On Thursday morning in New York, Phil Schiller outlined a number of problems in the current state of the American education system. He cited the low graduation rates of high school students, and noted that the United States wasn’t in the international top ten for reading, math or science. One of challenges, he noted, was keeping kids engaged in an era of constant entertainment. Apple, he said, could overcome this hurdle with three enhancements to the technology they currently ship and, as he pointed out, is already in use by millions of students.

iBooks 2: Textbooks

Textbooks are loathed by students and teachers alike. In the last century, the rate of scientific and historical discovery ensures that textbooks are out of date the minute they are printed. They aren’t interactive, and cannot present anything animated. This becomes evident the moment anything living is analysed. Static diagrams cannot represent these dramatic changes and movements effectively.

Apple’s solution is to provide students with digital textbooks filled with animations, live information and interviews. This isn’t unprecedented, as Kyle Rose notes:

This isn’t exciting because Apple’s the first company to create worthwhile digital textbooks. That honor goes to Inkling. It’s exciting because Apple’s the only company that is in a position to completely change how we learn, and iBooks certainly has the power to do so.

Apple is putting these digital textbooks on devices that students often already own, in a way that’s convenient and accessible. Aside from Amazon, nobody else has this level of content distribution, and Amazon isn’t doing this.

One can gush at length about the new possibilities offered by digital textbooks. I highly recommend watching the keynote or buying one of the books to experience it. Though if you’re concerned about price, you are in for a shock. There are a number of free samples on the store, and the full textbooks are only $14.99. Fifteen dollars for a textbook. That’s an unheard-of deal.

Of course there are drawbacks with this just-launched product. Textbooks are only available in the US, for now, and they’ve only announced high school books, and therefore only high school pricing. Expect post-secondary books to be more expensive, but to significantly undercut the price of the physical books by a similarly-huge margin. On a curious note, despite the use of the iBooks application, there are no page-turn animations. Rather, the pages slide left-to-right like a PDF. I suspect Apple was aching to remove their interpretation of textbooks from the physical version as much as possible.

But these limitations are quickly forgotten as you discover how simple it is to highlight a section, how quick it is to jump to a specific concept, and how effortless studying becomes. Apple has created a marvellous and delightful product from the oft-loathed textbook. Welcome to the new education.

iBooks Author

Along with the revamped iBooks application for iOS, Apple unveiled a curious and controversial counterpart for Mac OS X. It’s an iBooks-authouring application, but it isn’t quite that straightforward.

At first glance, iBooks Author could be mistaken an addition to the iWork suite. It is something of a hybrid of Keynote and Dashcode, from Apple’s developer tools. And because it’s free, I highly recommend you grab it from the Mac App Store and take it for a spin.

There are a few quirks with the app. The most notable one that I’ve discovered is that it’s set up only to produce the highly interactive books, and is therefore an inadequate self-publishing solution for those that would prefer to publish a more text-heavy novel or short story. Amazon does a much better job with their Kindle Singles. There’s also no option to embed fonts. John Gruber hopes that it’s just a 1.0 omission, but I suspect that it’s a licensing issue. iBooks Author is a free app, and anyone can publish a book to the iBookstore. Sorting out potentially thousands of font licenses would grind the submission process to a halt.

But the biggest issue with the app comes in the form of its end user license agreement (EULA). Dan Wineman calls it “audacious” and “unprecedented”, referring to this section:

If you charge a fee for any book or other work you generate using this software (a “Work”), you may only sell or distribute such Work through Apple (e.g., through the iBookstore) and such distribution will be subject to a separate agreement with Apple.

That is to say that any book created through iBooks Author may only be sold for more than free through the iBookstore. You’re allowed to export and distribute it in other formats provided you do not charge for it. The EULA’s control over the product of the app that is what’s outrageous, as Wineman explains:

Apple, in this EULA, is claiming a right not just to its software, but to its software’s output. It’s akin to Microsoft trying to restrict what people can do with Word documents, or Adobe declaring that if you use Photoshop to export a JPEG, you can’t freely sell it to Getty.

I wholly agree that this is Apple overstepping its legal boundaries. They wanted to gain as much traction in the market as possible, and the quickest way of doing that is to release the software for free. But Apple needs to protect its investment and take its 30% cut. In the end, it’s controlling in a way that no other software is.

iTunes U App

After Apple had concluded the above announcements, the keynote felt like it was going to be over. Yet Schiller stood on stage and announced that there was something else that they had been working on to enhance education. Eddy Cue presented an app that I feel is one of the most beautiful they’ve ever shipped.

iTunes U is Apple’s free educational lecture collection on the iTunes Store. Since launching in 2007, Cue announced that it had become the world’s largest selection of free university courses. Conversely, I have treated iTunes U as a curiosity in the store. Today, Apple injected a little bit of life into it with their iTunes U app.

