yojimbo311's comments

I forget the term for it, but it's exactly like Terms and Conditions. Always expect the user to solve any puzzle put to them using the least amount of energy/effort. It's quite honestly not worth it to anyone to go through the work of securing their information/data/whatever until it's actually genuinely at risk or they have lost something in the past. Until then it's an impedance and an annoyance that makes them very unhappy.

Once something like this happens it's impressive how much cognitive dissonance there is behind the excuses those very same people make or their claims that not enough was done to protect them. Don't get me wrong, these individuals were horribly victimized and it's not ok, but we can't allow ourselves to be satisfied by just blaming the company, especially if they otherwise provided the tools that would have kept the account secure. We can only realistically expect the companies we entrust our data to be responsible for making it possible for us to secure our data and not leaking it through other systemic failures. If we choose to shortcut it then it's our responsibility to learn from that and do better next time. We can't blame anyone involved here for doing what they should otherwise be motivated/expected to do. Apple provided the tools to protect the accounts, and as far as we know didn't allow them to be otherwise compromised. The victims set up their accounts in a way that they could easily access/recover them in the future (honestly, it's now required to remember around 20+ account passwords to manage our lives and it's only getting worse) regardless if they knew the risks or not. Security education is out there and it's as loud as we could hope to get it, people just won't internalize it until the risk is tangible. We can demand that companies like Apple, but it won't actually improve anything if people can't be bothered to use them or more importantly find it WAY more inconvenient and seek ways to bypass them in whatever way possible just to get them out of the way.

It's a shame that this is blowing up for Apple as if it's all Apple's fault, but maybe some good can come from it.

I wound up nearly writing a book in response to this so I'll try to sum it up.

I agree with most of what you've said in this thread, but...

> Why have a centralized legal roadblock to new product development?

Rephrased: Why have a centralized catalog of discoveries and inventions available to the public that afford the contributors temporary exclusive license?

The idea behind patents was to counter very real problems created by the failure of markets to balance out the incentive to invent and innovate with the incentive to make those discoveries publicly available so they can inspire or cornerstone further discoveries. If they weren't published they were hoarded as trade secrets and were at risk of being lost forever over time.

Did the inception of patents account for or even acknowledge the kind of market control they're being used and traded for today? The lauded free market has turned patents into a commodity, possibly by expectation, but it's clear that this activity is relatively recent and seems to me due to changes in how the scope of their exclusive license grants is being interpreted/abused. Would we be better off assuming that the publication of discoveries would lead to closely aligned derivative products that would create a competitive environment or should we be generous with the licenses granted "inventors" so there's greater incentive to share those inventions?

Personally I think we're just seeing the beginning of what effects doing the later can have.

Precisely. These are all very good examples of what to be careful of in designing any transformations or transitions. There are however, lots of incredibly useful and well designed transformations that actually enhance the overall experience and usability of an interface especially when used in conjunction with each other, fad or not.

I wasn't trying to dismiss it as a whole, but I did want to encourage the decisions to include it to be deliberate and thoughtful. That may have rubbed a few people the wrong way and I'm ok with that. I was hoping to start a reasonable dialog of where designers and developers should make an attempt to draw the line so that the end result doesn't become the equivalent of "now available in 3D!" so I really appreciate your response.

I'm pretty sure we've already seen cases that prove that it doesn't, perhaps not enough to write a blog post about, but they are definitely out there (iOS 7's dramatic increase in the use of motion comes immediately to mind). I think it's a dangerous sentiment to promote in such a generalized sense and designers/developers need to be very cognizant of the value any animation provides to the UX. It's far too easy to justify the abuse/overuse of motion/animation, making any animation noticeable to "delight"/"tell a story" which contradicts any functional reason for implementing it.

I found the post overall to be pretty superficial. There was only one paragraph spent on describing the function/purpose of "motion design" and it placed far more emphasis on it's more marketable aspects than on it's utility to "educate your users about how to interact with particular elements".

"Motion design" is just one UI tool and one that really didn't need to be pulled out and promoted in this way IMHO as it's always been an essential tool in great software when used properly. I think it would have been great if it wasn't an "implicit announcement" but explored in detail what good "motion design" entails. It's easy to get carried away with it, and introducing motion with appropriate intent can be what makes an otherwise good application into a great one, but let's not pretend it's magic dust that can turn cole to diamonds.

