This Week's Sponsor:

Kolide

Ensure that if a device isn’t secure it can’t access your apps.  It’s Device Trust for Okta.


The Problem With The iOS Home Screen

I’ve been thinking about the problems I have with iOS’ Home screen concept for years now, but I never fully grasped what was, exactly, that with time made using the Home screen – and thus the whole system of Springboard pages – clunky and annoying. Until it hit me earlier today, and suddenly everything started to make sense.

The iOS Home screen is conceptually broken. Not “broken” as in unusable, unstable or technically flawed. From an engineering standpoint, the iOS Home  screen works. The concept of the Home screen we interact with today is broken because the Home screen wants to be a real, physical, tangible surface while providing access to the gates of the intangible: apps. Apps are data, information, connectivity, presentation, media. Digital content isn’t tangible in the sense that it exists in a physical space, unless you count the atoms and the electrons and the bits that make using an app possible. But that’s a long stretch. The iOS Home screen is based on the concept that app icons are objects on top of it;  this has created a series of issues over the years.

Throughout the release history of iOS, Apple had to compromise and, I believe, implement functionalities the original Home screen wasn’t meant to support. First users wanted third-party apps, Apple waited, but eventually allowed developers to create software to install on an iPhone or iPod touch. Apps are the most important addition to the operating system to date, and they kickstarted the App Store revolution we’re witnessing. In allowing third-party developers to create apps, however, Apple essentially lost control over the display of objects on the Home screen – Apple may be able to check upon the inner workings of an app, but they can’t ban apps based on lack of taste in choosing an icon. And with that, developers were free to choose Home screen icons that don’t necessarily resemble real-life objects, thus breaking the metaphor of manipulating “badges on a table”, as I like to think of it. Have you noticed how almost every built-in, Apple-made iOS app has an icon that resembles a real-life object? The only exception? The App Store and iTunes icons. Which are marketplaces for digital content.

Apple states it clearly in the iOS Human Interface Guidelines:

When virtual objects and actions in an application are metaphors for objects and actions in the real world, users quickly grasp how to use the app. The classic example of a software metaphor is the folder: People put things in folders in the real world, so they immediately understand the idea of putting files into folders on a computer.

Think of the objects and scenes you design as opportunities to communicate with users and to express the essence of your app. Don’t feel that you must strive for scrupulous accuracy. Often, an amplified or enhanced portrayal of something can seem more real, and convey more meaning, than a faithful likeness.

Portray real substances accurately. Icons that represent real objects should also look as though they are made of real materials and have real mass. Realistic icons accurately replicate the characteristics of substances such as fabric, glass, paper, and metal, and convey an object’s weight and feel.

Later, users wanted multitasking and folders. Unsurprisingly, Apple gave them implementations of these features that look like objects, in this case objects with linen. Here’s where the situation gets more complex: folders and the multitasking tray, unlike app icons, actively interact with the Home screen, they don’t just sit on top of it. The way Apple designed them, the multitasking tray resides as linen below the Home screen, and folders are tiny containers with a linen background that expands atop of the Home screen. You can see how the entire concept of Home screen as a surface starts crackling under the design weight of  these features: is the Home screen a surface that has another layer underneath? Another one above as well? What do you mean I have music controls in the multitasking tray, too?

Most recently, iOS users began asking more vigorously for a better notification system, a unified reading environment for magazines, and widgets. Apple gave them Notification Center and Newsstand, but didn’t announce anything widget-related, at least for the Home screen. The Home screen, with iOS 5, got two new additions: a new layer, Notification Center, and a new default icon, Newsstand, which isn’t really an icon but it’s a folder with a different background and shelves.

As I said, I believe choosing the right approach to delivering new functionalities and keeping the original Home screen concept got trickier for Apple over the years. What started as a black background with a few default apps turned into a customizable area of hundreds of app icons with folders and multiple pages with a series of additional layers managed by the overly abused linen texture. But the seed of the broken concept can be seen way back into iPhone OS history: think about Spotlight and Springboard page indicators. What are they – how do they fit into the metaphor of a physical surface with objects on top of it? Surfaces don’t have search boxes and indicators. Notebooks have pages, but you have to flip them and turn them and touch them. Websites have search boxes, but they’re bits and lines of code.