It is — quite simply — beautiful. It looks like iBooks made out of mahogany and brass. Everything looks rich, nobel and musty. Downloading a course is a joy, as the app bundles all the materials needed into the file structure. They’re not necessarily included in the initial download, but are made available to stream as needed. Every course gets broken down into a series of lectures, topics or themes, and the app connects with the new textbooks in iBooks where appropriate. It’s an exquisite experience, and one I cannot believe is provided for free.

The New Education

Nothing above will be remembered if Apple fails on its core premise of creating an education experience for the twenty-first century. This depends on wide acceptance, and could come to a grinding halt if any of the textbook publishers decide that it isn’t worth it. It’s good that Apple has the balls to disrupt the market in this way.

Though Schiller did not mention it, the students that have a higher likelihood of doing poorly in school or dropping out altogether are those from low-income families, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. This presents an unusual problem for Apple. The students that can afford — and probably already own — an iPad are higher-income students. This is an issue that Business Insider raised in their decidedly awful response to today’s announcements. If they did the math using their own figures, however, the iPad ranks favourably.

Depending on the school, a full courseload is anywhere from 4-8 classes per semester, so for this example, 6 classes will suffice. Business Insider cites a typical textbook price of $75 and notes Apple’s maximum price for high school books is $15. Therefore, the first term will cost $450 for traditional textbooks, or $90 for Apple’s textbooks plus $500 for an iPad, for a total of $590. The traditional books lose their advantage in the second term, however, as it’s another $450 for those, for a total of $900. The student with the iPad is only going to pay another $90, for a year-total of $680.

This is, of course, a hypothetical example. A student probably won’t need textbooks in every class they’re taking. Furthermore, it’s unlikely that a high school student will be purchasing all of their books; instead, they’ll likely be borrowing them from the school’s library. However, the burden that shared textbooks place on a school is obvious. Students can’t mark the books up because they don’t own them. The school must purchase enough books for an entire class, or several classes, and a number of these will need to be replaced at the end of each term.

To maximise their success, Apple has offered schools an easy way to purchase a large number of digital textbooks. They could then distribute the redemption codes on the first day of class. It has a cost advantage, too: for the price of a single physical textbook, a school could purchase 6 of the digital textbooks. For some schools, this will be a wise investment. For others — likely those with much lower budgets — paper textbooks will prevail. They don’t have the wiggle room to experiment.

For what it’s worth, I hope that this works out. This won’t just benefit Apple; rather, it will change the textbook industry permanently. It’s one that’s desperate for disruption.

— January 20, 2012

I posted earlier about Google’s new Android Design Guidelines. This is a great guide to help developers understand the platform and all its own peculiarities, especially when an app is developed for multiple platforms. I disagree with a number of these conventions, but that’s another topic entirely. The guide itself is well-written, though I have some thoughts and comments for some of the points.

The Themes page:

Android provides three system themes that you can choose from when building apps for Ice Cream Sandwich:

• Holo Light
• Holo Dark
• Holo Light with dark action bars

Pick the system theme that best matches the needs and design aesthetics for your app.

Like Apple’s infamous brushed metal look, the Holo Light with dark action bars theme is an ill-defined third choice. There seem to be no guidelines on its use. The Light and Dark themes are easy enough to interpret, as the former is for text-based apps — the Gmail app is shown as an example. The Dark theme is clearly geared towards multimedia and utility applications. Google uses Settings as their example, but Photos also uses this theme. They’ve chosen Google Talk, however, to represent the dark action bars variant of Holo Light, and I don’t understand the context of its use.

From the Metrics and Grids section:

Touchable UI components are generally laid out along 48 [display pixel] units.

This is much clearer than iOS’ layout.

The section on icon design is decidedly less clear, especially in the Launcher icon style. There’s an ill-considered mix of photorealistic icons, ones that look like clipart, and others that are effectively flat. Nothing lines up. The colours are inconsistent. This makes any view with those icons look cluttered and messy.

The App Structure page reinforces this system-wide inconsistency:

Google Books’ detail view is all about replicating the experience of reading an actual book. The page-flip animation reinforces that notion.