Which part? Andreessen taking his anger out on Snowden or the NSA's tampering? To the latter, yes, yes I do. If for no other reason than the consequences of such tampering are obvious if ever discovered and nothing ever stays secret forever. They made the decision and we can only assume they did it knowing full well what would happen should it ever come to light, leak or not. Would things have been much different if this was discovered 5 years from now? How about 10? Can we assume they would stop tampering with equipment at any point without disclosure?

IMHO no agency that is being funded to fulfill American public interests should be making choices that override, or put at serious risk, the needs of the public just to make their job more efficient/effective. Even if we accept reinterpretations of what public "needs" might be, this was a decision who's risks would be extremely costly should disclosure ever occur and it shouldn't have happened, perhaps even outweighing the benefits (to the public) they offered, which we may never get a straight answer as to what they were.

I was really excited to try this out, but then I hit the requirement to provide contact information just to download the library. This is, for good or bad, always off putting to me. I don't consider the need to collect certain information bad in itself as long as it's reasonable or at least justified. In this case however, there's a distinct lack of communication as to why the information is being collected and that makes me wary (it's also fairly common recently so this isn't the only offender). I can make all sorts of my own assumptions as to why the developers would need that information, but after being bitten a few times by folks who have been a little less than transparent with their actual use of that information I'd prefer not to rely on my own assumptions.

Some feedback based on my experience (take with a healthy dose of salt):

- The quickstart menu item is the only one that takes you away from the main page which interrupts the experience when using this particular style of pagination. The way back to the main page from the quickstart page is also not particularly obvious (just a back arrow within the logo would be sufficient).

- A big red flag is the counter counting how many gestures have been "tracked" leading me to believe that there's some sort of phone home going on which, all things being equal, doesn't make too much sense for a gesture library (unless some explanation is provided).

- Another big red flag is no mention of why the need for a full name is required in addition to the email, or why the email is necessary for the download (It's mentioned that it will be sent to the email if the user scrolls down to the 2nd form, but not in the first "page").

- No obvious way to provide feedback is immediately available (I assume it's provided in whatever email communication is made or within the library itself).

(edit formatting)

Personally, I think this sentiment cheapens his decision and makes less of what he's really done here. I think what he's done is pretty heroic, at least in modern terms, and something that very few, possibly none, of us would be willing to pull the trigger on.

Wether he's made, or is still making, a fortune is besides the point. He made the hard choice and has made it clear to everyone who's asked that he is all the better for it. This more than anything else is a powerful and important example that we may or may not see again. If nothing else he has highlighted the need for more empathy in software. His focus seems to be in bringing joy and entertainment to people and doesn't appear to have any ulterior motive. This is rare and we should be celebrating it rather than dismiss it by the fact that he has been fortunate enough to actually be successful from it (something that is also extremely rare).

There are quite literally thousands of documents that disagree with you on that, especially when it comes to physical addiction. Your response demonstrates a misunderstanding as to what addiction is, even if you happen to have experienced it first hand.

If you're really interested in continuing to debate whether your perspective of addiction should be adopted by others feel free to search Google for "addiction" or "is addiction a lifelong problem" or if that's something you don't have time for start with the first Google result I pulled up: http://aspe.hhs.gov/hsp/subabuse99/chap2.htm

There are plenty of other, better, sources that will provide more thorough descriptions of both the physical and psychological characteristics of addition. Practically all of them acknowledge that addiction, once attained, does not grant an individual the luxury of choice as you entertain it. One can certainly choose to seek the tools to control the impulses of addiction through willpower (be it internally or externally inspired), but that will never mean they can choose to make the underlying addiction go away and never bother them again at any point for the rest of their lives.

Addiction by itself is absolutely not a choice. Whatever it is that someone tried or was coerced to try that eventually resulted in that addiction may or may not have been a choice. A person may indeed, with appropriate support and resources be able to break their addiction, but they remain afflicted with it throughout the rest of their lives. Why do you think most people who were once addicted to alcohol must remain eternally vigilant to never touch the stuff again?