If you follow my theory, you can understand how things start making sense from this perspective. You can’t move multiple app icons at once not because of some technical limitation, but because, I believe, in the original Home screen vision inspired by physics apps were meant as a single entity to manipulate, one at a time. On a table, you can’t “select” multiple buttons and pretend they’re all going to move as you touch only one. That doesn’t make any sense in real life. I could expand this concept to the entire skeuomorphism Vs. interface design, but I’ll leave that for another time. My concern right now is the Home screen, the first thing you see when you unlock a device, when you close an app, the place where you manage your apps, your content. There’s a lot of weirdness and inconsistencies going on in some Apple apps and interfaces, but the Home screen is the prime example of a user interface meant for 2007 which was subsequently patched and refined and patched again to accomodate new functionalities introduced in iOS (the same happened with the Home button). You could argue that some proposed features, such as widgets, haven’t been implemented yet because of technical constraints. It’s fair argument, and I’ll take it. Yet I think that, even if complex from an implementation standpoint, it’s the concept itself that makes widgets difficult with the current Home screen.

The problem Apple needs to overcome is that the Home screen tries to be a real object while providing access to the gates of the digital world. To reinvent it, Apple needs to tear apart the whole concept and rebuild it from the ground up.


Five Ways to Improve Gmail for iOS

Five Ways to Improve Gmail for iOS

Great analysis by Ken Yarmosh:

A native Gmail app on iOS had been anxiously awaited for years but when Gmail for iOS launched back in November 2011, it do so to much berating. The main complaint against the app is that it is basically an iOS wrapper around the standard mobile web app. Personally, I found the criticisms overall harsh but it does need to be improved. In no particular order, here are five ways to do that.

I agree on all the points, and I’ll add that Google might consider picking the team that created the Search app for iPad to improve Gmail for iOS. Google Search for iPad is a great app: fast, stable, responsive, innovative – that’s Google at its best, making a native app that is not cumbersome or underpowered. Gmail, on the other hand, feels like an attempt to “get the job done”: take a web view, throw some native wrapper on top of it, call it a Gmail app. Done. Gmail for iOS disappoints, but I’m still hoping Google is preparing something good for it. If that’s the case, please, Google, follow Ken’s suggestions.

On the other hand though, I can’t stop thinking about Sparrow for iPhone. That’s one of my most anticipated apps of 2012.

Permalink

Sync Your iOS Device Wirelessly with AppleScript

Sync Your iOS Device Wirelessly with AppleScript

Doug Adams shares a great AppleScript to initiate a wireless iTunes sync session, set up so that it runs automatically once a day:

A while back, I retired my iPhone 3G to the bedside table after buying an iPhone 4. I use the 3G pretty much as glorified clock radio-iPod Touch. I have a few radio apps on it and the Digital Clock app. I also have it set to sync and back up over Wi-Fi to my main iMac so I manually initiate a sync when I need to update Podcasts and apps and what have you.

This manual syncing has become tiresome. (I mean, if I used a traditional clock radio, I wouldn’t have to update its content manually, right?)

It’s simple enough to write an AppleScript to sync a connected iPhone but I want the script to run on a regular basis without me having to fire it. I like to listen to Podcasts in the evening so sometime during dinner would be a good time to update the 3G with any Podcasts that have arrived during the day. For this, I can create a launchd agent to fire the AppleScript that syncs the 3G in the background.

I had cron already set up (I followed this post), and I can confirm the script works really well (as you can see, I changed the script with “4S” for my device). Obviously, you can use this script without cron as well – it’ll simply sync with iTunes, but I guess it sort of defeats the purpose of this tutorial (unless you have a way to launch AppleScripts remotely). Doug also posted a similar script for automatically updating expired podcasts, which you can check out here.

Permalink

Valve Releases Steam Mobile for iPhone

Back in March, we reported game developer Valve – best known for hits such as Half-Life and Portal – was “looking into” a Steam expansion for mobile devices.  Today, we can see the results with the official Steam Mobile app for iPhone now live in the App Store for free. You can read more about Steam Mobile on Valve’s website, too.

With the free Steam app for iOS, you can participate in the Steam community wherever you go. Chat with your Steam friends, browse community groups and user profiles, read the latest gaming news and stay up to date on unbeatable Steam sales.

Steam Mobile for iPhone brings the Steam experience from the web to iOS, allowing users to check on their friends’ status, chat, browse the Steam game store and manage their wish list, and even add new items to the cart. Judging from the screenshots – we can’t try the app yet, as it’s in “closed beta” – it appears you can easily open a game’s page and check out its description, screenshots, add it to the wish list or your Steam cart; the Catalog section has tabs to browse Featured, New, Popular games and “Specials”, whereas other navigation options are located in a Facebook-like sidebar that contains links to Friends Activity, News Feeds, and more.