This counters what Matias Duarte said when interviewed by Josh Topolsky:

“Right now if you look at all of these applications that are designed in this real-objecty, faux wood paneling, faux brushed metal, faux jelly button kind of thing… if you step back and you really look at them, they look kind of juvenile. They’re not photorealistic, they’re illustrations.”

He’s on a roll now. Clearly Matias has spent a lot of time thinking about what he doesn’t like. “If you look back at the web, people did the same thing. All these cartoony things hanging off a page. If you tried that today, people would be laughing, unless you were doing it in a kitsch, poking-fun-at-yourself, retro art way.”

He then goes on to say that taking the Microsoft approach of stark minimalism is too constraining, but in the opposite direction. The threshold for Android is clearly somewhere along those lines, but what Google is recommending is clearly more cartoonish than the actual UI that Apple ships, and which Duarte called “cartoony”.

From the Writing Style page:

Be friendly. [This d]ialog that appears when an application crashes [is] confusing and annoying — “Sorry” just rubs salt in the wound.

I don’t know when it became trendy to make error messages cuddly, but it’s irritating. Good on Google for clarifying this. On the other hand, I’m surprised Android apps display any crash dialogue at all. It isn’t 1998 any more; applications have the ability automatically send crash reports.

Speaking of crash messages, Google seems to be unclear on what they intend. On the Writing Style page, they would like developers to be clear, concise and friendly. However, on the Dialogs page, one of the examples notes that “the process com.android.phone has stopped”. How is that friendly?

The Pure Android page cracked me up. It’s clearly an attempt to caution developers that Android is not iOS, and designing for it requires different elements with different conventions. For the most part, it avoids ragging on iOS, but there’s a cute dig on one of the items:

A common pattern on other platforms is the display of right-pointing carets on line items that allow the user to drill deeper into additional content.

Android does not use such indicators on drill-down line items. Avoid them to stay consistent with the platform and in order to not have the user guess as to what the meaning of those carets may be.

But barely-readable sliders and unclear WiFi connection status is not confusing. Got it. Unclear, convoluted difference between back and up? Not a problem. An up arrow that causes a descending action? Perfectly fine.

By the way, what about the reverse, where an application is developed for Android and then ported to iOS? Shouldn’t a Google-developed app adopt the conventions of the platform too? As Alan Zeino points out, this doesn’t seem to be a priority.

I recommend flipping through the entire guide, if only for the use of Hipster Ipsum on many of the pages. It’s too bad these guidelines won’t be enforced. It’s an incredibly well-written and clearly annotated site, but it bears little relevance if these principles don’t gain widespread adoption.

— January 12, 2012

As a Canadian, I’m a bit perplexed as to a number of inconsistencies with Comedy Central’s offerings.

The Daily Show website, for instance, does not stream any video to Canadians. However, we’re still watching the same ads and therefore are contributing to the same revenue stream as American viewers.

The Daily Show website does stream video within Canada when browsed from an iPad. However, it’s only video from the last couple of episodes.

The Daily Show app is available in the Canadian App Store, but does not stream video. This would be okay, except it costs $1.99. Two bucks for a useless app dependent on geography.

The Canadian resource for Daily Show videos has typically been the Comedy Network site (Canadian version of CC), however their archives only extend back two weeks. This becomes problematic when attempting to locate a clip from even a month ago.

Are these problems smaller and independent of each other, or is there a general level of consistency that cannot be maintained across different platforms?

— January 5, 2012

The end of every year is filled with top ten lists, a canned story about champagne and a certain amount of sentimentality. In the spirit of that, these are seventeen records I really enjoyed this year, each with a short summary of my thoughts.

Bon Iver — Bon Iver

From a Wisconsin log cabin to woking with Kanye West, Justin Vernon made an significant cultural leap in the last few years. Bon Iver separated the band from the reputation they’d built with For Emma, Forever Ago without removing what is quintessentially theirs. Mellow, beautiful and haunting, Bon Iver’s latest effort is just so.

Ego/Mirror — Burial & Four Tet feat. Thom Yorke

Burial and Four Tet have previously collaborated, and each has remixed a Thom Yorke song. The three working together produced just two eight-minute songs, but they’re both tremendous. Ego sounds most influenced by Burial, whereas Mirror edges closer to Four Tet’s sound, but both have the immediacy and depth of their distinct atmosphere mellowed with the addition of Yorke’s falsetto, hushed vocals.

