I bought my Nexus 5 in 2013. It's still running pretty smoothly. Every time I see an app render using the N5 frame, I chuckle. It just reiterates my thought that I made a good choice when I bought my phone, and I like that feeling.
"The second would be to bite the bullet and tell the world what your plans are, even though it’s your decades-long tradition — a fundamental part of the company’s culture — to let actual shipping products, not promises of future products, tell your story."
Interestingly enough, they also broke secrecy in 2013 when they gave a sneak peek of the new MacPro at WWDC, which would only ship later that year. They probably only announce products when they're ready to ship to not hurt sales of the existing models, but I'm guessing that won't make much of a difference with the current MacPro.
I got through 5 years of Engineering without buying a book. Between a bunch of copies of newer versions, some of older ones, some in English (this was in a Portuguese-speaking country) and some that couldn't be checked out from the library, there was always a copy available.
That was one of the high points of the college I went to, and I sure as hell did not take it for granted.
4) Forbes "Quote of the day". Seriously Forbes, that is irritating as hell.
Still, my number 1 is loading the extra content and making elements jump around. A lot of times I: 1) see a link that interests me; 2) hover my finger over a link, ready to tap; 3) wait 1-2 secs, to be sure it's done loading; 4) Ok, it's ready; 5) tap the liContent jumps and I click somewhere else.
Both Facebook's and Twitter's search act like this. It displays recent search for enough time for you to move your finger/mouse to click it, then loads general results, like trending and suggestions. Waiting for the AJAX response to come back before displaying anything should be the norm.
I remember Starbucks was doing it for their mobile app about two years ago, sacrificing security for a "better"/faster UX. It's one of those things that you think "No one would be dumb enough to do this", only to be surprised by the fact that a big player has been doing it for a while.
Thought so too, but the timelines don't match, since she mentions stuff about Xmas.
Still, my jaw dropped a few more cm after reading those sentences, and believe me, it was already on the floor after reading the medium piece.
Totally agree on the UX. Example: 99.8% of the openings I've seen on their job board in the past 4 months all redirect to an outside board, usually Indeed. Actually, I only remember finishing an application inside LI once, which begs the question: why aren't companies posting their jobs inside LI? It almost looks like they scrape posts from Indeed. Besides, one of the Premium features is "Featured Applicant: Move to the top of recruiters' applicant lists", which is basically worthless if no one actually applies through LI.
There are many holes in LI's UX which I'm hoping will get fixed after the purchase is complete. I just hope it doesn't break as Skype did (you're not the only one to feel that). Even though it's Microsoft, it's not Ballmer's MSFT anymore, so I'm hopeful. And if it does, there'll be a big gap for some other company to fill.
Remember the U2 fiasco, when Apple decided to break into your computer and push their new album through iTunes? It seems like whenever Apple decides to take control of your files, shit happens.
Back in the day, I tried to use iTunes for a while when I bought my iPod. One of the first things that it asked me was to take control of my music, as it would reorganize it by itself. I agreed, but tested it first with a small sample. When I saw the mess it had done to the way I organized my music, specially with the files' names, I backed out of the auto-organize option and preached heavily against it to everyone I knew.
I learned my lesson: never let whatever service control your files. And always, ALWAYS have backup. Remember: The answer to life, the universe and how many backups you should keep of your stuff is 42.
While the U2 fiasco was a bad move, I don't think that "break into your computer" is a fair characterization of what they did. They added it to your available downloads and, depending on your sync settings, it was downloaded to devices.
I'm not a huge fan of having my media managed by the companies I buy hardware from, but when I found a user's manual document on my Kindle I didn't consider it 'getting hacked' by them.
A more appropriate analogy than a user guide would be finding Fifty Shades of Grey or Harry Potter on your kindle one day, because Amazon did a deal and decided you should have it, or perhaps having your copy of 1984 erased because of copyright violations. ++ungood.
A user manual is expected on a new device, having media on your device added and deleted by a corporation on their whim is not so pleasant, mostly because it makes their view of your true relation to them apparent.
Fair enough. "break into your computer" does sound like getting hacked by them, which wasn't technically true, at least from what I know. Thanks for pointing that out.
Apple fundamentally does not understand software. A shame, as the software, really, was their original special sauce with the Mac 128k and beyond.
Today, however, the company really doesn't understand how to make, maintain, or market software. It sees software as a way to spread their control of their hardware further into your life. It's going to be the death of Apple, mark my words.
