I have no idea what’s going on with Bob Mansfield, and frankly neither does anyone else, save a few people inside Apple. But it sure looks to me like the man keeps trying to leave the company, and Tim Cook wisely keeps giving him strong incentives to stay.

Stripping a man of his SVP title might sound like a demotion to some, but if the guy has plenty of money, doesn’t necessarily want the spotlight, and wants to spend less time stressing out about work, getting to report directly to the CEO on “special” projects without the overhead of large departmental responsibilities sounds like a strong incentive to stick around to me.

I never had any interest in Gmail.

Back in the mid 2000s, when everyone was jumping on the Gmail bandwagon, I was perfectly fine with my mac.com email address (which I had signed up for within five minutes of Steve Jobs’ announcement at Macworld New York 2000). People always complain that Apple’s Internet services suck, and they are right in many cases. But mac.com email has always been rock solid for me. I can count on one hand the number of times my account has actually been out of service over the last 13 years.

Furthermore, accessing email in the browser seemed like a step backwards, and while I was interested in many of Google’s products at the time (Maps being my favorite), changing my email address didn’t seem like a good idea. Also, in the early days of Gmail, an invite was the only way to get in. (Maybe because I have few friends and hate asking them for favors of any kind, I’ve always found invite systems pretentious.)

Eventually, I did give in and sign up for a Gmail address, not because I wanted Gmail, but because it was required for another Google product I did very much want to use: Reader. RSS reading, unlike mail, seemed like a good fit for a browser app, since all the articles I’d be reading would be in the browser, anyway. (Remember, this is long before the era of Instapaper.) So I created a Gmail address, reluctantly, but only used it for Reader access. This same address later gave me access to YouTube and Google’s chat, neither of which were ever as important to me as Reader was.

The announcement of Google’s retirement of Reader, then, meant a lot more to me than simply losing my RSS syncing method. I had since moved out of the Reader web interface entirely and adopted a combo of the excellent Reeder app on the Mac and iOS, coupled with Instapaper for all my RSS reading sans browsers. Now that the back end needed to be replaced, too, I could finally retire my Gmail address and shut down my Google account altogether.

Over the past few years, I’ve been slowly moving away from every Google service I’ve ever used. Duck Duck Go has replaced Google search on my Macs. I’d love to use Duck Duck Go on my iOS devices, too, but Apple so far has only given me the option of Yahoo and Bing on my iPhone and iPad. Apple’s Maps suits me perfectly fine, especially with the announcement of the Maps app for OS X Mavericks. (Go ahead and laugh, but wherever I’ve gone, I’ve only run into minor issues with Apple’s solution.) I use Vimeo instead of YouTube for any videos I need to upload, which are few and far between. Google+ adds no value to my life whatsoever. I have no use for Google Docs. I’ve never liked Google Calendar and Contacts, either. And then there’s that Gmail account, which I never used for email in the first place.

It’s not that I hate Google, or that I take some special joy in shutting down this account. But the fact of the matter is that I simply don’t trust Google with my data. And what they offer me in return is of little benefit to me. I have good alternatives for anything I would want to do with a Google product.

A few months back, I finally shut down my LinkedIn account, and it felt great. (They still email me once in a while, which is a whole other story.) Letting my Google account go, I’m guessing, will be similarly liberating.

Sure, the alternative services that I’ve chosen are collecting data on me, too. It’s not like I’m “off the grid” by any means. But being off Google’s grid does seem like a good idea at the moment.

So what will I do for my RSS needs? Well, fortunately, the closing of Reader has caused a real resurgence in RSS offerings, so I have plenty of options. I’ve postponed the switch until now for two reasons: so I could research the best options, and, more importantly, to wait and see which services Reeder will support. (RSS is a serious part of my daily workflow. I don’t want to switch apps if I don’t have to. And I need a solution that works the same everywhere, on my Macs as well as my iOS devices.)