Neverendless — Cave

I must confess that I’ve only listened to Neverendless twice in full. It’s exquisite, but like fudge, it’s hard to consume great amounts in a single sitting. Curious noodling combines with drones to produce something like Wilco, The American Analog Set and Brian Eno in a blender. Strangely satisfying.

Instrumentals — Clams Casino

Clams Casino’s mixtape is as significant as DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing… was 15 years ago. Both were produced using similar plunderphonic methods, but whereas DJ Shadow used physical records acquired from the dusty depths of his local store, Clams Casino chose Limewire and arbitrary searches. In many cases, he wasn’t even aware of the song he was sampling from, but his collaging of these pseudonymous sounds is fascinating. A tremendous listen.

Cults 7″ — Cults

I chose Cults’ EP rather than the full length because I think it’s a tighter group of songs with far less filler. The EP has their poor-pun-intended cult hit Go Outside, along with two other playful, lo-fi songs. Very simple, yet supremely joyful.

Looping State of Mind — The Field

Super simple, often unbelievably repetitive, yet satisfying in the same way that the Caves record is. Warm-feeling chill-inducing tracks lay here. Can something this deep have such an ostensibly opaque surface? Whatever it is, it works.

Nostalgia, Ultra — Frank Ocean

The new king of smooth hip-hop is here. This is another mixtape on the list, yet it’s ever so good. Novacane is probably the most recognisable track from the album, but it’s all worth a listen. Bitches Talkin’ and Songs for Women is a sly, witty and elegant one-two punch. The former features a sample of Radiohead’s Optimistic, with a woman grumbling about Ocean’s repetitive over-playing of it, and in the latter, Ocean relents that his women can listen to whatever they want. Since I also have that choice, I’ll keep listening to this record.

Deep Politics — Grails

A few years ago, post rock became the thing that every new band was doing. Very few did it well, but nobody’s done post rock this well or this cooly for quite some time, likely because Deep Politics isn’t strictly post rock. It’s a molten, ever-changing mix of a wide variety of influences, culminating in an exciting, fizzing kind of record.

Watch the Throne — Jay-Z & Kanye West

I know, I know: Watch the Throne isn’t the revolutionary, game-changing record everyone was predicting. But it’s an hour-and-a-bit of fun. It’s grotesque, ostentatious and vulgar, sure, but it’s so self-aware that those attributes are almost a benefit. There are a couple of filler songs, and I didn’t care for Niggas in Paris as much as everyone else did, but it was one of my favourites from 2011 because of Otis. In under three minutes, Jay and Kanye spit verses back and forth like the most amazing rap battle you’ve heard. Other notable tracks include No Church In the Wild and Illest Motherfucker Alive, the latter of which is probably the closest rap has gotten to sounding like it’s been dipped in gold, covered in diamonds and served on a bed of caviar.

Destroyed — Moby

Destroyed has, unfortunately, the usual three or four throwaway songs that are standard for just about all Moby records. But somehow they make more sense when the record is listened to as Moby recommends: very late at night when almost everyone else in your big city is asleep. It is a record of the night, of loneliness and isolation, and yet doesn’t sound dreary. On the contrary, it sounds hopeful and excited. That is until you get to Stella Maris, which is probably the point where you will start remembering those you’ve loved and lost. But all is mended in your heart with the arrival of Lacrimae a short time later. Give solitude a spin.

Days — Real Estate

As if you didn’t already have enough sixties-throwback indie pop in your library, Days was released this year. It’s a really great interpretation of the genre, if nothing spectacularly original. It’s worth a listen on a lazy Saturday, when the sun is shining and with a glass of iced mint tea. For some reason or another, that combination works well with this record.

Inni — Sigur Rós

Sigur Rós released their first live album this year, yet it was also their second performance film. These guys are known to eschew the conventional approach and forge their own path. I’m a massive fan of live records, as they often allow subtle details and nuances in an artist’s music to surface. Inni is a spectacular double disc performance, showcasing the band’s career so far in a most intimate way. I haven’t seen the film yet, but I hear it’s also excellent.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo — Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross

Three hours of a sparse tundra-esque soundtrack spanning three discs shouldn’t be listenable. For some reason or another, this is. It is Reznor’s signature sound, but it isn’t Nine Inch Nails, nor The Social Network. It is its own entity. Like Inni, I haven’t seen the corresponding film yet, but with Fincher, Craig and Mara, it can’t go wrong, especially not when aided by such a haunting, cold soundtrack. If you don’t want three hours of atmospheric soundtrack, at least grab Karen O’s cover of Immigrant Song, and the other cover, Is Your Love Strong Enough?, as performed by Reznor’s other band How to Destroy Angels. It’s the right thing to do.

