Design does matter.
John Gruber, today:
For years, when Apple was down, they were held up as proof that making the best products didn’t matter. The Mac is better than Windows and look what happened was the refrain.
Not any more. Yesterday, Apple recorded the second most profitable quarter of any US company, ever. Just look at these charts from Dan Frommer:
Startup apps and competition from heavy hitters.
For a startup the biggest problem is almost never a competitor. The biggest problem is typically non-adoption.
Dan Moral rightly points out at StartupNorth that Apple introducing iMessage to the iPhone should help companies like Kik who up until now have been serving a space that only a small percentage of people likely knew or cared about, private messaging.
Nobody knows there is something better than texting available. Nobody knows that Kik exists. Well, Apple & iMessage are about to blow up the “private messenger” space. In an ideal world, as the market grows, Kik goes along with it.
This is a sound point of view contrasting the assumption that when Apple (or anyone with weight behind them) enters a market they destroy the incumbents. This jives with what we’ve heard from other app developers.
How tuned in customer service can help improve product design.
From Duncan Davidson’s A Hidden Genius:
It’s the data that’s generated at the Genius bar that fascinates me. This data, in aggregate, can tell Apple a lot about what machines break, how they break, and after how long in a much more direct way than what would come out of a third party service center.
Remember when Apple introduced the Intel-based MacBook Pros and they changed the power connector from a plug to the new MagSafe adapter? I’m pretty sure I recall Steve saying on stage they made the change in response to seeing lots of broken laptops caused by people tripping over the cord.
I wonder how many other issues in Apple products get addressed, in part, because of the data gathered in Apple stores by Apple employees.
I tripped over someone’s power cord yesterday and their laptop didn’t even budge thanks to the MagSafe power adaptor. I’m sure there are countless stories like this. Genius.
Apple’s new skin.
Will Apple’s Oct 20 Back to the Mac event finally herald the unification of its OSX app designs?
While updates to iTunes over the years have hinted at some long needed aesthetic changes (such as shifting away from the aqua scrollbars), there has been a general divergence between all the standard OSX apps. Even the promised Snow Leopard tuneup ignored aesthetic refinement.
A brief video on simplifying your user interface.
Apple recently released an update to its Remote app for managing iTunes from your iPhone or iPad. One of the key features of this app is the ability to control speakers throughout your home. So, top left of the app, we find the audio sharing icon and dropdown (unfortunately, with a different icon to accommodate for the alternative placement of the volume slider depending on whether you’re browsing your library or looking at the currently playing song).
Apple’s iOS and the mobile market.
There’s a lot of talk about iOS market share and how the mobile market will shape up over time, particularly with Windows Phone 7 entering the market soon. That said, Brandt Dainow’s impressively long “Lessons for Apple” is painfully weak in its assumptions and rather ridiculous conclusions. Let’s take a look at his take on Apple, iOS, and the mobile market and see if we can’t make some sense of it all.
What’s the optimal camera location on an iPad?
On an iPhone, it makes perfect sense to put the front-facing camera on the top when the phone is in portrait mode, because that’s the natural way to hold the phone.
When it comes to the iPad, it’s a little different, because it’s natural to hold the iPad in both ways.
The mobile app market.
With Apple’s App Store and mobile apps on Android, Blackberry and the soon to be released Windows Phone 7 providing access to tens of millions of on the go customers, there’s a good chance you may be interested in moving your content from Web and into the proprietary app market.
Sadly, mainstream media is already on the app market doomsday bandwagon with Fast Company’s “Expert Blogger” Aaron Shapiro pontificating about “The Great App Bubble”. Backing his leaps of logic up by making statements that don’t correlate to his points, Aaron looks to be on a mission to save companies from this impending app bubble, where small businesses implode, VC money is lost, and developers are left homeless. He’s discovered 8 signs of the impending app bubble, all centered around Apple’s slice of the market. Let’s have a look see:
