Posts in Linked

Apple Posts Letter On “Commitment to Customer Privacy”→

Apple has today posted a lengthy public statement on how they handle customer data following allegations of involvement in the NSA-operated PRISM surveillance program. In the letter, Apple reiterates that they don’t provide any government agency with direct access to their servers, and that only the “narrowest possible set of information” is provided to the authorities after a court order and an evaluation of Apple’s Legal team.

Apple writes:

From December 1, 2012 to May 31, 2013, Apple received between 4,000 and 5,000 requests from U.S. law enforcement for customer data. Between 9,000 and 10,000 accounts or devices were specified in those requests, which came from federal, state and local authorities and included both criminal investigations and national security matters. The most common form of request comes from police investigating robberies and other crimes, searching for missing children, trying to locate a patient with Alzheimer’s disease, or hoping to prevent a suicide.

Apple also explains that they don’t mantain a “mountain of personal details about our customers in the first place”.

For example, conversations which take place over iMessage and FaceTime are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them. Apple cannot decrypt that data. Similarly, we do not store data related to customers’ location, Map searches or Siri requests in any identifiable form.

Apple’s letter is available here, and it’s linked directly on Apple.com’s front page as well.

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I Wouldn’t Mod the New AirPort Extreme→

9to5Mac ran a quick piece this morning about hacking the new AirPort Extreme. Apparently Apple kept the hard drive caddy in place for the new AirPort Time Capsule, but left out any internal connectors.

In the worst ‘case’ scenario, DIYers could use the USB port and wire a bus-powered 2.5 inch hard drive (up to 2TB currently) or SSD around inside the case.

Don’t do this. You don’t really save a lot of money (if any by the time you paid shipping for a new 2TB HDD and USB compatible cable), and then you’d be using up an available USB slot that could be used for other things, like even more storage or a USB printer. If you want a hard drive, just pay more upfront for the AirPort Time Capsule.

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Flatness and the Dimensionality of iOS 7→

David Cole, product designer at Quora, writes:

The big, obvious change to the look in iOS 7 is the flatness. This change is being characterized as a stripping away of dimensionality. I’ll propose something else is going on here: the move to flat screens actually affords a ramp up in dimensionality. When an individual screen gets flattened together, you can treat it as a single object that you can then manipulate and relate to other screens. This concept is at the heart of the biggest changes to the iOS 7 interaction paradigms.

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Matt Gemmell Compares iOS 7 To iOS 6→

The smear of murky tones across the lower-right half of the iOS 6 grid is replaced with whites and a few light blues on iOS 7. Similarly, iOS 6’s handful of different visual styles (and several eccentric outliers) have become essentially two main themes on iOS 7: the paper-like, bright style in about 75% of apps, and the dark utility style for the remainder.

A great piece by Matt, especially in his thoughts on “flatness” and “brightening”. The pixelated screenshot comparison shows just how striking the difference between iOS 6 and iOS 7 is.

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The iOS 7 App Store Opportunity→

Marco Arment has a good take on what iOS 7 represents for developers: a huge opportunity to differentiate apps that will inevitably remain stuck on iOS 6 from those that will embrace iOS 7’s new modern approach later this year.

As I wrote today, it’ll be interesting to see how developers of existing apps will adapt to iOS 7’s dramatic reimagination of the OS. I do believe that many will try an in-between approach to a) keep their identity in the jump to iOS 7 or b) target both iOS 6 and iOS 7 with separate interfaces. I either case, I don’t think that’s a great solution. And, I am curious to see how long it’ll take designers and developers to exclusively target iOS 7 with different, custom interfaces – as many have done in the past five years.

I’m also thinking about how the App Store team will handle the transition from iOS 6 to iOS 7, which should coincide with Apple reaching the 1 million apps milestone (I was off by < 100,000 apps). Aside from App Store improvements that I mentioned in the past, I believe Apple should find a way to clearly promote and organize apps that have been built exclusively for iOS 7. The new OS isn’t just tweaking functionalities or refining some UI elements; I find it hard to envision an App Store that doesn’t make any distinction between “classic” and “modern” apps.