Within and Without — Washed Out

Cute and charming as only Washed Out can do, Within and Without is also essential for that proverbial lazy Real Estate Saturday. I didn’t find it to revolutionise Washed Out’s past work, but it builds on that history with a delicate balance. Warm and engaging like so many records this year, but with a suave sense of style few can match.

House of Balloons — The Weeknd

What would you do if you had a voice like Michael Jackson’s at age 20? You’d make one hell of an R & B record. I did a full review of the Weeknd’s Balloons trilogy and as I said, I thoroughly enjoyed all three. But House of Balloons is still the strongest and is still the one I reach for. I can’t wait to hear what happens next.

The Year of Hibernation — Youth Lagoon

What do you get if you bury vaguely nostalgic lyrics and tinny bedroom recordings under gobs of reverb? You get most modern indie pop, actually. Youth Lagoon chose this well-trodden path, but his effort is one of the better ones. Astonishingly simple production with the requisite Tumblr-ready artwork? By the indie pop playbook, yes.

Conatus — Zola Jesus

Sounding kind of like the music of Nine Inch Nails hooked up with Florence and the Machine, the latest Zola Jesus record is a triumph. Supremely engaging and dangerous melodies combine with ethereal vocals and smothered in echo. The result is strangely beautiful and beautifully strange.

If you can’t grab all seventeen of these records, you should at least collect the following playlist. Songs are available on iTunes or, in the case of The Weeknd and Clams Casino, in a free mixtape.

1. Svefn-G-Englar – Sigur Rós
2. Hikkomori – Zola Jesus
3. Novacane – Frank Ocean
4. Before – Washed Out
5. Afternoon – Youth Lagoon
6. Municipality – Real Estate
7. The Curse – Cults
8. Towers – Bon Iver
9. Adam Roberts – Cave
10. Ego – Burial & Four Tet feat. Thom Yorke
11. After – Moby
12. Otis – Jay-Z & Kanye West
13. Loft Music – The Weeknd
14. Corridors of Power – Grails
15. Motivation – Clams Casino
16. Then It’s White – The Field
17. Is Your Love Strong Enough? – How to Destroy Angels

— December 31, 2011

I’ve spent the past week with friends and family, enjoying some great baking and coffee while playing Scattergories and giving Acquire a try. It’s a comfortable environment worthy of contemplation. As I was drifting into a deep slumber in the wee hours of this morning, this atmosphere paid off with a couple of short pieces of writing. One will be published next year, but the other follows.

I’m not embarrassed to admit that I’ve never made a New Year’s resolution. As the clock strikes midnight on Saturday night, I will not be thinking of a single, specific way to change the life I’ve built. Where I am at is not nirvana, but it is a fossil layer in my constant evolution.

If you’ve made a however-small change to your life in the last few months, you are proof that the change of a date means nothing in the big scope. It is an arbitrary time in which many make the choice to give up smoking while improving family relations. The page is flipped in your Gregorian, but aside from being inebriated, you are no different than you were the day prior.

The priorities that are most valuable to you are those which you will act upon. You don’t need numerical change to motivate yourself. The changes to your life you will be making on January 1 don’t have greater significance then than they do now.

— December 28, 2011

Vlad Savov wrote an editorial on The Verge rightly criticising Samsung for their stubborn and crass lack of support in upgrading year-old devices.

Earlier today, Samsung revealed that it won’t update the Galaxy S, its most successful smartphone to date, to the latest version of Android. You might shrug and dismiss that as just more evidence of Android’s inherent fragmentation or the need for buyers to beware, but I take grave issue with it. This is a decision based not on technical constraints, as Samsung would have you believe, but on hubris.

The Galaxy S, as Savov notes, has sold nearly 20 million units worldwide. It was released just last year, and already Samsung can’t be bothered to upgrade it to Ice Cream Sandwich. Savov takes issue with this, noting that “Samsung considers its relationship with the consumer to be concluded the moment the sale is completed,” a decision that is counter to that of Google, Apple and Microsoft. Those three names all consider software to be upgradeable, for the most part, even after it’s sold. Apple and Microsoft charge to upgrade major versions of their desktop operating system, but not for their phones.

Android exists in a netherworld of somewhat murky distinction between Google’s role, the hardware vendor’s role, and the role of the carrier. All three have a say in whether a device gets upgraded. While it’s true that Google doesn’t really care one way or another if a user upgrades, the hardware company wants their custom software on it, and the carrier would prefer if you didn’t remove their preinstalled apps that nobody ever uses.

