New Apple Lust Objects for 2010 and onward

i'm not just trolling. i've spent a huge portion of the last four-ish years of my life following this company, probably more than most of the people in this thread, and my interest in them isn't superifical. a lot of people here clearly have a different sort of interest in the company than i do, because i don't like this thread that much, (or, frankly, a lot of ilx in general these days, but that's beyond the scope of this post). what interests me about apple has a lot to do with jobs and little to do with the quotidian shit like which device should i buy. for me, the company is about ideas and, yes, the products too. but the culture jobs created is the thing. the values embedded in the design of the new campus is the thing. the thoughts that go into the design of the products is the thing. “excellence,” which steve and tim talk about, is the thing

(You realize there are people in this thread that’ve worked for Apple on many of the described products, right?)

i am going to throw an absolute shit fit and sign up for debian mailing lists if this turns out to be true:

"I’ve heard from Yosemite beta testers that Apple is removing the ability to “pin” the Dock to one corner of the screen."

I was using my mum's 10.6 machine this weekend, and damn if Snow Leopard isn't >>>>>>>>> 10.7, 10.8, 10.9 and a damn sight better on standard dpi screens than 10.10

no idea that was a hidden pref that was available. Caring about the dock has never been agl though, just shrink it really small and ignore it.

nextstep >>>>>>

a real os with a real dock

http://www.fanboy.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/nextstep-os.jpg

Nonetheless, I’ll bite:

beyond that, right now, there's a lot going on that one could talk about that isn't specs crap: tim cook is changing the company. look at those two businessweek pieces. (hilarious cover, right? captivating to hear people talk about that instead of what's in the fucking articles.) cook has a clear, public focus on social justice and the environment. that's interesting, because for jobs it was explicitly about the products. (again, see the two bw links.) there's the “openness” issue cook refers to and others have noted, especially during and post-wwdc. cotton was kicked out as part of that, perhaps. (to make things “friendlier” or w/e.) forstall's firing, which is also brought up in the longer interview, was clearly part of a change in the company's internal ways of doing things. (i'm just gonna stop saying read the pieces now, but read the pieces. maybe check out gruber's “only apple” thing too.)

i just got done the other day re-reading the sj bio, and that's the sort of stuff that's more interesting to me personally. i use an ipad. i'm typing on an imac. but there's much, much bigger stuff at stake here. i figure there are probably very few here who are as interested in that side of the coin though, and a lot of ppl, as i've kinda suggested, are probably just casual fans who'd rather talk about whether the iphone 6 plus will fit in their pocket or not, but i can't stop them from posting unfortunately

ilx basically is more or less not for me anymore, so i should probably reduce my involvement instead of just getting annoyed or w/e all the time, but i don't really have many other places to hang at the moment, so here i am

Apple is a technology company. You’re overstating the influence of Jobs. And you’re especially overstating the influence of Cook. Honestly, from a leadership perspective, Craig Federighi and Scott Forstall were responsible for most of what Apple accomplished since the iMac era.

caek is making a joke, but the Next acquisition is usually misconstrued by the technology press. It’s assumed it was about Jobs. That’s true. But only partially. Jobs didn’t change Apple’s culture. Next did. Unix and Objective-C wasn’t just responsible for OS X and the OS X ecosystem, it forced Apple to take systems groups seriously which is where the iPod and iPhone came from. It wasn’t like some executive was “Let’s make a phone” and they made a phone. There were so many experiments and ideas that were built (and even shipped) before it became its own product. Blah, blah, blah ….

i'm not making a joke. i'm deadly serious. without unix, objective c, and to a lesser extent without the academia/education/science market that next brought with them, we'd all be running freebsd.

and the dock is worth caring about because it could have been great.

p.s. fix the finder.

“Apple-U” is bullshit. Most people don’t “climb the ladder” (e.g. engineers retire engineers) and compensation isn’t tied to an organization chart (e.g. senior engineers make more than executives — I think this is true in marketing too), so classes are usually “The History of Apple” and “Human Interface Guidelines” (i.e. stuff for new hires).

Markers - As someone who has been working in the business for many years (started off designing internal modems for various macs and powerbooks back in the 90s), I find your condescension pretty off-putting. You say you've "spent a huge portion of the last four-ish years of my life following this company." Not really sure what that means. It feels like you've developed (in four short years) a weird team mentality around Apple, and you get defensive on their behalf when anyone criticizes them or makes fun of their products.

Apple is definitely the leader in user experience across a ton of different product lines. But they also have some huge advantages (supply chain power, marketing dollars, ridiculous war chest) that amplify their dominance in ways that are greater than just the strength of their leadership or engineering teams. For example (citing the first BW article here), they have the money and resources to build a bunch of products that never see the light of day once they are deemed not "good enough." That's admirable in some ways, but it's also something that they are in a mostly-unique position to do.

The thing that has made me most cynical about Apple is the stream of burned-out employees that they generate (I hired a bunch of these "refugees" in the last few years!). Apple has created an obnoxious, sort-of macho corporate culture that thrives on confrontation, overwork, and finding-someone-to-blame. Probably the Landmark Forum shoulders some of the blame for this. Maybe this leads to some great products, but it sure seems like a rough place to work.

So trying to treat Apple as something bigger than just a company not only seems silly to me, but also kind-of scary.

Like stet wrote, I think the products are the important thing about Apple. I'm pretty sure Tim Cook and the rest of the team there agree with that too.

many xps weird coincidence i moved my dock to the right hand side of the screen today to be more like nextstep

I miss OS9, tbh. OSX is such a shotgun full of mixed metaphors, gimmicky graphical effects, and forced user behaviors. Dock is confusing, the whole save-as thing being removed, the trying to do everything through Spotlight, but then making Spotlight all shuffly and frustrating, trying to hide the folder structure.

