Month: December 2015

I think I have a real answer, finally, about what Apple is thinking.

 

And it took way longer than I would’ve liked to figure it out.  In fact I’m surprised that it was so difficult…not that it was so difficult for me, but that it was so difficult for Apple to TELL US THIS.

 

The reason for those caps will be explained later.  For now, let me get into this.

 

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Background

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Remember when iOS was first released?  It was such an awesome experience:  FINALLY, a phone that non-tech savvy people could actually use!  And LIKE USING IT.  Literally a “device in shining armor”.  And not only that, it gave those laymen a leg due to referencing the physical world, and therefore pushing forward their organization.

And then updates occurred!  Even more capabilities!  And then a little more…and then a tiny bit more…and then uh, maybe that’s cool…all this shiny is starting to feel stale…also that tape deck analogy in Podcasts is a little weird…

And then the head hauncho kicks the bucket, and the whole world cried.

 

And then BAM HOLY SHIT

 

Suddenly Candy Land took over!  ACK IT’S GUMDROP MOUNTAINS…wait.  It went flat.  And there’s color and transparency everywhere.  And how come suddenly in iOS 8 it’s all “This iDevice is so goddamn powerful you can AirDrop, and we never thought of this before because Scott Forstall—I mean Steve Jobs is a total idiot.  Also Metal makes your iPhone as powerful as a PS4 console because we couldn’t think of iterating so slowly anymore because we hate reality!  Also, the entire basic UI is white.  Battery issue?  PSSSHH, we can fix that.”

 

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The details

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Don’t quite know what I’m getting at?  Let’s look at a detail that pretty much has everyone banging Jony with a pan:  The buttons.

 

They’re not buttons.  Or at least they don’t look like a button.  In fact I can literally do this and say I’ve made a button iOS-style.  But is it a button?  No, I’ve only changed the font color; there is no link attached to it.  You also might have clicked it just to check.  Because it also looks like a page link that normal sites use.

But that’s not the area I’m going for.  I’m not saying that Jony is incredibly lazy and just not designing buttons because he thinks the normal website-link style is fine.

Jony is trying to rid us of assuming that whatever device you have has any sort of grounding in any logical sense.

…are you still here?  Good.  Just checking.

 

“What the hell are you on about?”  I can hear you say.  “I don’t care if my iPhone hovers in the air and gives me food and water somehow!  I need SIGNALS to determine whether I can press a bit of text and have it do something!  Also, doesn’t this ‘text color button’ thing go against Apple’s values?  I don’t know what is a button!  I feel uncertain and nervous when using my iDevice!  That shouldn’t happen!”

 

…yes.  You are correct.  But you’re also assuming a “button” in the digital sense should be analogous to a “button” in the real life sense.  From pretty much day one, you’ve been trained to think of a button as “an object that is separate from the rest of the object it rests on, and I can press this object down, and something will happen”.

 

That sort of assumption doesn’t work with Apple’s current vision.  We’re going to detour a bit, so hang on.

 

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What is a “button”?

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What do you think of when you hear the word “button”?  For me, I think of a big red button with a silver border sticking out of a rusty brown metal surface.

 

You might be thinking of something similar:  A thing that looks like you can press it and it will do something.  A keyboard key, a mouse button, buttons on airplanes, the power button on your PC and/or Mac, etc.  All of those are grounded in our reality because, from day one and onward, the basic behavior of the button itself has not changed.  You press it, it moves downward into the thing it’s attached to, and something else happens because of it.

 

Now, let’s take a feature that Apple has recently introduced:  Live Photos.

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You’ve set a photo as your lock screen and home screen wallpaper:  Your daughter blowing bubbles.  You miss your daughter, you’ve been away for a while at work, and you can’t wait to take the trip back home and see her again.  You take out your phone to look at her on the lock screen.  You tense up, squeezing your hand around the phone, holding back your tears,  and…did the picture just move?!?  You relax your hand in surprise, and the picture…if it was moving…stops.  You squeeze the phone again…and find that it wasn’t your imagination.  The photo comes to life with a short little video clip of your daughter putting the soap wand in the bottle, and pulling it out and starting to blow.  It ends quickly, but you feel touched.  It was an unexpected piece of your daughter’s life in video…and maybe with this, you can wait it out a couple more days.  [Of course, this kind of thing is slightly ruined by the fact that Apple told us about this kind of thing in the keynote and on the website, but if you don’t allow people to read or watch Apple’s stuff, then this is totally legit.]

 

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Now how did you activate this?  You pressed on the screen, right?  Of course you did…but there was nothing telling you that you could do this.  No borders, no visible touch points, not even any indication when you do press down that it was your finger that activated it.  And yet, when you did press down at that point in your life, it was very important.  It inspired you to keep slogging through life.

 

That is exactly the sort of logic Jony used in deciding what most of the buttons looked like:  You might not know what exactly an app does, but when you press/swipe/pinch on the screen, something might happen that is exactly what you want.  You feel empowered, because the app did what you wanted, or needed, without a solid expectation.  And if it’s powerful enough, you feel like a god, you feel like you can do things, it can inspire so much stuff within people.

 

Or, you know…you could continue to argue that you need signals for everything you do, and completely ruin the opportunity for events like this.

 

So, does not having borders around buttons keep with Apple’s values?  Absolutely.

 

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Now for Application

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We can apply this “god-like appropriation” to all the UI elements.  The stark white backgrounds?  Well, it’s not black or gray, which would make it look factory-like, so instead, it leaves you free to experience what the app has to offer.  The bright colors thrown all over the place?  Think Jelly Belly, Google, Skittles, Preschool, jumping castles, etc.  The translucent glass? To make it all pretty.

 

 

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Wait a moment…

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“Wait a second!  What about the other parts of the UI?  The Stocks app for example, has a BLACK background.  And some of the more important buttons in iOS actually HAVE borders surrounding them!  Not to mention the OS X operating system and tvOS, which have buttons with very obvious borders ALL OVER THE PLACE!”

 

……yes.  Yeah.  And I don’t have an as detailed or solid of an answer for those.  The best I can do is:

 

Stocks:  Erm…I have no idea…because you want to be creative with buying and selling stocks, right?

Buttons WITH borders:  People were being even more dumb with these particular buttons during testing

The Mac:  Since the Mac has a precision pointing system, you need to be able to deduce more where the buttons are.

tvOS:  You answer this.  Because you’re sitting like 50 feet away from the TV and you need to see where you can use the remote.

tvOS Buttons WITHOUT borders:  wait what

 

So what about those caps I was going to explain about?

 

They’ve already been explained, in a meta sense.

 

Force Touch, the feature that made the picture move…is only available on the iPhone 6s and 6s plus.  Thanks for taking so damn long to do that, Apple.