You can download Steam Mobile here, but it’s likely you won’t be able to use the app right away as you have to “express interest” in the beta first. Steam Mobile has also been released for Android today.


Clear: An Interview With Impending’s Phill Ryu

When Phill Ryu (MacHeist team member) emailed me a few days ago to give me a preview of his upcoming iPhone app, Clear, I immediately said “yes” and eagerly started waiting for a TestFlight email to hit my inbox. I know Phill: he has good taste in design, knows that I like great apps, and he’s an overall nice guy that I had gotten to work with multiple times in the past for MacHeist. Phill hinted at the particular nature of the app; yet when the beta came, I felt the kind of surprise and delight in using Clear I hadn’t experienced, I believe, since the original Tweetbot beta. Clear is one of those apps that redefine interaction schemes and navigation patterns: like Tweetie’s “pull-to-refresh” and Tweetbot’s “swipe-to-load” before it, I’m sure Clear’s gestures to move between lists and add new tasks will change the way developers imagine todo list apps.

Clear is a simple todo list app. Without spoiling too much now – you can check out the app’s webpage here, and promo video below – let me just say that the way Clear handles task creation, completion and list management has been uniquely and cleverly built around the iPhone’s screen and the way we can interact with our devices. In fact, I don’t think Clear would be possible on any other platform – when Clear comes out in the next few weeks, you’ll understand why you often hear of things such as “iPhone features the smoothest animations” or “fastest scrolling”. Everything in Clear is delightfully tappable, scrollable, responsive to your fingers with visual cues and sound effects. Yet it’s so simple. I’ll leave my thoughts about the app for a proper review.

What’s also intriguing about Clear, interface aside, is the team behind it. Take a look at the studio’s page: those who have been around long enough in the Apple Community will instantly recognize names like David Lanham and Dan Counsell; Impending’s webpage also reveals Ted Bradley, Jay Meistrich, Raphael Mun, Jeremy Grosser and Josh Mobley worked on Impending’s debut. Clear itself was co-created by Phill Ryu, Dan Counsell and Milen Dzhumerov. That was enough to trigger my curiosity radar, and ask Phill to sit down for a (virtual) coffee to discuss Impending and Clear.

Check out my interview with Phill Ryu and Clear’s promo video after the break. Read more


2012, The Next iPhone, And LTE

The iPhone 4S, released in October, was supposed to feature LTE connectivity, at least according to some of the rumors that were floating around at the time. The device turned out to feature faster 3G downloads at 14.4 Mbps through HSPDA, which is an enhanced version of the 3G protocol that has been around for a while, but still isn’t as widely adopted as you would expect from a technology that Apple decided to use in a major iPhone upgrade. In Italy, for instance, few areas have access to HSDPA, not to mention HSPA+.

(Note: although commonly referred to as “4G” the current revision of LTE doesn’t meet the requirements for 4G connectivity yet. The LTE Advanced standard does conform to 4G requirements, but it’s likely that you’ll see the term “LTE” associated with 4G simply because it’s a major leap forward in terms of wireless connectivity)

Now, the debate as to whether Apple should have made the 4S an LTE iPhone or should have an LTE iPhone 5 this year is making the rounds again. Unlike previous debates, fortunately this time we have someone who’s trying to make some sense out of this and cut through the haze of rumors and theories to point out that, actually, it wouldn’t make much sense business-wise for Apple to implement LTE in the near term. Why? Because of all those 37 million iPhones Apple has sold in the quarter that ended on December 31, very few of them were sold in areas where LTE is available. Read: the United States, some parts of Denmark and Sweden, some cities in Canada, and Saudi Arabia. The “4G” rollout in countries other than the US is a slow process, and the ones mentioned above have a very small percentage of their spectrum covered by active LTE networks – they’re basically in the middle of initial testing right now. And even in the US, Chris Foreman assumes that whilst the major carriers have all implemented LTE or will start relatively soon, only half of subscribers would be covered in 2012, thus reducing the potential addressable market to 15% of iPhone customers worldwide. Why would Apple make an LTE iPhone for 15% of its entire customer base?

