Author: Pat

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.

 

———

Background

——

 

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.”

 

———

The details

——

 

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.

 

———

What is a “button”?

——

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.

——

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.]

 

——

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.

 

———

Now for Application

——

 

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.

 

 

———

Wait a moment…

——

“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.

As in, right now it’s saying I have a meeting with someone…but that is an event which belongs to my dad.

 

I think this is mostly due to the fact that all the shared stuff came from Google.  Or at least that’s what I would think if iOS had grouped all the shared stuff into one entry, but that’s not what it did.  It separated all the calendars into separate entries with the appropriate emails…and yet, despite the fact that it should know I have never attended even 1/8th of my dad’s meetings, it still reminds me, via Notification Center and sometimes popup message, that I have to leave to go to a meeting.

Or maybe this is due to the fact that I actually attend 1/68th of the meetings…because I do have my own stuff I go to that is also in his calendar…

 

Even if that was the case…that doesn’t mean it should surface one of his contacts in Proactive that I know but have never contacted at all recently.

You know one theory I have?  The theory I have is that Proactive and anything else that uses calendars to do stuff scans everything on my phone regardless of who it belongs to.  At least it rates things based on importance which is fine, but that algorithim needs work, because did I mention it reminds me of my dad’s events and surfaces his contacts?

I swear on my grandparent’s grave that iOS should have already known this.  I am dead serious.

—-

[WARNING:  Bashing of Apple ahead]

Continue reading “iOS and OS X doesn’t know what a shared calendar is #apple #iosisdumb”

So yeah, I keep realizing after I write, like, any post about Apple that I keep being a flip-flop about how I think about it.

 

I apologize.

—-

It’s actually incredibly difficult to maintain a single opinion.  And the main reason is because of its history.

Guess what?  It actually tried to be the perfect company; the one that never failed, the one who provides perfect software, in the perfect way.  The company that “just worked”.

Guess what else?  There were dents.  Even with the charisma and fiery personality of Steve Jobs on their side, some of their software just…didn’t work.  It wasn’t perfect, and it didn’t satisfy everyone it came across.

Just like every other company.  Except unlike every other company who just SAYS that they have the perfect solution, Steve Jobs actually BELIEVED that he had the perfect solution.  And this belief developed a cult.  Yeah, unlike every other company, Apple developed a following of thousands and thousands of die-hard fans, just because of the SPECIFIC way that Jobs presented his gadgets.

There was also a lot of internal structure stuff that kept up the quality.  I bet there were fights about what color to make something where Steve Jobs beat someone bloody.

And then he died.

—-

Now herein lies the issue in which Apple no longer has a giant battering ram to force out our so-loved luscious quality.  And so down falls the quality into a basin of hell, where each change provokes massive outrages, and breakages of our so dearly-beloved digital i-Devices…

…um, sorry.

But for all the massive changes, like the total overhaul of the UI, the addition of awesome features like Proactive and Apple Pay…Apple kept the old.

There is still iCloud Photo Library and Genius Playlists.  There’s still the entire basic layout of every single app. There’s still ATTEMPTS at quality…

But they…just can’t.  There is an air of panic over at Apple Inc, as they lump together feature after feature, acquiring more and more companies, running themselves into the ground trying to please our thick, Steve Jobs-stained skulls…

But through it all…there’s been some really good stuff.  Things that offer glimpses of the old Apple.  The new trackpad on the MacBook, which immediately won over my dad…the awesome sound system in the iPad Pro (which I haven’t gotten yet, but I want to)…3D Touch on the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus VIIII Edition…oops, just 6s Plus…

—-

So can you see why it’s so difficult to keep a clear head?  It’s because there’s glimpses of Apple trying, and trying really well, but most of it’s just been broken update after broken feature, and the inconsistency makes it hard to tell if Apple is finally gearing up again to be the perfect little company who could, or diving down into a hell of broken things and repeating its 1985-1997 history (and if you don’t remember, that time frame is when Steve Jobs left Apple, formed NeXT, and Apple crumbled under the stress of no Steve and the incompetence of Gil Amelio).

 

 

And if you still think that Apple screwing its quality is just a load of hooey, I just had an issue where my iOS 9.0 iPhone 5S couldn’t verify an update to iOS 9.0.1 because it SAID it wasn’t connected…even though it was fully connected to Wi-Fi.  Cellular had it do the same thing.  I had to update it through iTunes.

 

Oh well…it tries.  The trackpad is cool, and apparently it worked well enough to win over anyone who touched it, so…you know what?  You’re alright, Apple.  Everyone should love you, you deserve a cookie.

 

Except that there’s STILL NO EXCUSE FOR THAT LITTLE THING WITH THE INTERNET AND THE UPDATE.  You happy about that, Tim Cook you little jerk, you stupid…

Oh wait, I’m flip-flopping again.  Sorry.

