Federico gets creative making an eBook with Apple’s Pages app, then the guys go deep into the strengths and challenges of the new multitasking system in iPadOS 13.
In this week’s episode of Adapt, I had a lot of fun playing around with Pages for Ryan’s challenge; we also dig deeper into the multitasking changes of iPadOS. You can listen below (and find the show notes here), and don’t forget to send us questions using #AskAdapt and by tagging our Twitter account.
Excellent piece by Dieter Bohn at The Verge following news of Jony Ive’s coming departure from Apple:
While Apple might have a good story about having been founded in a garage, the true founding myth of Apple is the myth of genius. You know the fable, which has the benefit of also being true. When Steve Jobs was in charge, Apple made amazing things: the Apple computer, the Mac. Jobs not in charge: the very bad ‘90s with Scully and the Newton. Jobs back in charge: the renaissance, the iPod, the iPhone.
After Steve Jobs, that mantle was passed to Jony Ive. And he quietly (quite literally) took it. It was important to our concept of Apple that there be a single, discerning decision maker. Somebody uncompromising about quality. Somebody with very good taste. A capital G Genius.
Bohn makes the case, based on solid evidence from other sources, that Apple has operated for years without being driven by a singular “genius” but rather a collaborative, highly-capable team – and while that seems to have been more true than ever lately, to a degree it’s always been the case. In spite of the mythos surrounding Steve Jobs, responsibility for Apple’s best work falls not just on his shoulders, but on that of the team he was surrounded by.
Ive’s absence will certainly be felt, but the hole he leaves is likely much smaller than his “legend” would imply. As Bohn remarks, “we should stop thinking of Apple as the singular expression of one person’s genius. History has moved beyond the Great Man theory, and so too should our ideas about how Apple operates.”
MacStories Weekly: Issue 182 Great piece by John Gruber on Jony Ive leaving Apple and the end of the Ive era at Apple:
I think Tim Cook is a great CEO and Jeff Williams is a great COO. But who’s in charge of product design now? There is no new chief design officer, which, really, is what Steve Jobs always was. From a product standpoint, the post-Jobs era at Apple has been the Jony Ive era, not the Tim Cook era. That’s not a knock on Tim Cook. To his credit, Tim Cook has never pretended to be a product guy, which is exactly the hubris that John Sculley succumbed to back in the early ’90s, leading to the Newton being launched far before it was ready and the Macintosh platform languishing.
My gut sense for years has been that Ive without Jobs has been like McCartney without Lennon. Or Lennon without McCartney — take whichever analogical pairing you prefer. My point here is only that the fruit of their collaborations were, seemingly magically, far greater than the sums of the duos’ talents and tastes.
Assuming Ive’s exit has been planned for a while, it makes little sense to me that Apple’s new design leaders (Hankey and Dye) are reporting to Jeff Williams, the company’s chief operating officer – unless Apple has bigger plans for him in the near future. Then again, Gruber’s point still holds: who’s Apple’s Chief Design Officer now?
Tim Bradshaw of the Financial Times dropped a bombshell: Jony Ive is leaving Apple to start his own design firm called LoveFrom, and Apple will be its first client. Ive told Bradshaw:
While I will not be an [Apple] employee, I will still be very involved — I hope for many, many years to come,” Sir Jonathan told the FT in an exclusive interview. “This just seems like a natural and gentle time to make this change.
Ive’s transition from his role as Apple Chief Design Officer where he oversees the design of both hardware and software to his new company will begin later this year with LoveFrom launching in 2020. Marc Newson who has collaborated with Ive in the past will join him as part of the LoveFrom design team. In addition to continuing ongoing projects for Apple, Ive told the Financial Times he would work on unspecified ‘personal passions.’
Ive has led Apple’s design team since 1996 and is responsible for the company’s iconic product designs like the iMac, iPod, and iPhone. He also guided the design and construction of Apple Park. In a press release issued by Apple, Tim Cook said:
Jony is a singular figure in the design world and his role in Apple’s revival cannot be overstated, from 1998’s groundbreaking iMac to the iPhone and the unprecedented ambition of Apple Park, where recently he has been putting so much of his energy and care,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “Apple will continue to benefit from Jony’s talents by working directly with him on exclusive projects, and through the ongoing work of the brilliant and passionate design team he has built. After so many years working closely together, I’m happy that our relationship continues to evolve and I look forward to working with Jony long into the future.
Apple has not announced a replacement for Ive. Instead, the company’s press release says that design team leaders Evans Hankey, Vice President of Industrial Design, and Alan Dye, Vice President of Human Interface Design, will report to Apple’s Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams. Of the design team, Ive had this to say:
After nearly 30 years and countless projects, I am most proud of the lasting work we have done to create a design team, process and culture at Apple that is without peer. Today it is stronger, more vibrant and more talented than at any point in Apple’s history,” said Ive. “The team will certainly thrive under the excellent leadership of Evans, Alan and Jeff, who have been among my closest collaborators. I have the utmost confidence in my designer colleagues at Apple, who remain my closest friends, and I look forward to working with them for many years to come.
Separately, Apple announced that it has named Sabih Kahn as joined the company’s executive team as Senior Vice President of Operations. In a press release, Apple said that Khan who has been at the company since the mid-90s:
will be in charge of Apple’s global supply chain, ensuring product quality and overseeing planning, procurement, manufacturing, logistics and product fulfillment functions, as well as Apple’s supplier responsibility programs that protect and educate workers at production facilities around the world.
According to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Williams:
Sabih leads our Ops team with heart,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “He and his entire worldwide team are committed to delivering unmatched experiences to our customers, treating workers everywhere with dignity and respect, and protecting the environment for future generations.