This post was picked up by Matthew Panzarino at The Next Web, who makes two very important observations. The first regards the nature of Android as a platform:

Samsung has no ecosystem or platform of its own. In fact, it can be argued that Android itself isn’t even a platform, it’s a collection of tools that allow companies to build a platform.

This is absolutely true, as far as the user’s perspective is concerned. They wouldn’t articulate it nearly this way, but as far as many are concerned, the OS on the phones of different manufacturers is distinct.

Panzarino also notes that this isn’t just Samsung:

[I]t’s systemic to Android as a whole. The makers of Android hardware see little benefit in updating even devices that are less than a year old. And, though I think it’s a punk move, I don’t blame them. There is little to no return to be had.

As I wrote a while back, Android hardware manufacturers aren’t using Android because it’s the best OS out there, but because it’s the best that they can get their hands on. It ticks all the boxes they care about: it allows customisation, it’s free to implement, and there’s the freedom for carriers to negotiate and meddle with it. Why would Samsung care deeply about an OS that they have no immediate allegiance to ^[1]?

Marco Arment noticed Panzarino’s post, and offered up his take:

Nobody in the Android ecosystem — not Google, not manufacturers of Android devices, and certainly not the gadget blogs that review and promote them — seems to care about long-term user satisfaction, even when “long-term” is as short as a two-year smartphone contract.

He also wonders if the Android user base feels any loyalty to the platform, or if they’ll reciprocate the uncaring and ostracising characteristics displayed by the hardware manufacturers. According to research published by GFK last month, 84% of iPhone users will buy another iPhone, but only 60% of Android customers plan on being loyal to their platform. I wonder if these numbers will be different now that a significant number of customers have been excluded from a major update.

All this comes as Chris Ziegler published a visualisation of most (but not all) of the Android phones HTC has released in the past year. He notes that, among other problems with having such a large quantity of phones:

[M]ore SKUs means more firmwares, and more versions of those firmwares. Each of those versions needs the care and feeding of an engineering team, and there are only so many engineers to go around. If a particular model is unpopular — which is more likely when you’re releasing a countless array of them — long-term support becomes an even greater risk.

To summarise: manufacturers make a lot of phone models which they are unwilling to upgrade or maintain. I simply cannot think of a reason why this is good for customers in the long term.

1. While it’s true that Samsung and Google have their Nexus partnership, the rest of Samsung’s lineup isn’t tied to Android. If another OS were to come along that worked better for Samsung, they’d have few qualms about switching their lineup to it. [↑]

— December 23, 2011

Apple has a really great grip on what makes for a superb user interface. It’s rare for them to mess up, especially in a way that mars usability. I feel that the “Store” button in iOS 5′s Music application^[1] is an egregious example of one of these rare screw-ups. I see the problem as two-fold.

The first scope of issues with the button is its placement. It is located in a position of the UI that in almost every other instance means “return to the previous level” (the exceptions being Contacts and Calendar, which use it as the place for the refresh control). In Music, it also means this in just about every screen, until you get to a top-level screen — something that you’ve selected from the bottom toolbar. Artists, for instance.

There is no upper level from Artists. Albums are lower in the hierarchy; songs and playlists are lower still. Artists is what music in iTunes is sorted by, by default. Yet Music presents the Store button as the next level of hierarchy. In a way, this makes sense: music is sorted by artist, and music comes from the iTunes Store. But you weren’t thinking that, were you? That’s because it isn’t really the next level. There simply isn’t one, and shoehorning the Store into that position is awkward at best.

To be fair, iBooks does have a Store button, as does Newsstand. But the iBookstore is on the “back” of your shelf, whereas the Store button in Newsstand and Music sends the user to an entirely different application. It isn’t as big of an issue in Newsstand, because that’s presented on the home screen, akin to a folder. But Music is presented as its own app, and there isn’t another button in the “go back a level” position anywhere else on the iPhone that sends the user to a different application.

To be fair, the iTunes Store has a “Library” button that will send the user back to Music, but it’s on the other side of the toolbar. It’s in a logical place, if we use the “iTunes store is the next level of hierarchy after Artists” screwed-up brand of logic.

These problems would be excusable if the button had a point, but as far as I can figure out, it doesn’t. Music is where you go to listen to music; the purple iTunes icon is the one you tap on if you want to buy music. I mentioned iBooks before, which is similar in that it has a local library and the iBookstore. But that’s an anomaly because the store is integrated into the iBooks app (not to mention that the “Store” button is located on the opposite side). Its only point, so far as I can tell, is to capture stray taps.