Unfortunately, Silvio didn’t manage to get all three versions of his Reeder apps updated in time for the shutdown, so I’ll be at least temporarily marooned with a workaround solution. Most likely I’ll just do all RSS on my iPhone until the iPad and Mac app updates arrive. Or I’ll try out a Mac alternative like ReadKit, since it’s getting a lot of good press lately. But I’m sure in a few months this will all be settled and I’ll back into my regular workflow on all my devices.

In the end, I chose Feed Wrangler as my sync service, as the streams seem like an excellent feature, and there’s a yearly subscription cost involved. (I inherently mistrust any company that doesn’t charge me money for a service.) We’ll see how that goes. I will reserve judgment for after I’ve had a few weeks working with it in Reeder everywhere.

I’m sure there will be times when not having a Google account will be a minor inconvenience to me. But I see no compelling reason at the moment to keep it active just on the outside chance I’ll need it again.

With all the extra complications of modern Internet use, I think it’s a good thing to purge the list of companies who have accounts associated with your name, just to clear the air a little. So look out, Facebook. You’re probably next.

I’ve been looking closely at iOS 7, and like many designers I have mixed feelings. Some of the changes, like the expanded use of motion, are a breath of fresh air. Animation is coming to the forefront and will only be further explored in the years to come. And that’s very exciting. In other areas, meanwhile, such as the heavy reliance on type rather than icons, the over-reliance on plain white backgrounds everywhere, and the lack of clear separation between elements such as the status bar and the title bar, I’m a little less convinced. (And I won’t participate in the icon debate, except to say that there’s more work to be done, I hope.) But I understand that this is a rough draft, that all Apple interface design is a work in progress, and that the “big shifts” (just like the original OS X) usually take a few iterations before Apple works out where they may have taken it too far in a particular direction.

And that’s where my work moving forward comes in. Unlike Apple, I only have a handful of apps to conform to this new iOS 7 design language, so I can take some extra time with them. And the number one guiding principle for me is this: Don’t overcorrect.

I think a lot of designers will be tempted to strip out all adornment in their apps and try too hard to copy the stock Apple apps. This would be a mistake.

Take my app x2y, as an example. I started thinking about what I would need to do to make this fit in with iOS 7 immediately following last Monday’s keynote. And what I’ve concluded is that it does need some work. But not as much as I initially thought.

Sure, I can further flatten out the already pretty flat toolbars, remove the highlights and shadows from my custom number pad, maybe back off on some of the background texture. And I can get rid of some of the custom adornments that don’t really need to be there, such as the logo on the top of the interface. But should I switch from the dark grey to a more iOS 7-common white background? I don’t think so. When I use this app, I’m usually in my dark office, with my focus on my iMac’s 27” screen. The last thing I want is my iPhone or iPad blasting white light at me just so I can make some image size calculations.

And what about the font? Helvetica Neue Light is nice, and I actually like the system-wide movement toward thinner fonts on Retina screens. On the other hand, Futura is a major part of x2y’s personality. Those sharp, beautifully recognizable numbers were chosen for a reason, and I can’t see replacing them just because the system font has changed. I can, however, in the interest of improving clarity, make those fonts larger in some places.

After a few days of playing around, what I ended up with is something along the lines of this. A change, to be sure, but not a drastic one. A look that won’t be out of place on iOS 7, but would still work on iOS 6 as well.[1]

One of the nice things about iOS as opposed to OS X is that once your app is launched, it takes over the entire screen. So while you want it to fit in with other apps on the system, there is plenty of room for your own app’s personality to shine. You can have a custom look and feel, so long as the user experience is consistent and it doesn’t look too out of touch.

My advice to my fellow designers is to not take the new look of iOS 7 too literally. Remember the core of what Apple’s trying to achieve—clarity, deference, depth—and interpret those principles in your own fashion. Sure, hard light from 90-degrees above is giving way to more diffuse, ambient lighting, and heavy drop shadows and distracting textures are likewise passé. But don’t try to make all your apps look like iOS 7 Mail. That would be counterproductive.