I’ve been privileged to work with Sabih for more than 20 years, and you won’t find a more talented operations executive anywhere on the planet,” said Williams. “He is a world-class leader and collaborator, and I have no doubt that he will be the best leader of the Ops team in Apple’s history.
This is a surprising turn of events. Ive will continue to work with Apple, but it clearly won’t be his sole focus anymore. He’s left a lasting imprint on Apple over the course of almost three decades and is leaving behind design team led by Apple veterans, which leaves the company in good hands. Still, it’s a shame to see Ive go.
The addition of Kahn to the leadership team who, along with the company’s two design leads, will report to Jeff Williams is interesting too. I wouldn’t be surprised if Williams is being groomed to take over as CEO someday.
Myke resumes his role as the tvOS guy and Federico’s Memoji have all been killed. Apple’s Public Betas have arrived, as have new rumors of a future small iPhone. Stephen preaches the good news of Carbon.
On this week’s episode of Connected, we discuss Apple’s latest public betas and the future of Catalyst apps. You can listen below (and find the show notes here).
Sponsored by:
All my cards on the table: until I tried Anders Borum’s new app, Secure ShellFish, I had no idea what an SSH or SFTP server even was. I’ve never had the need for a file server, and have thus considered it one of those technical computing concepts that’s over my head and exists only for a certain type of user. My guess is that many other people feel the same way, not just because of the concept of servers itself, but also because the tools available for configuring and accessing servers can tend to be overly complex. Secure ShellFish, on both iPad and iPhone, aims to be the opposite: it makes configuring servers easy, and accessing them even easier because it’s built around integration with Apple’s Files app.
All three of the apps in Apple’s iWork productivity suite received a substantial update this week. Changes varied by app and across platforms, but the lion’s share of the revisions improved the apps’ flexibility, text styling, and image handling capabilities, and, on iOS, Pencil integration.
The Mac versions of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote and their iOS counterparts now allow text to be styled with gradients and images. There are also new outline styles. Images, shapes, and equations can be placed inline in text boxes, which allows them to move with the text box when it’s moved, and the apps use face detection when photos are added to a document to determine where they should go intelligently.
In Pages, Numbers, and Keynote for iOS, a double-tap of the Apple Pencil toggles it between two modes: scrolling and selection, and drawing. The apps’ dictionaries can also be modified now using a new ‘Learn Spelling’ function. Altering the size and color of bullets, adding custom bullets, and changing indentation levels for bulleted lists is available in all three apps as is changing the borders of cells in tables. Finally, all three apps have new chart editing functionality for styling series, adjusting the spacing between columns, and adding trend lines, among other things.
Most of the remaining changes are to Pages and Numbers. Both iOS and Mac versions of Pages and Numbers have added the ability to link text to other pages of a Pages document or sheets in Numbers. Also, on both platforms, Pages can copy and paste pages of a document or sections of one between two different documents and reapply a master page to return a document to its default style state. There’s an English-language template for creating novels in Pages on iOS and the Mac too.
Finally, both versions of Numbers use a new, more powerful 128-bit calculation engine in its spreadsheets and add the ability to insert rows into filtered tables.
It’s great to see all versions of the iWork apps getting an update. I don’t use Pages or Keynote regularly, but Numbers has become an app that I rely on most days, and I appreciate the fact that Apple has kept the functionality of both the Mac and iOS versions close to each other even if it means maintaining two separate sets of code.
Ahead of the first 2020 Democratic debates, which take place over the next couple days, Apple News has launched a dedicated candidate guide pooling information about each presidential hopeful from a wide variety of sources. News has offered similar election-related hubs in the past, but nothing near as extensive as the candidate guide debuting today.
20 Democratic contenders are profiled in the candidate guide, and with each the News editorial team has assembled a swath of facts, key stances, quotes, and other relevant information meant to ensure future voters are informed amidst a crowded field of prospects.
One of the greatest values of News’ approach is that it summarizes key data in a brief, easy to read format. With minimal time investment you can find out a candidate’s experience, what they’re best known for, their breakout moment, and more. I especially appreciated the straight to the point “You’ll love her/him if you…” and “You’ll leave him/her if you…” factoids.
While there’s certainly a strong dose of editorial work done by Apple’s team in this guide, the key driving force behind each candidate profile is stories from other news sources. In Apple’s press release announcing the candidate guide, the following sources are referenced:
ABC News, Axios, CNN, Fox News, NBC News, Politico, The Hill, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, TIME, USA Today, Vox and others
Each candidate profile is filled with links to stories from these sources and more, with practically every detail listed about a candidate tied directly to an outside link. This approach allows Apple’s editors to summarize key facts and make them easily digestible, all while putting news sources front and center so readers can go deeper on topics they’re interested in.
Besides the general profile information for candidates I’ve already outlined, Apple News also shares which issues are at the core of a candidate’s platform, how the fundraising landscape currently looks among candidates, recent standout news appearances, notable supporters, and more.
Apple News is positioning itself, with features like this candidate guide and other forthcoming 2020 US election coverage, as a trusted source for voters. Laura Kern, the Apple News editor-in-chief, wrote, “we want to offer Apple News readers a trusted place to learn more about candidates…The candidate guide in Apple News is a robust and reliable resource”. The message is clear: while pervasive fake news across other major news platforms was evident in the 2016 election, Apple believes it can offer a news source that’s trusted and reliable leading up to November 2020.
The Democratic candidate guide can be accessed in Apple News via the included link using an iPhone, iPad, or Mac.
