When I started using OS X, one of the biggest draws for me was first-class native keyboard shortcuts support that was consistently followed and applied by all apps (first party and otherwise). So you could be sure that a shortcut for search across all contexts (global) would work just as well as the shortcut for a contextual search within any app. No one writes great third-party native apps anymore and even Apple's own apps completely disregard this part of their heritage. Just try searching across the AppStore, Apple Music, and the legacy Finder.
For newer Apple apps, sometimes the keyboard shortcuts simply don't exist. I believe part of the problem here is the deprecation of AppleScript, which means there's no incentive to spend time on consistency, and the other part has to do with organizational indifference towards all the wonderful UX innovations from the past.
What Apple has successfully accomplished, in collaboration with other 'big tech' companies is drastically reducing user expectations from their software. I wouldn't completely blame the AppStore's forced race to the bottom for this alone. There is still a huge market for tasteful apps that cost more (even sometimes with obnoxious subscriptions), but if even Apple isn't leading by example, why waste time on it if you could just build another simple note-taking app.
If their problem was 'too many developers', I reckon they'd be building totally useless yet amazingly engineered SDKs and data/analytics tools or apps to improve the quality and satisfaction of your music consumption. Instead, they focus on all the things that just reek of an overabundance of marketers and Product People™.
It could be either, but yea, I have seen this mostly at companies with too many product owners and designers who are trying to build their portfolio, and they are enabled by too many developers who just say "yes" to everything they are asked to write.
But, the industry does also have a "Developers Gotta Develop" problem. The way I've seen it explained is: "Programmers are like beavers. Leave a beaver alone to decide what to do and they'll just keep building dams, regardless of the fact that their home is done." I don't know if that's really true about beavers, but it's true about software organizations. The whole software development team will just continue changing the software even long past the point where they're done.
Surely, Apple will respond by artificially hampering one or more of their products in the EU and hence take away even the slightest reason to upgrade hardware in the name of Apple Intelligence.
Customers need a company that acts and reasons like an adult.
You’re obviously insinuating that they are delaying features in the EU just to be petty, but the ostensible reason is plenty compelling on its own.
The EU regulations will require them to do insane amounts of custom work building a public API for Apple Intelligence. Imagine how hard it will be to make that interface secure, private, not terrible for users.
The other features like mirroring are much simpler, but still, is it worth making a public interface and taking the security and privacy risks just to offer the feature in the EU?
Every new feature in the EU is now a massive liability, so of course they’re going to be more cautious what they release.
The idea that any third party app could (a) record my screen 24/7 in the background or (b) have full access to all of the data on my phone would be beyond unacceptable.
Everyone rightly criticised Microsoft for providing such a capability and they would do the same with Apple as well.
>The idea that any third party app could (a) record my screen 24/7 in the background or (b) have full access to all of the data on my phone would be beyond unacceptable.
So don't give permission? (or don't install the app in the first place) I thought this was about malicious apps that collected private data behind your back.
This comment would have made sense in the late 90s.
Today we have decades of experience that the majority of users are not capable of making informed decisions when it comes to topics like app permissions. Especially the flow on implications e.g. allow the app to record the screen could mean your bank details are exposed.
> The EU regulations will require them to do insane amounts of custom work building a public API
Apple are the biggest company in the world. If they wanted they could hire 1000 developers to throw at this, and it wouldnt even dent a single percent of their profit.
Apple could very easily do this if they wanted to, heck they could do absolutely anything they want with their money and clout, but they dont.
You can’t do anything you want just by adding developers. If it were that easy, the entire software industry would look completely different. And that’s not even accounting for the inevitable system-wide repercussions of the work.
Im aware of the man month, and Im aware that you cant just throw any deverlopers at any coding problem.
However I believe Apple easily has the money, developers, and ability to do this if they wanted.
Look at all the other amazing things they do, anyone who argues this is hard for them is delusional IMO.
There’s a difference between working to build an amazing product that wows people, and working to fulfill mind numbing regulations created by people who couldn’t run a coffee shop. One is soul enriching, another is soul crushing. If Apple wants to torture its developers into doing soul numbing, slow moving work, I guess they can but the default response would be to not do that and give their developers more meaningful tasks that leaves them and Apple happy.
Sure, but why not just cut out the middlemen? Just install a EU representative in each Apple office, and they can watch over all the developers and dictate features.
The notion that Apple is punishing one of the largest markets on the planet by disincentivizing them from upgrading to the next generation of hardware seems like something you didn't really think through. The AI thing will be the #1 selling point of the 16 and onwards, and you can be assured that Apple wants it in the EU.
Apple, as with most mega-cos, needs to be reigned in and corralled by the governments of the world. But let's be real that the EU in some of their actions has grossly overreached and offered up impractical demands, while strangely targeting only American companies.
It was way ahead of its time even in the 90s. I remember being swooned by the real-time typing windows, amazing sound effects, Just Works™ file transfer, and the wonderful contact list with people decorating their names with ASCII art. I made some wonderful friends in real life.
This was my immediate thought upon seeing the title! I used to love the library telnet server, which worked for searching, placing a hold, renewing, and even inter-library loans. There was also rudimentary full-text search of engineering journals. Today, it's a 'modern' website with tons of whitespace, non-customizable fonts, and links out to events and what not. Simplicity is such a wonderful feature and yet it's somehow completely orthogonal to modern engineering.
...and after passing that hurdle, you're suddenly exposed to a large body of work in the organization that has no processes to ensure continuity and modernization other than some rudimetary coding styles and PR/code review flows. The only way to stick around is to make your output so incomprehensible that the only way to maintain it is to keep the lead around.
For all the talk about hiring the best, once they're in the goal becomes to stop hands-on development as quickly as possible and to add friction to improving the knowledge repository as much as possible.
Bad design is slowly becoming an industry trend, which is surprising because Twitter today has more design influencers than ever before. Personally, I feel that the marriage of design with data has created such a huge mess that there’s just no good escape hatch.
It’s all about simplicity and the 80/20 principle today, which means that designers are bound to look at usage metrics and clicks as evidence of a successful design. Upper management doesn’t have to care as long as the bottom line is doing well and they’re able to kill competition in other ways.
From a user standpoint, though, once you get attuned to the basic functionality you want more power features that cost a lot of effort to build but don’t really make you pay more for them. You just can’t win.
My theory of software design is that the designers who are designing software don't really understand how software works. They got into "product design" because it sounded creative and fun. They're glorified graphic designers rather than people who think about "products" as software. They think of software as sleek consumer goods. They're not engineers.
Perhaps that's why nearly every software engineer's blog that gets posted on Hacker News has significantly better UX than the websites of professional product designers, if those designers even took the time to make their own website in the first place.
For newer Apple apps, sometimes the keyboard shortcuts simply don't exist. I believe part of the problem here is the deprecation of AppleScript, which means there's no incentive to spend time on consistency, and the other part has to do with organizational indifference towards all the wonderful UX innovations from the past.
What Apple has successfully accomplished, in collaboration with other 'big tech' companies is drastically reducing user expectations from their software. I wouldn't completely blame the AppStore's forced race to the bottom for this alone. There is still a huge market for tasteful apps that cost more (even sometimes with obnoxious subscriptions), but if even Apple isn't leading by example, why waste time on it if you could just build another simple note-taking app.