Tapbots on iPhone OS 3 adoptions among their active users:
We’re currently running at an overall 75% upgrade rate which is pretty insane considering the number of devices and the fact that its only been 5 days.
Posts Tagged ‘Apple’
iPhone OS 3.0 Adoption Rate
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009iPhoto Faces fail
Friday, March 27th, 2009
Apple stops requiring serial numbers for boxed iWork 09
Thursday, January 22nd, 2009Ars Technica discovers an Apple support document explaining that boxed, retail copies of iWork 09 do not require a serial number. An interesting choice by Apple.
Macworld Keynote
Sunday, January 11th, 2009A few thoughts, based on watching the keynote via QuickTime:
- Phil Schiller was great. He seemed to be a little nervous in his delivery, but he was interesting in a casual, friendly way. If he has a chance to do some of Apple’s special events in the future, he’ll be a little less awkward.
- From any other company, this would have been a slam dunk, and people who are unhappy are clearly expecting too much.
- The iLife 09 upgrades make it a must-have purchase for me. I’m looking forward to working through the Garage Band tutorials, and iPhoto face and location metadata is an omission I’ve been struggling to find workarounds to. And as an owner of a Flip Ultra, I’m really looking forward to having image stabilization.
- The 17″ MacBook built-in battery seems like a great trade-off to me. I don’t have two batteries anymore, I just replace the one I have when it won’t hold enough charge anymore. It sounds like that will still be possible.
- I’m really happy to see DRM-free music on the iTunes Store. I’m less impressed with the all-or-nothing upgrade, but will probably upgrade sooner or later.
iCal View menu
Monday, December 22nd, 2008Here’s iCal’s View menu.
What’s so confusing about it? You really need to see how it interacts with the iCal main window to understand. We’re going to be focusing on the group starting with “Hide Calendar List.”
The iCal main window looks like this:
The sidebar on the left side of the screen looks simple enough. Now let’s look again at the menu. What would you expect Hide Calendar List to do?
Wrong. It does this:
Both the calendar and mini month calendar are hidden. Hiding both makes sense, but calling the command Hide Calendar List doesn’t. Go back to the menu, and we see the helpful command “Hide Mini Months.” What Mini Months? Oh, the ones that were on the iCal window, but aren’t anymore? I wonder what it does?
It does this:
That’s right. Choosing Hide Mini Months showed the mini calendar.
So here’s how the menu commands work:
The first command, Show/Hide Calendar List, hides the entire left side bar: The calendar list and whatever is under it.
The second and third commands, Show/Hide Mini Months/Notifications, control what’s under the calendar list, but still controlled with the Show/Hide Calendar List command. And they don’t actually do what they say they’re going to do if the calendar lis is hidden. They’re mutually exclusive: Think of them as Under Calendar List: None, Mini Months, or Notifications.
The fourth and fifth items are entirely independent of the first three items.
Granted, coming up with menu commands to control a UI like this is hard. But that’s no excuse to throw your hands in the air and settle on this UI.
Are you sure?
Monday, December 1st, 2008My biggest pet peeve in iTunes is undoubtably how it asks you “Are you sure?” before doing anything, and always in an unhelpful way.
As an example, I mentioned to my wife a Christmas album I used to love. I spotted it in the iTunes Store and clicked Buy Album1. iTunes “helpfully” asked me:
This is a completely useless confirmation screen. If — and we’re talking hypothetical here — I considered $7.99 a big purchase and needed a confirmation screen for it, wouldn’t I want to know the price, too? Wouldn’t this dialog make more sense as:
Are you sure you want to spend $7.99 on an 80s Christmas album?
Really, you’re being a bit impulsive here. That’s cool, we’ll take your money, but we want to make sure you’ve checked with your wife first.
(Okay, not actually those words. But something involving the price.)
But instead, I’ll shake my head at the idiocy, of click “Don’t ask me about buying albums again,” and never see the warning again. What was the point, then?
- After discussing it with my wife, of course. [↩]
Two strikes…
Saturday, October 18th, 2008Apple’s sample code includes an annoying disclaimer at the top of each file. I can understand the need for a disclaimer, but this code takes it to an obnoxious level: every .h file or .m file you open, you can’t see any actual code to to the length of the disclaimer.
Strike one is including that disclaimer in every file. If the lawyers can’t accept “Please see DISCLAIMER.TXT.” in place of 38 lines of bullshit, you have stupid lawyers. Fine, though. I’ll just remove it, right?
Luckily, Xcode has a great Find-Replace tool. So we’ll use it.
And here’s where we hit strike two:
It’d be nice if we could blame this on Xcode. Indeed, it’s Xcode’s fault that the text is so long. But it’s Mac OS X’s fault that the sheet goes under the dock rather than truncating before it.
iPhone NDA
Wednesday, October 1st, 2008Hooray! Apple’s iPhone developer NDA will no longer cover released software.
It seemed inevitable that this NDA change would be made, but I admit I thought the change would come in January 2009.
It’d be easy to overlook that this doesn’t include an App Store policy change, but maybe that’s on Apple’s schedule too.
Another Apple App Store rejection
Saturday, September 20th, 2008Duplicating Apple functionality? Well, not so much.
Microsoft doesn’t get it
Saturday, September 20th, 2008The new Microsoft commercial starts with a John Hodgman dressalike (You can’t really call him a lookalike, but at the distance the camera is at it doesn’t matter) saying “I’m a PC and I’ve been stereotyped.” It then goes to various people asserting they’re a PC. It’s interesting at first, but after a few seconds you realize: This is all Microsoft’s got for this commercial. After a minute of droning, the commercial blissfully comes to an end.
It makes slightly more sense than the Gates & Seinfeld commercials, but replaces the quirkiness of those ads with banality.
The commercial shows Microsoft doesn’t get the concept behind Apple’s “Get a Mac” ads. Hodgman is not the personification of Windows, and Justin Long is no the personification of Mac. Hodgman is a PC, like he says. Long is a Mac, like he says.
What does that mean? Well, it means that the difference between Long and Hodgman is the ability to run Mac OS X. Long can, and Hodgman can’t. PC’s secret motivation — an undercurrent running through all the commercials that Apple will never vocalize — is that he’s jealous. He knows he can do all the things a PC can do. He wants to do all the things a Mac can do, too. His motives, then, are minimizing the value of Mac OS X: It isn’t really that simple. It isn’t really that easy. You don’t really need that, you can do it without a Mac.
But PC doesn’t really believe it. He knows he can do everything Mac can do. He just also knows he can’t do it as easily. So the secret behind the motivation he won’t state is this: He wants to run Mac OS X, too. And Apple will never vocalize this, because it inspires the question to the masses: Why can’t PC run Mac OS X?1
So Microsoft runs this ad, showing all the things PC can do. Great. Each one of them is something Mac can do, too.
Microsoft needs to focus on promoting their product, not someone else’s product. And Microsoft does not sell generic PCs. But what does Microsoft sell, really? What are they going to brag about on Windows? Why do they need to?
Every time Microsoft puts out a commercial, they blink. And they don’t have to at this point.
- Sure, there’s lots of good reasons. I’m not denying that. I’m also not denying they are probably all solvable. I’m just pointing out that Apple doesn’t really want people choosing between a Mac and a PC to ask the question, but just to take it for granted. [↩]