According to fourth quarter 2011 results, AT&T activated 4.1 million iPhones, while Verizon activated 4.2 million. Sprint would not disclose the number of iPhones it activated last quarter, but we feel safe in assuming that number is less than 4 million. Assuming Sprint was able to activate (perhaps a generous) 2 million or so iPhones, only a little over a quarter of iPhones were sold in the US. The other three-quarters, then, are sold in areas with practically no LTE coverage.

It goes deeper. You might argue that, yes, Apple could make an exception because they have made some in the past. But the WiFi-less 3GS and camera-less iPhone 4S were necessary modifications to get these devices on sale, otherwise they wouldn’t have gotten regulatory approval. It’s not like Apple is forced to implement LTE, especially considering the enhanced 3G still isn’t as widely adopted as the company hopes.

The LTE iPhone is primarily the result of months of speculation and countless rumors based on nothing. No evidence. Perhaps a few code strings here and there, but then again – go trust those code references these days. For all we know, the LTE iPhone doesn’t exist.

Or does it? A popular counterargument I often get is that Apple experiments with all kinds of new technologies in their labs; they take a look at new specifications and standards, and consider whether they should be worth investing more research and development resources for possible future implementations. I get it, and it’s entirely plausible that Apple engineers have at least looked at current LTE chips utilized by several Android handsets. But I don’t know how far they may have gotten into actually testing these chips, if only for verification purposes, at the light of Cook’s multiple remarks in the past about concerns regarding the effects these chips have on battery life. Those bigger screens Android makers tout in their commercials might be a requirement, rather than a feature. But I digress.

Another popular theory is that new LTE chips by Qualcomm, a component supplier Apple is already using, should become available in the first half of this year and, based on published specifications, allow device makers to considerably cut down on battery usage and required space. These new chips are smaller, consume less power and are made by a company Apple already buys components from. The next iPhone will have LTE! Not so fast. Read more


Launch Center 1.1 Adds Scheduled Launch Actions

We reviewed App Cubby’s Launch Center when the app was released back in December after Apple rejected an initial version based on Notification Center. Even without fancy Notification Center integration, Launch Center has become one of my new favorite apps, earning a spot in my iPhone’s dock because of its greatest achievement: allowing me to save an unlimited number of shortcuts for actions that I repeat every day (such as calling my mom or iMessaging my team) in a single place. I’d argue that I even prefer Launch Center without Notification Center support as it’s more focused.

And today with version 1.1 it gets even better. Launch Center 1.o, in fact, allowed you to create shortcuts through custom URLs and activate them with a single tap. But you still had to remember you had to do something – you’ve got your nice action to call your dad, but what if you forget to call him? The shortcut becomes useless. Similarly, your iOS device comes with alarms, but you can’t associate actions to them; it’s easy to set an alarm in three hours for something “important”, and forget what it was all about. Launch Center’s new scheduled launch actions are a fantastic mix of shortcuts and alarms: you can now assign a custom alarm to each of your shortcuts. When the time comes, Launch Center will fire off a local iOS notification that will show up in Notification Center, and take you to the configured action…which will activate and call your dad with one tap, to finish the example above. It’s genius.

I use Launch Center every day and I can already see scheduled launch actions becoming an integral part of my workflow – imagine setting up alarms for emails, messages or just about any app you know you’re going to use at a certain point in time. Launch Center 1.1 combines the speed of custom URLs with local notifications to create smart alarms that have both context and the appropriate speed to feel immediate and intuitive.

Launch Center 1.1 is available in the App Store at $0.99.


Apple’s Results and Developers

Apple’s Results and Developers

David Smith looks at yesterday’s Q1 2012 numbers from an indie developer’s perspective:

If you add up the combined resolutions of all iOS devices sold in this quarter you get 40,747,941,888,000 pixels. It takes 17 viewings of entire Star Wars Saga on Blu Ray to see that many pixels. (805 minutes x 24 fps x 1080p).

On a more serious note:

Apple paid out $700M to developers during this quarter. That is equivalent to 125 $0.99 apps being sold every second.

Hardware brings in the real money for Apple. But I think it’s safe to say that, at this point, it’s the software ecosystem and the developers that are convincing people to switch to iOS. I’d like to know: how much of those $700 comes from games?

Permalink

The Apple Community

I read this great piece by Stephen Hackett today, and while I was reading it I figured I’m often asked why I (and to an extent our team) do what I do every day. So here’s a brief explanation.