I suppose I’m less irritated by the idea that the button is there, but that it sends me away from the application I was using. I think that’s the biggest error. It has a high potential to be accidentally activated, it momentarily confuses the user in the event of an accidental selection and generally impairs usability ^[2]. If Apple so desperately wants traffic to the iTunes Store from Music, they might consider placing the Store view on the “back” of the app. It would be dramatically less jarring. For now, it’s a dumb place for an unnecessary button in a way that creates user confusion.

1. I’m using iOS 5 as a bit of a shorthand, as this only affects the iPhone and iPod touch. The Store button is also present in Videos, but that’s less of a concern because it has a flatter hierarchy. [↑]
2. Yes, I filed a radar, number 10529892. Please duplicate it if you share my concern. [↑]

— December 5, 2011

Felix Salmon published an article yesterday on Wired’s website in which he argues that Apple customers are both cheap and willing to pay too much for a better experience. It’s a pretty shitty article, and I’m nearly certain it’s linkbait, but let’s roll in the mud and see what turds we can dig up.

Back when Apple sold widgets, things were easy: you paid through the nose for your widget, and then you were happy.

Typical Apple customers buy expensive things and are happy to do so. Keep that in mind.

But now Apple makes mobile devices like iPhones and iPads, an that means it has no choice but to get into bed with the much-hated wireless companies. It tries to control the experience as best it can — but people still end up being faced with ludicrous charges like $30 a month for text messaging.

$30 a month for text messaging is ridiculous. To be fair to AT&T, it’s only $20 a month for unlimited text messaging (it’s also $20 per month on Sprint and Verizon, too). Salmon is arguing that the price he’s being charged for a simple feature mars his experience with the phone.

It is indeed possible to get around extortionate wireless charges. Rather than buy a 3G iPad, for instance, you can use one with only WiFi, and then connect it when you’re on the go to a tethered smartphone or some kind of MiFi device.

I thought we were talking about text messaging? Way to change the subject there, Salmon.

It certainly is possible to tether a WiFi iPad to a smartphone, and it’s quite easy. But I’ll get back to that because I want to discuss this text messaging thing first.

And rather than spend lots of money on text messages, you can sign up for Google Voice, and do all your texting with that number. […] Yes, you get to check your text messages on the web, which can be useful — although it’s not that useful. But you also break a lot of things which otherwise work seamlessly in iOS. There’s no MMS, for instance.

This is a paragraph filled with drawbacks of Google Voice. The very next sentence says exactly what you, dear reader, are thinking:

There’s no iMessage.

That’s the stuff. Salmon has spent a great deal of time arguing that text messaging plans suck, and that Google Voice’s implementation of text messaging sucks, and that Google Voice doesn’t have a lot of things that are included in the default iPhone Messages, which sucks. But he fails to mention that iMessage would solve all of these problems until nearly at the end of the article, where he says:

Text-messaging plans are ludicrously expensive, and I support anybody who comes up with a way of avoiding having to pay those bills. (Including, it must be said, Apple, whose iMessage platform, if it catches on, neatly circumvents existing text-messaging systems.)

Precisely. He includes the “if it catches on” caveat, but Apple already includes a way to never pay for text messaging if you have a lot of friends with iOS devices.

But it does seem to me that so long as Apple has to deal with the hated wireless providers, people will always be voluntarily accepting a subpar user experience because they want to save on monthly charges.

The iMessage experience is effectively identical to the text messaging experience, except without the cost. I fail to see his point, unless he’s still griping about Google Voice.

Alright, onto this WiFi/3G iPad thing.

Take the iPad, for instance: I can attest from personal experience that the 3G iPad is just miles better than trying to use a wifi-only iPad with a MiFi. It downloads e-mails automatically, even when you don’t ask it to; you can pull it out of your bag and look up anything you like instantly; there’s no waiting around for the wireless modem to get online and generate its wifi signal; you don’t need to worry about how charged up your MiFi is, or where you left it; you get all the advantages of real GPS; etc etc.

So if you’re frequently outside of places where you have WiFi, a 3G iPad makes more sense. Why not buy one of those if you need your email to receive while your iPad is in your bag?

But the 3G iPad is why people love Apple. And it costs $300 a year over and above the cost of the iPad, which is itself $130 more than the WiFi-only version. There are definitely cheaper ways of getting your iPad online. But you lose a significant amount of elegance and ease of use in the process.