In the past, Apple launched App Store sections for apps taking advantage of new OSes or hardware features, and I’m wondering if, with 1 million iOS apps, differentiation between iOS 6 and iOS 7 should deserve another simple section or something more advanced like search filters, “made for iOS 7” badges, or new editorial efforts from the App Store team.

Properly promoting and organizing iOS 7 apps on the Store can benefit Apple, its users, and third-party developers. The App Store’s back catalog isn’t a new topic of discussion, but with iOS 7 and six zeros getting closer, it’s worth reconsidering it.

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iOS 7 and Aqua→

The Iconfactory’s Craig Hockenberry was around when Aqua was first introduced:

Like with Aqua, these fundamental changes in how things work will stick around for a long time. We may complain about how things look in the short term, but improvements in usability will be something that we value much more in the long term.

But more importantly, and more subtly, is the change of focus within the apps themselves. In the design of Twitterrific 5, we went through the process of figuring out what content was most important and then designing controls around that information. Previous designs focused on the control structure first and then filled it with content.

The more I keep using iOS 7, the more I think apps like Twitterrific 5 and Vesper already are great fits for its new interface principles. They are actual, commercial proof that focusing on content first doesn’t imply ending up with boring, overly simplistic apps.

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Frank Chimero On iOS 7→

Luckily, things like icons, colors, and typography are easier to iterate than userflows, information architecture, and features. They’re also the elements that take more time than expected to craft, so I can see all of these refinements being the most likely to be cut from a tight deadline, and the first up to be revisited by the design team before the official release, or quickly thereafter. If that awful Safari icon bugs you, imagine how the designers at Apple must feel.

I do think that some aspects of iOS 7 beta 1 interface are, indeed, poorly put together. Others simply look odd right now. And I agree with Frank: when you have to introduce a working demo on stage (multiple ones, in fact) and release a developer beta on the same day, refinements are likely cut. The problem is that the Internet will notice inconsistencies; the upside is that Apple designers use the Internet, too.

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Stephen Hackett On WWDC 2013 Keynote→

When Tim Cook said that iOS 7 was the biggest change to iOS since the introduction of the iPhone, he wasn’t kidding. The UI is of course drastically different, but things like background-updating and better car integration are huge changes.

However, once we can all zoom out a little bit, I think iOS 7 will be seen as an evolutionary change. A big one, perhaps, but one that shouldn’t be seen as all that surprising.

iOS 7 is a new foundation. This is how Apple rolls.

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The New Yorker’s Exposé on Canabalt→

Simon Parkin of The New Yorker:

“The first endless runner I played was Canabalt,” said Luke Muscat, Jetpack Joyride’s designer. “You had this single button to jump. I loved the juxtaposition of high-intensity action with absolute simplicity.” Prior to Canabalt’s release, game makers had struggled to reconcile the smartphone’s absence of buttons with the interactive complexities of contemporary video games. Canabalt’s solution was elegant and simple: tap anywhere on the glass and your character leaps. Muscat recalled: “I remember playing Canabalt and just thinking, How has nobody ever thought of this before?”

There’s a lot of endless runners on the iPhone, and Canabalt is widely attributed as the game that started it all. It’s also the only runner that’s maintained my interest, being one of a few games that doesn’t ask me to buy something in a store or prompt me with a tutorial. It’s an attractive game with only a few core mechanics and touchscreen controls that aren’t middling (you feel the weight of your character as he leaps from ledge to ledge). There’s a real sense of desperation in the game as you stumble out of the first window and onto the rooftops below, scrambling onto your feet as the game reveals the backdrop of a burning city under siege. It begs you to ask a lot of questions, though it never answers them, even as more is revealed the farther you run. It’s a classic.

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