I worked with a Google engineer once and he offered me advice as I was considering buying a new phone, namely the HTC One: "Phone manufacturers know how to make hardware. Google knows how to make software. When you marry the two with both knowing their place in the world, things work out. When one tries to make what the other does, you get crappy stuff on top of your system. Stick to vanilla Android, man."
Having said that, I see Apple more as a hardware manufacturer than as a software one. You don't hear Jony Ive and his seductive British accent passionately talking about iOS or OSX as many times as he does about new hardware. It doesn't see software in the same way it sees hardware.
Still, I can't complain about Apple offering free OSX upgrades, including major ones, for quite some time now and also managing to maintain backward compatibility for a rather large span of devices (my early 2011 MBP still flows nicely with OSX El Cap).
Usually with iPhone/iPod Video upgrades, getting the latest version of iOS with an older device can significantly degrade performance. (And I'm sure it's the same with iPads.)
At least on a Macbook you can reinstall the operating system, but an iPhone 4 is stuck like that.
El Crapitan has so many problems it's ridiculous. They broke not only all kinds of Open Source software with their overly paranoid system protection, but also a bunch of hardware by messing up the USB drivers. There are now tons of musical instruments, Arduinos, and other USB devices that don't work with El Crapitan. Apple's response was: ... there was no response.
Us hardware manufacturers are still looking for a fix. Our customers are angry at us and blaming us, and we can't do anything. There's no way for our customers to even tell Apple what's wrong, either.
My HTC One has gotten dreadfully slower since release from Android releases. I don't think it's exclusive to iPhones - in fact I think android phones are more prone to it.
I guess I'm also lucky to have the latest 6.0.1 on my Nexus 5 running smoothly. Yes, it did get a bit slower after some updates, enough for me to notice it, but considering it shipped with 4.4, I'm still pretty happy with it.
But you're right: it's definitely not exclusive to iPhones. Planned obsolescence, some would argue.
If you’re a great software designer, you probably want to work for a company that says, “Software is in our DNA.” A company where the CEO gets up on their hind legs at every all-hands meeting and announces “Our success depends upon shipping the world’s greatest software designs.”
Why would you want to go work for a company where at every such all-hands, you have to sit through executive after executive talking about their hardware logistics prowess, and their hardware design prowess, and their hardware margins numbers, and so on?
It would be the same thing going to work at Google. Here you are, the Jony Ive of software design, being told that the stock price depends upon the math that drives ad click-through.
I recall a softare designer few years back publicly rage-quitting Google because Google didn’t believe in design, they wanted to A/B test everything in the belief that you could hill-climb to a good-enough result. It was almost as if they believed that human designers subtracted from design rather than created it.
Whether you agree or disagree, why go to work at a company that thinks what you do is a distraction or even an outright harm to their main product?
Yes, it's difficult. It's less that Apple needs to hire a famous designer and more that it has to give a designer (there are many badasses in-house) serious authority. Apple has to realize it's lost the software leadership that it used to take pride in for that to happen.
> I recall a softare designer few years back publicly rage-quitting Google because they didn’t believe in design, they wanted to A/B test everything. It was almost as if they believed that human designers subtracted from design.
I am convinced that an A/B testing algorithm error is responsible for Google Maps.
I know Google have scads of data about how people use maps. I can't understand how they get from all that data to the product which can be incredibly frustrating to use.
A/B testing data is only as good as the samples provided. They may have done wonderful A/B testing, but that the alternative designs were just so bad that the current design version made it through ;)
If they did, they'd quit shortly after learning that, if they wanted to move around inside Apple, like to a different group, they have to interview and be evaluated just like an outsider. Apple is so secretive, people cannot even change groups.
One of the worst widely distributed and used pieces of software. There are many, many, crappies, buggier, pieces of software out there; it's just that nobody has to use them.
And it wants you to be a consumer badly.
The case described here, is of a producer/artist loosing unique works due to a consumer software rationale, that assumes that all in the reach of the software is not yours and thereby at whims of the license givers/maintainers.
Also Apple only begrudgingly supports Enterprise customers with their iDevices. It seems like it should be a huge opportunity for Microsoft to make a dent with their mobile platform but they decided to focus on the consumer market as well.
Defense in depth is a good thing as well. In my case, the first line of defense would be ZFS snapshots on my homebuilt NAS. If malware scrozzles my NAS, a rollback to the last snapshot can be a quick way to fix it.
Other systems get backed up to the NAS, and the NAS drives are periodically backed up onto a second ZFS pool that is normally kept physically offline.
I've survived for 48 years eating too much steak, drinking too much beer, and exercising too little. In your opinion, does this give us useful information that tells us that I should keep doing these things, because obviously, I will live forever?