Well, not necessarily confusing so much as “going behind your back and being very scary but once you figure it out you actually realize it’s smarter than you”.

 

Before we start, I want to say that I finally noticed a certain passage in the Apple TOS saying I was not allowed to blog about any betas.  I have since been trying to honor that.

Key word: “Trying”.  This post was originally going to be how Proactive was underhanded and sneaky…but then I actually did some homework and figured out that Proactive is actually just really smart.  This is the story of how that happened.

 

Yes, this is just me fanboying about Proactive.  Bite me.

—-

Now, I recently reinstalled the beta after I got my phone replaced due to dropping it.  I originally installed the beta when it was still Public Beta 1.  When I reinstalled it, it was at 3.  Now, apparently some defaults got switched around, and suddenly Bob Smith appeared in the first slot of my Siri-Contact Suggestions (and I wrote it that way because fudge naming schemes I guess).

I had not emailed Bob in two years.  And the only email I had sent him was a bug report for an app he made.  I also had not even made a contact out of him.  When I checked, the iPhone appeared to have his email and his Twitter handle.  I didn’t know he had a Twitter, and I had not followed him.

 

And then I found in the iPhone settings that there actually was a toggle that made contacts out of emails you sent things to so actually it was fine.  HOWEVER……

 

That is where Jim Adams comes in.  Jim was also a contact created by Proactive.  You might think I had emailed him at one point…but you’d be wrong.  There were no emails from him, n0 notes, no textual information, not a shred of evidence on my device that said he ever existed…except for a single, solitary calendar event from 2014.  This event contained his email (albeit an old discontinued one).

I spent all day attempting to figure all this out…and it was so annoying, because as I was doing it…well…

 

You have to understand the magnitude of what the hell Proactive is.  You can think of it like a little robotic spider in your phone, invisible to you.  It watches everything you do, and it reaches out through the Wi-Fi, downloading your calendar and email history, and crawls all over them, scanning for trends, contact information, and any other useful things.  The thing is…you don’t know what that creepy robotic spider is doing.  It could be contacting other related iPhones to correlate and pool data. Because did I mention Jim and Bob were two head honchoes of completely separate companies, and that my dad was a part of both?!

Yeah.  Me and my dad both thought that Proactive was being invasive as hell!

 

But…Bob was from a single email (and backed by two emails from Twitter suggesting I follow him), and Jim was from a single calendar event (which I guess should be kind of a high priority since it’s your calendar…except it’s not my calendar.  I have a shared calendar thing.  And iOS seems to not know that.  At all.  I’ll talk more about it if I feel like it.).

 

So in fact…Proactive was actually being smart about what it did.

 

And…my dad figured out that Proactive seemed to be basing it’s algorithm (at least for Siri-Contact Suggestions) off of the CRM, or Customer Relations Model.  [And no alt text for that link because WordPress won’t allow me to have any fun anymore :p]

 

So…good job Apple!  I hated you when I was figuring it out but I did so good job!

 

(Also…I want to say “good job” again, because while I was getting g my iPhone replaced, dad touched the new MacBook’s trackpad…and was immediately tempted to ditch his old one just for the trackpad!  So GOOD JOB!)

 

Ahhhh…this is the Apple everyone knows and loves.  Welcome back. 🙂

Interesting.  They actually kept the code name.  Or maybe it was the real name all along.  Their intelligent iPhone assistant is called Proactive.

…it’s fitting, I don’t care.

What I do care about is that it’s almost here!  Finally Apple can scrape off users from Google Now…or to put it in a way that makes me feel better (as an Apple fan anyway), Apple can make your life even easier and turn you into even more of a couch potato.

And something else interesting:  Android Migration.  Yes everyone, Apple has made an app for Android that transfers all available data from your Android to your iOS device, exactly like Windows Migration does.  And I can’t say that in a way that makes me feel better.

And yes, that was not in the keynote, but it’s interesting.

—-

Proactive Assistant

—

Good job, Apple!  You managed to stuff App suggestions and contact suggestions in without compromising privacy!  I hope!

And Search!  And news!  And weather!  And basically combining the features of several apps into one convenient screen!  Screw you, Google, here’s another Google!

…It’s actually not as interesting as I thought it would be.  The only notable thing is that Siri understands context now!  You can now call her up and say “Remind me about this tomorrow.”, and Siri will notice that you were looking at a webpage before you activated her, and will set a reminder to remind you about whatever’s on that page.

The thing about the suggestions, though, is that they’re completely based on context and intelligence (on-device, though my dad just doesn’t believe that).  Cyoar!

——

The new iPad Experience

——

Fantastic!  Apple finally learned from the Buddha of business who has been screaming from his mountaintop at the top of his lungs:  “BUSINESS OWNERS NEED MORE THAN ONE APP TO BE PRODUCTIVE ON A SCREEN THAT’S BIGGER THAN A MOUSEPAD!!”  Split-screen apps and a keyboard trackpad for the cursor!  Text cursor, not cursor cursor!  Brilliance!  Everyone will be so pleased, and I mean EVERYONE!  It’s going to—what?

