Coping With What Apple’s Become
Apple software’s gotten so aggressively stupid that I just don’t trust it any more, not even with utterly unremarkable, basic tasks
Yeah.
Imagine an Apple Car.
Then get the hell off the streets!
Yo, Tim Cook!
Previously here:
Filed under Apple: The Company
Over the weekend, I listened to an MP3 conversion of a talk at Google by Christopher Bonanos.
He wrote Instant: The Story of Polaroid.
It’s difficult to imagine such a massive company hitting the rocks and sinking so quickly.
But consumer videotape was the rock that sunk Polaroid like a corporate Titanic.
Filed under Apple: The Company, Books To Check, Digital Overthrow, Google, Reference, Video, Writer
According to Amazon, the update to its Fire OS mobile operating system, Fire OS 5 (code-named “Bellini”), will introduce a “Blue Shade” feature that uses specialized filters to limit users’ exposure to blue light, which has been shown to not only prolong the time it takes to fall asleep, but also delay REM sleep and reduce our levels of alertness the following day.
With “Blue Shade” enabled, the tablet will instead offer warm color filters and the ability to lower the display brightness to an “ultra-low” level for comfortable nighttime reading, Amazon says, even in a dark room.
You’ll also be able to further fine-tune the color settings to your personal preferences, while the device continues to adjust the color filtering as you do so to limit the blue wavelength light. The feature will be available to switch on or off with just a tap from a new quick setting after the Fire OS update is installed.
Meanwhile, in Apple Land: Apple shuts down iPhone and iPad screen brightness adjusting app Flux
f.lux cannot ship an iOS App using the Documented APIs, because the APIs we use are not there. In the last 5 years, we have had numerous conversations with Apple about our product and what would be required to make it work with iOS.
Hey, Apple, get with it. Bluelight filtering is important. I’ve seen this for myself: Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 8.0: Bluelight Filter Test.
My advice? Think of this as an ADA issue and get to work on the needed APIs and issue them to developers ASAP. Make people happy.
Previously here:
Filed under Apple: The Company, iOS
The Semiotics of Apple Watch Glancing
From a fashion standpoint, I can’t imagine the Apple Watch being more than a one-season hot ticket that lands in a dead jewelry drawer once the user gets frustrated with the upkeep. The Apple Watch requires an awful lot of fiddling and tweaking to get its functionality tuned just so. The initial set-up process is time consuming and not well defined enough to show progress. Those giving the Apple Watch as a Christmas gift would be well served to open the package and set things up in advance in the way they might assemble a bicycle the night before. Installing apps is a hit or miss proposition with some apps installing automatically after an update to the corresponding iOS version and some not, regardless of the setting on your watch.
Apple used to be famous for its attention to detail. To the “microscopic” level of pixels, never mind just the “macroscopic” level of UI/UX.
So many goddammed things are wrong in the Apple Universe these days, that I’m beginning to think the passing of Steve Jobs really has doomed that company. Oh, it won’t be a fast fall. But something will happen.
Apple now occupies the Nokia Position — they’re not the best, it’s just that all their competitors are worse.
I’d like to see Apple be the best again, dammit, because that’s what the brand used to mean. Why Jobs wanted it to exist.
Filed under Apple: The Company
How Apple Is Giving Design A Bad Name
Gone are the fundamental principles of good design: discoverability, feedback, recovery, and so on. Instead, Apple has, in striving for beauty, created fonts that are so small or thin, coupled with low contrast, that they are difficult or impossible for many people with normal vision to read. We have obscure gestures that are beyond even the developer’s ability to remember. We have great features that most people don’t realize exist.
Filed under Apple: The Company, iOS, Quoted, Reference
Apple sees iPhone sales grow 22.1% to 48M in Q4 2015, but iPad sales declined 19.5%
Those considering buying iPads, however, were likely trying to figure out if they want the new iPad Pro or even the iPad mini 4. Tablet sales in general haven’t been doing well, a trend that Apple has not been able to counter with the iPad. In fact, iPad sales have been falling for more than a year now, and this is the first quarter Apple has sold under 10 million iPads since Q4 2011.
Boldfaced emphasis added by me.
The iPad was supposed to usher in a new computing paradigm, a new way for people to interact with a device. In fact, it was supposed to be something as world-changing as the original Macintosh.
That revolution seems to have come to an abrupt halt.
I can understand Android tablet sales plummeting. The market was flooded with tablets that were low-cost and absolute shit — thank you for your greed and contempt for your customers, Borders Books, Best Buy, and Wal-Mart — but the iPad still falling?
I think at this point it’s fair to point the finger at another factor.
Filed under Apple: The Company
If this is paywalled, drop the title into Google search to bypass:
Apple Speeds Up Electric-Car Work
Apple, Inc. is accelerating efforts to build an electric car, designating it internally as a “committed project” and setting a target ship date for 2019, according to people familiar with the matter.
They should call it the Pippin.
Ahem.
Seriously, has Apple gone off the rails?
This is a product that could lead to the death of people.
There’s no doing half-assed unfinished 1.0 shit with a vehicle.
Apple has so much software to fix right now that getting distracted like this is just shameful.
Filed under Apple: The Company, Stupid
Thinking about all the contortions that are necessary for getting files into and out of an iOS device, it hit me: Apple intends to market the iPad Pro to corporations.
It goes up against the Microsoft Surface and, well, that’s just about it. Unless you include notebooks.
How long will corporate customers put up with the lack of a filesystem?
With lack of accessing hardwired mass storage?
Filed under Apple: The Company, iOS
What a frikkin difference in images!
Filed under Android, Apple: The Company, Google, iOS
Mike Cane’s xBlog 