After all, Letterpress looked and worked just fine on iOS 6. Twitterrific fits in nicely on either system. Because good design is good design. It’s much better to be in the position of potentially influencing Apple’s next version of iOS (as those two apps clearly did) than to be copying the current version.

1. Note, this is three days worth of work on the next version of x2y. The final product may vary quite a bit as it gets refined over the next few months.  ↩

Android’s Market Share Is Literally A Joke | Tech.pinions – Perspective, Insight, Analysis: “The company that buys market share must inevitably go out of business or reverse its course and fight its way back up to profitability. The company with the value and the profits, on the other hand, has the advantage of holding the high ground and can choose to take market share at will.”

(Via John Kirk for Tech Opinions.)

This, in a nutshell, is what’s wrong with developers on the App Store trying to get to the top of the charts at any cost. They’re buying market share by maximizing downloads instead of profits. And most end up making little money as a result.

Kirk’s piece here is examining iOS Phones vs. Android, but the same concept applies to the software sold on these devices as well. Having more users is actually a bad thing when the cost per user is higher than the profit per user.

People like to cite Microsoft when talking about the value of market share, but they always seem to forget that Microsoft never sacrificed profit margin to get that market share. It was the hardware manufacturers—Dell, Sony, HP, Gateway, etc.—who were caught up in the pricing wars. Microsoft pitted them against each other and sat back on a pile of gold as they tore each other to pieces.

Google? Not so much with Android.

I didn’t appreciate this when I was beta testing OmniPresence (because the beta was Mac-only and didn’t involve the iPad) but The Omni Group has really done something amazing with this new synching software. In essence, they’ve married the best of Dropbox and iCloud, and they’ve given it away for any developer to use.

The Problem with Dropbox

Dropbox is no question a rock-solid solution for synching files. And it’s about as simple as a synching solution can get on the Mac. Create a folder. Put anything you want in that folder. Everything in that folder is available everywhere. Perfect, right?

Well, it’s perfect on the Mac, but when you then move over to accessing your files with your iPad, things get a little clunky. And not just because of Apple’s restrictions about sharing data between apps. I actually believe in what Apple is trying to do with removing the file system on the iPad. No matter how much we nerds scream about it, the file system is probably the biggest barrier average users have to learning to use a Mac. There is an elegant simplicity to opening an app on an iPad and seeing only the files that app understands and nothing else. Using a solution like Dropbox on the iPad always feels like a step backwards, no matter how you slice it. Navigating folder structures just feels wrong. It’s simply not native to the platform.

The Problem with iCloud

iCloud, at the same time, is much better on the iPad than it is on OS X. It was created with the removal of the Finder in mind. That’s fine on the iPad, but we expect and want to use the Finder on our Macs. We get frustrated when we can’t simply see a folder with all our files in it on the Mac. Where did my shared files go? How to I share them with anyone else? iCloud is downright confusing and extremely limiting on the Mac.

The Solution

What OmniPresence manages to do is behave like Dropbox on the Mac and iCloud on the iPad. And that’s just brilliant. On your Mac, set up a folder, just like you would for Dropbox, drop anything you want in there, and it syncs. Move it around, make subfolders, whatever. But then open any OmniPresence-enabled app on your iPad, and you see just the files pertaining to that app in your document list. Make changes on either device, and the file gets auto-updated, just like with iCloud, even while open. Even if you create subfolders on the Mac, the documents all show up in your list natively on the iPad without having to drill down anywhere. And you’re not copying the file from your Dropbox app into the iPad app, making changes, and then manually syncing back; all changes are synched back in seconds automatically.

As if this weren’t cool enough, Omni then takes it another two steps by 1) allowing you to sync to your own server instead of Omni’s and 2) releasing the synch software as open source, so anyone can do whatever they want with it. This removes any ambiguity about security or monetization motivations. Don’t trust Dropbox or Omni with your files? Fine, just set it up and run it on your own server.

This may all sound like a commercial for The Omni Group, but I’m just stunned they’ve managed to pull this off so cleanly. I hope a lot of other app developers realize what an opportunity this is and start embedding this functionality into their apps.