Granted, a 3G iPad is clearly more elegant than tethering, but it’s such a minute difference. It’s one toggle on an iPhone to turn on tethering. If your WiFi-only iPad has already connected to your iPhone, you don’t have to type in the password again, or change any other settings. It’s certainly more cumbersome than having a 3G card in the iPad, but not by much. And once again, it’s a built-in option that doesn’t require the purchase of a MiFi, if you have a smartphone that supports tethering.

Wrap it up, Felix. What’s your big point?

[T]hese techniques are most attractive to people who are tempted by Apple products but can only just afford them, or can’t quite afford them. As it seeks to increase its market share, Apple has to sell its products to more and more of these people, who will often be buying an Apple product for the first time. And the last thing that Apple wants is for its carefully-crafted user experience to be sullied by something as banal as an attempt to avoid text-messaging charges.

So the real problem isn’t poor financial planning, but that Apple and wireless carriers can’t accommodate for these users? I want to be very clear that I’m not setting up some sort of class rivalry — in fact, that’s what Salmon has done throughout his article. But it should be noted that buying an expensive phone with an expensive plan is an expensive prospect, no matter which way you slice it.

Apple has always hated it when its customers have a subpar user experience, but this problem isn’t going to go away: in fact, it’s only going to get worse.

Why? What? How? I am not taking this out of context — Salmon simply doesn’t finish this thought.

To sum up, then: Apple’s customers have traditionally been willing to pay more for a better user experience, but as they produce products of a more mainstream calibre, they risk corrupting their user experience with customers who actually can’t afford their products, and with wireless carriers that charge too much. This is Salmon’s thesis, in a nut.

His article then uses incorrect prices, forgets about built-in workarounds and exaggerates the difficulties that one might find while using these circumventions, all the while ignoring every other manufacturer that faces these same problems. In addition, while the United States may currently be Apple’s biggest market, carriers in Europe and Asia often have much better pricing for wireless plans, and Apple hasn’t fully tapped into those markets.

F for effort, Felix.

Addendum

The always-alert Carter Allen noted on Twitter:

Re: Felix’s piece, a MiFi costs $50/month, minimum. So his “cheaper but worse” argument doesn’t even work mathematically.

And it’s $30 to buy one on a two-year contract. True, the 3G iPad is $130 more than a WiFi-only equivalent model, but the plan is $15-25 per month without any contract at all.

— November 26, 2011

I consider myself something of an advertisement aficionado. That is not to say that I enjoy all ads, but rather that I like the concept of advertising. It’s a blank canvas on which motion graphics, video, music, text and any number of other elements can culminate in an attempt to sell me on a product or service. The thirty-second TV spot is a playful limitation in which an ad firm can experiment.

Apple’s advertising has traditionally been some of the best out there. It has been recognised the world over and hailed as an example of what good advertising looks like. From the iconic “1984″ Superbowl spot (which was more like a very short film) to the “Think Different” campaign, and right through the “Mac vs. PC” ads and the ubiquitous iPod silhouette campaign, Apple is the king of buzz (with the help of TBWA Chiat/Day, of course).

I think Apple’s recent ads have lived up to this precedent. “There’s an app for that” is a phrase oft heard in non-tech circles, for instance. “We Believe” is an ad that isn’t so much regarding the iPad, but Apple itself, and it works marvellously. Recent iPhone ads are also particularly effective, with their shallow depth-of-field creating an air of quality, and the careful framing emphasising the use of speech when communicating with Siri.

A couple of days ago, Apple released a new ad for the iPod touch, and it feels somehow different. It has all of the right elements: the white backdrop, the indie pop soundtrack, a youthful cast and high production values. But something about it is missing. An indescribable x-factor.

Consider some previous iPod touch ads, such as “The Funnest iPod Ever”. It has similar elements, but is immediately more engaging. The music is that much stronger, the action more fulfilling. Aside from the hands in the foreground, there isn’t a cast. But that’s okay, because the ad is strong enough without one. Likewise for “All Kinds of Fun”, the penultimate iPod touch ad. The inclusion of a cast cannot be the issue, however, as this old iPod nano ad demonstrates. It has all the right ingredients, resulting in an excellent spot.

The new iPod touch ad lacks the magic of these ads, for some reason I can’t quite put my finger on. It could be the tempo, or the people, or the editing. There’s something missing, and since the ad will be playing frequently for the next month, it’s bound to irritate me every single time.

— November 25, 2011