It’s about technology and getting to make a living out of writing for this community, the Apple community. Communities are made of people; in this case, the Apple community is made of developers, readers, fans of Apple devices, journalists, designers, PR guys – everyone who has at least some interest in following technology and the stuff Apple comes up with.

I don’t work for myself. I mean, sure, technically I do work for myself, but that’s not what gets me out of bed in the morning. I work for my readers. I work for the developers who come up with amazing solutions and ideas every day. I work for my team. Ultimately, I don’t work because I have to, but because it feels good to write about and for the Apple community.

“I do what I do” because I can provide for myself and my family thanks to what I love writing about – technology and software.

Because with the iPhone I have a world of information and data in my pocket; data that travels from a server who-knows-where in North Carolina, through a series of cables and pipes from the U.S to Italy, from another server to a cell tower, from a cell tower wirelessly to my device, and it turns into pixels I can see on a screen that, however, shows no pixels. When I stop to think about it, I still look at my iPhone with the amusement of a three year old kid seeing the night sky for the first time.

“I do what I do” because software is helping me make my life a little better. I can take photos and show them to my friends and archive them online. When I’m at the hospital, I can send text messages to my friends for free, in real-time, and feel good about knowing that someone on the other part of the screen is reading my words. With Rdio, I can listen to any song I want whenever I want, from any device I own, and tell my girlfriend she should check out the latest hit from Noel Gallagher. With Dropbox, I can write my articles on one device, pick them up again on another one, take a break and finish them up on a mobile phone that magically got the latest versions of those files over the air. Software is disrupting every industry it touches. I get to write about it, and even choose which app to use.

I write for the Apple community because in the past three years I got to know some amazingly talented and honest and caring people that, however, I’ve never met in “real life”. But isn’t this real life? What about having a team of four people around the world that greet you with “good morning buddy” every morning isn’t real? How could you exclude from real-life the works of developers who pour their souls into making a little piece of software – often just to make something work better for their customers – and are kind enough to tell you about it, in advance, with honest words and ready for any feedback you might have? Just because we haven’t shaken hands yet it doesn’t mean this, all this, isn’t real. Actual businesses are built every day on top of our community, ideas flourish and turn into projects with deadlines, projects that I will likely write about and share with other people that have decided to listen to what I have to say. The things we write, the feedback we give, the links we share – they do matter. Right now I’m writing this post on my iPad, in my living room, with my dad trying to understand how Gmail works. In a few minutes, these digital words will travel through a network, and end up on a website on a server somewhere in the United States. What’s not real about this, exactly?

“I do what I do” because I don’t think I’m better than anyone, but my words can make life slightly better for someone else. Maybe a developer who would really like to see his dream come true and hours of coding turned into an app anyone can see and use. Maybe a reader who needs help with his computer. Maybe someone who was having a bad day, but suddenly felt inspired in reading about Steve again. I don’t think the Apple Community is better than other circles of people who share a common interest. But I do believe we are better human beings because of it, because of what we decide to do to make even the smallest dent in the universe.

It’s easy to lose motivation though. Because the Internet allows for these kinds of communications that don’t require a physical confrontation or debate face-to-face, it’s easy to lose track of a conversation, misinterpret someone else’s words, or think a reader is “hating you”. Not that “online fights” and controversies aren’t real. They are very much so. But even when I’m reading about the latest Gruber-Thurrot (or anyone, really) blogging face-off, I like to think if they ever met “in real life” they would grab a beer together, look back at their “Internet fights” and say “Oh, screw it – what do you think of the latest iPhone?” with the enthusiasm of two people who are genuinely excited and passionate about technology.

Because, ultimately, it’s about the people. Even when we write about Google or Apple or Twitter and we imagine these big, faceless corporations in glass buildings “somewhere in California”, we’re actually writing about big corporations in glass buildings “somewhere in California”. But made of people. Of ideas. Of passion and genius and willingness to run a business successfully, to spread innovation and collaboration, to provide services that weren’t possible before. To show up every day because “it’s worth it”. Are tech companies greedy? Sure they are. But you have to believe there’s still a genuine, intact spark of passion in their core values. Otherwise they wouldn’t be here. Greediness alone doesn’t get you anywhere.

Which brings me back to the Apple Community. It’s easier to see what I’m talking about with the “smaller guys”, the indie developers and the bloggers. It’s easier to get to know them, work with them, maybe grab a beer with them and show them pictures of my kids someday, too.

And that’s why I do what I do.