Guess I'm an old man...

i haven't felt the same about macs since os x screwed up the finder

i don't do anything through spotlight

The thing that has made me most cynical about Apple is the stream of burned-out employees that they generate (I hired a bunch of these "refugees" in the last few years!). Apple has created an obnoxious, sort-of macho corporate culture that thrives on confrontation, overwork, and finding-someone-to-blame. Probably the Landmark Forum shoulders some of the blame for this. Maybe this leads to some great products, but it sure seems like a rough place to work

OTM

(While I’ve written about this elsewhere, but it’s worth restating: Internet Software and Services is a cluster-fuck. Unfortunately, it’s also where most of the resources are spent. Retention is horrible. Technology is a jumble of failed products—WebObjects, notably—and inherited stacks from acquisitions—orchestrating a bevy of services using different NoSQL stores and running on different VMs isn’t enjoyable.)

Apple is definitely the leader in user experience across a ton of different product lines. But they also have some huge advantages (supply chain power, marketing dollars, ridiculous war chest) that amplify their dominance in ways that are greater than just the strength of their leadership or engineering teams. For example (citing the first BW article here), they have the money and resources to build a bunch of products that never see the light of day once they are deemed not "good enough." That's admirable in some ways, but it's also something that they are in a mostly-unique position to do.

A minor correction: most experiments are small and most of them ship. Nonetheless, few are marketed, and even fewer become independent products. And deprecations happens fast (e.g. consider features that Apple’s introduced in a version of OS X or iOS and removed shortly after).

xp

i control this thing using launchbar, which in many was an amazing app, but as a UI paradigm it's one up from zsh or something.

fix the finder.

i don't do anything through spotlight

Odd. I exclusively use Spotlight and a tiled window manager.

`cd` and `ls` are still better than Finder. But, admittedly, they are better than most alternatives.

I exclusively use Spotlight and a tiled window manager

Me too, although the share of my stuff which is manageable as local files is smaller and smaller. I wish it wasn't the case. Most of the organizational stuff I do in Lightroom or iTunes should be possible in the Finder, imo.

Finally started using Spotlight more, but I'm just not sure what was so broken about directory structures. Windows 8 seems hot to get rid of them too. I guess folders full of recent documents and a powerful search tool are probably better than having to remember where I put something, but that was never such a huge cognitive load for me in the first place.

Between the fucked-up new expose, the fucked-up launchpad, the fucked-up dashboard, the double-fucked-up Spaces and the super-fucked-up Finder I need Alfred to get anything done on my Mac at all.

Whereas with the real Finder, some drawers and a torn-off Switcher menu I could still get everything done A+ style. That set still feels so right it's weird to think that OS X has almost been around as long as classic Mac OS now.

And (sorry this is turning into the IHA thread) yeah - why did Apple essentially create a hidden directory structure for a bunch of their apps (mail, iPhoto)?

All of this points to Apple completely dumping OSX once they figure out how to make iOS good enough for PC usage.

I loved dumping everything in the Apple menu and having a couple of spring-loaded folders along the bottom of the screen (in OS9).

yeah, fuckin spaces

i set that shit up eons ago and never got it to behave properly so i just acclimated to the way it was fucked up and forgot about it

And (sorry this is turning into the IHA thread) yeah - why did Apple essentially create a hidden directory structure for a bunch of their apps (mail, iPhoto)?

It pre-dates Apple. NeXT used a similar graph system for storage too.

(Rob Pike is the champion of this: http://rob.pike.usesthis.com for an introduction!)

On the NeXT stuff, the engineering culture, Copland, the Classic>OS X and OS X>iOS transitions I found the three Nitin Ganatra episodes of the Debug podcast to be pretty good listening.

(You need to suffer a lot of Rene Ritche "hnuh"s mind)

I don't have any of these problems. But I just browse the Internet.

tbf the hierarchical file system is a terrible UX requiring tons of cognitive load

hey you know what i would love to see is a thread about firstclass bbses and cracks&numbers and aohell and n0p and etc. i feel like posters here would have interesting things to say about that stuff.

i don't know how much i can remember about my local firstclass bss : /

the finder is broken?

someone recently posted this screenshot

http://jeff.rainbow-100.com/other/dosgames/21-1.png

and it made me super nostalgic

I used to understand the way window management (and the Finder) worked in OS X. Now I'm just a cranky old man flailing around, surrounded by mess.

I have expose turned off on my parent's iMac and it is a huge pain managing windows within an app

Why turn it off instead of just giving it an obscure hotkey

Parents hit all the keys

make it like cmd+f10

xp in my experience, parents are terrified of hitting any keys

lol

I love spaces, always use command-tab and command-~ instead of expose, use the finder maybe 30% of the time and iterm the other 70%, and have lots of bash alias for opening applications and making 'rm' put stuff in the Trash and dealing with finder windows, and I never use Spotlight

I don't know if it's stockholm syndrome or just time but I'm totally fine with OSX and have no fond memories of system 7/8/9. I do remember always turning off the "open every folder in new window" as soon as sat down though so maybe I'm just a heathen.

Parents hit all the keys

― 龜, Monday, September 22, 2014 8:47 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

charging news http://www.macrumors.com/2014/09/22/iphone-6-and-6-plus-charging

loving all these pro opinons even if i dont understand what all ur talking abt btw

Does anyone use Finder window tabs at all? Several keynote minutes were burned on that one.

pfft

im gonna use some right now

i use finder tabs like crazy

Finder Tabs abt as useful as Finder Tags

What's the connection between landmark forum and apple?

national socialism