Oh.  Split-screen won’t be available for iPad 2 and 3?  Even though they’re also getting iOS 9?

…okay…

——

WatchOS 2.0

——

…well…it’s fixed!  No more waiting for apps to load.  Also some other things but no one cares because it’s a f**king watch.  I’m sorry, I am annoyed.  I’ll shush now.

——

OS X El Capitan

——

Buenos días, el capitán! ¿Quieres que tu orden de “sopa Q” hoy en día, o te gustaría viajar a las estrellas conmigo? – [EDIT:  This is dumb.  Do not translate.]

Sorry.  My Star Trek was showing.

The instant Craig said it, I didn’t like it…but it’s been growing on me.  Some iOS feature ports and more refining!  Yay!

——

Apple Music

——

[And without even starting this part, I can tell that this is the point where I’m basically going to call Apple an idiot.  Just warning you.]

 

…the fuck are you doing?  Jimmy Iovine is an 80’s nerd.  You needed to teach him the basics of Apple BEFORE letting him onstage!!

Ok, so here’s what I’m talking about.  What did Jimmy say?  He said (paraphrased) “Our radio station ‘Beats 1’ is not going to be curated by an algorithim.  A computer just cannot get that emotional flow that you get with a regular human being.  And because of this, Beats 1 is only going to play the music that you want to hear.  Only the best gets on Beats 1.”

Okay…first off, “the best music” is subjective.  Second off, THAT’S WHAT MACHINE LEARNING IS FOR!!!!!  Isn’t that what Apple does best??  Making machines be more HUMAN??  HUMANIZING THE EXPERIENCE?!?!  CATERING TO HUMANS VIA THINGS LIKE SIRI AND

*CRASH!*

…ow.  What I’m saying, is if you don’t have the technology, don’t try for it!  Don’t risk things…

oohhh no.  I see what people are saying when they say that Apple has no people who can say “no” anymore.

I…I just dismissed that because…Steve Jobs couldn’t have been the ONLY person able to say no…

…

…and Apple turned into an idiot…?

*Windows BSOD screen*

The keynote is very soon, everyone, and what comes with it is some pretty cool stuff.

 

I think.

 

For one, Apple is announcing Proactive, a feature of iOS 9 that aims to slap Google Now in the butt.  Except Apple isn’t really known for slapping Google’s butt, so to make Apple fans happy let’s just say that Apple wants to make your life two-hundred times easier by introducing smart contextual actions.

Also, iOS 9 is going to be STABLE.  Because…it wasn’t before.  For some reason.

 

The Apple TV is not going to make an appearance, apparently, because Apple couldn’t get the hardware working.

 

—————————————

…I’m slightly out of it today.  One because while one of the main points of the Apple Watch is to communicate with the iPhone, the communication itself is STUPID slow.  2.  Why the hell couldn’t they get iOS 7 to be stable, and then make iOS 8 even more unstable, and THEN go for stability??  I mean I know Apple critics call Apple slow sometimes but this is so slow it violates their values…in my head at least.

And then that HORRENDOUSLY handled keynote last year…I just don’t get it.

——————————————

Sorry.  I had to get that out.

 

So let’s talk about Proactive.

——

Proactive is Apple’s version of Google Now (or of they really try it’ll be Apple’s version of Google Now On Tap).  And it will be placed to the left side of the first Home Screen page just like where Spotlight was originally.  Its goal is to make everything easier by lumping your calendar events, apps you use most often (based on time of day it seems), and other things all in one screen.

Just like Notification Center…what?  You said Notification Center doesn’t have app links?  Sure it does, in a widget called Launcher.

Because it has widgets…did you forget Apple tried way too hard in iOS 8…

 

One thing my dad pointed out is that Proactive can’t really do anything too smart unless it collects data and sends it to Apple.  As in Apple tracks you. Everything about you, anytime.

Actually, Apple already does that with Spotlight.  It gathers your Spotlight searches and which entry you tap and tracks that data.

…I just hope Apple doesn’t try to sell the data Proactive gathers.  [NOTE:  I have no idea how this selling data thing works or why it happens, and I don’t want to know.]

——

Also there’s going to be some dedicated HomeKit app or something…

…and I already said everything was going to be more stable…finally…

 

[[Jeezus.  I sounded so jumpy and bored at the same time in this post.  Reading so many critical reviews on Apple products has thrown me for a loop.  I would thank each and every one of them for giving me some much-needed perspective, but…they gave me some perspective on a company that did so well and now is not doing well at all (in terms of their goals, which is mostly the completely unhindered user experience).  I literally have no idea whether to be blindly excited/hopeful for Apple products or just hope that their good or to assume that they’ll suck.  And now I miss Steve Jobs.  I hope his ghost is brainstorming some ideas or something.]]