Results make up for awkwardness of iPhoto for iPad – Chicago Sun-Times: “iPhoto represents the second generation of iPad apps. It’s not merely a ‘mobile’ photo editor. It’s a photo editor. A less-ambitious photo app like Snapseed is something you play with. iPhoto is an app that you can actually rely on.”

(Via. Chicago Sun-Times)

I have to completely agree with Andy Ihnatko here. When I first started using iPhoto for iPad, I immediately thought, like everyone else, that it was a UI nightmare. But the more I used it, the more I ended up liking it. And more importantly, the more I ended up using it as my go-to app for photo organizing and experimentation. In a few days, I had already used iPhoto on my iPad far more than I ever had any of the other iOS iLife apps.

iPhoto for iPad truly is as capable, and far more enjoyable to use once you learn it, than its desktop counterpart.

We are entering a second stage of iPad software, as Mr. Ihnatko suggests. One where people start to recognize that the iPad is eventually going to be the laptop replacement, not just a casual consumption device. This is what the Kindle Fire and the Android tablets are all missing. The iPad is so much more than the competition thinks it is.

And who better than Apple to lead the way with a new generation of apps that go beyond consumption? True, the iPad versions of the iWork apps were heavily compromised for the sake of an easier user experience. But the newer Apple apps, Garageband, iMovie, and now iPhoto, are pushing the boundaries and demonstrating that over time, iOS will become just as capable as OS X on the Mac for most people.

The trick is figuring out how do these things with our fingers. So yes, user experience is not quite as easy to figure out on these more robust apps yet. But it took several years for the mouse and the original GUI to evolve into tools capable of rivaling text-based user interfaces. It’ll get there. Developers have to be willing to experiment until they find what works. And Apple, of course, has more at stake than anyone in leading that charge.

Compelling idea for moving files from Mac to iPhone | TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog: “There’s iCloud, Dropbox and a host of other services to help us tranfer these files, but there are no solutions as elegant as the concept devised by interaction designer Ishac Bertran.”

(Via. TUAW)

Elegant? I’d say this is anything but elegant. For starters, how is manually holding a phone in one hand while pinching and dragging with the other on a vertical screen more elegant than iCloud automatically syncing the files with no user interaction whatsoever?

Even Palm solved this problem already much more elegantly with the “bump” feature on the WebOS tablet a few years ago. You see a file on the tablet you want on your phone, or vice versa? Just bump the devices together on the side of the screen, and the file transfers.

But again, even that isn’t as simple as putting your files in iCloud, where they will simply be available on all devices at all times. Make an update on your phone, your laptop will have it in a few seconds. Make a change on your laptop, and the phone will have it in a few seconds.

I realize that Apple is just getting started with iCloud, and that they haven’t worked out all the kinks yet, but they’ve clearly demonstrated that this is the plan for the future. There will be no need for the user to ever “sync” anything, because synchronization will be constant and automatic.

Why you’d try and solve this problem when it’s already been solved is beyond me.

Familiar is not a design:

Quasar was not designed, but rather only implemented. It’s the classic outcome of closed, engineer-based thinking.

(Via Matt Legend Gemmell)

Matt Gemmell sums up my thoughts on Quasar perfectly. The iPad doesn’t present multiple apps on screen at once for a reason, and that reason isn’t because of some hardware limitation, or because Apple wanted to “dumb it down” for users. It wasn’t an arbitrary decision. Apple designed the iPad that way, and I believe it’s a better device for it. You can argue that other systems like Windows Metro or Palm’s Web OS handle this sort of thing better, but you can’t just haphazardly let people fall back into their worst desktop habits and call it an improvement.

10 Years of Touts:

A collection of little rotating “tout” graphics we had at the top of the old site.

The oldest modification date? 2002 — 10 years ago.

Through these touts, you can basically see everything we’ve done over the last 10 years. The passage of time generally freaks me out, so it’s a little overwhelming for me to see these all in one place, but it’s also kind of nice and comforting to see that, man, we’ve done a lot of stuff.

(Via Panic Blog)

Not a bad-looking graphic in the whole bunch. It says a lot when you can go 10 years and nothing you do looks dated.

CNET: Why has Forrester’s CEO become an Apple doomsayer?:

With so much of the management and design team being people who were there under Jobs, they retain a lot of the good aspects of that era—and while Jobs was undoubtedly a huge direct influence as a tastemaker, there’s a case to be made that having a CEO who employees arenot terrified of being trapped in an elevator with is, in the long run, a good thing.

(Via Coyote Tracks)

This is a brave assertion, but I have to agree. The only thing about Tim Cook that will need to play out over time is his sense of vision. Will he see the next big thing when the time comes? So far, we have no evidence that he’ll be able to match Jobs’ sense of that. But we have no evidence that he won’t be able to, either.

As far as running the company goes, he’s going to be just fine. And no one else would do it better.

The biggest thing Apple has to watch out for now is its own sense of complacency. Once you’re the top dog, and Apple is certainly going to be top dog for at least the next half decade, you become your own worst enemy. I think Tim Cook knows this well. Forget the competition, focus on what makes you great, and resist the urge to own every market, even when those markets make no sense.