Playing the "no one's pointing a gun to your head" card and claiming it is therefore "non-coersive" in defense of targeting and manipulating addictive behavior may very well be profitable but it's delusional and downright dishonest to everyone, including yourself, to think it isn't exploitive and conducive to serious personal and social issues. You need look no further in the historical record to see how this plays out than the tobacco and alcohol industry.

zimbatm's link to http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:generators was helpful here. https://wiki.python.org/moin/Generators seems to also have some useful background on where the semantics are coming from.

As someone who is grateful for your research and analysis, thank you, but filing a bug report is going to be WAY more effective, at least for iOS. https://bugreport.apple.com/ will get the ball rolling, even if it's been filed already. The more reports they get, the more likely they'll look at fixing the issue, especially if good use cases are provided.

I think you underestimate the impact these particular reviews are having for some, even if it's a minority.

Apple has as much incentive here as they have with any customer complaints. If it's important enough to developers and genuinely impacts their product (aka products Apple benefits from in more ways than one) they know it will effect the relationship they have with Apple. Like with anything however, the problem needs to communicated. The more people who communicate the same issue, the more likely it will get attention. https://bugreport.apple.com/ is the place to start. Not blogs, not HN, not Twitter or anything else.

If you want a problem you're having solved, start with filing a report in as detailed, and polite, a way as possible. Using blogs to bitch and complain about how Apple is ignoring an "obvious" issue, or how stupid they were to do things in such-and-such a way, is essentially counterproductive and being part of the problem rather than the solution. Using them to explain the issue, get a discussion around it going, coming up with solutions that work for you and fellow developers, and get additional reports filed, enhances the ability for Apple to respond with a genuine solution sooner rather than later. Sometimes they see the blogs and articles, but I'm sure it's more often they don't, so the trend I've seen over the last several years of vitriolic blogs being the first and only mention of a problem has, IMHO, really been disservice to the whole community.

It's always taken much longer than I would personally like or understand, but with enough bug reports filed on a given issue I do see traction and changes come later on down the road. They may not always be the changes I explicitly requested or expect, but they do resolve the problems in one way or another.

edit: grammar

I don't have numbers or sources to back it up, but in my experience at least, people who were satisfied with an entry-level model didn't keep track of newer models and weren't interested in "upgrading" unless the thing was about to die or there were substantial benefits.

Apple is most definitely shy of squeezing the bucks out of customers and they've proven that they have been willing to go to bat for customers to get a reasonable price. Not the lowest, not the best, but reasonable enough to keep things within reach of as many people as possible. They've even fought tooth and nail to create whole new economies that might not have existed at all even if it means kicking the doors open for competitors. Not just for you and me, not just because there's competition, but because their strategy as a whole demands it and I think it's proven very effective for them. If they really wanted to bleed customers to maximize their profits you can bet that we would have seen SIGNIFICANTLY higher prices for things like music and iPods etc. They work hard to keep prices as low as they can without sacrificing quality.

It's not like it's some nefarious plot to create lock in either. It's simply a long term business strategy that I don't think the industry as a whole ever truly understood or appreciated until things really got tight. Apple's not the only one playing the satisfied customer game either, nor is it some novel concept, which is why it's always baffled me that folks who are interested in the long game don't bother to do the same thing on a consistent basis. Looking out for and providing customers with the best/most cost effective solutions you can offer to solve their problems creates a virtuous cycle. Sure, you may never see them again, but treat a person well and chances are very good, especially in a market like hardware and software, that you will and/or you'll see their friends.

I'm getting really tired of seeing snarky comments like this show up in EVERY single post about Apple doing anything regardless of wether it was "good" or "bad". I'm also getting tired of "own" being used to mean "control", but that's a different argument.

There is nothing here to indicate that Apple has demonstrated any level of complete control over the devices they sell.

The only thing Apple demonstrated here is that once they determine an app is a bad actor that they are willing to terminate the services they provide utilized by those apps. There's no Big Brother style weight being thrown around here like it's some school yard fight, just a simple termination of contract and it's a benefit to users as well as Apple. It is also a mechanism that is severely limited in scope. Apple isn't capable of exerting full control over a person's phone only certain aspects which they have demonstrated a significant amount of restraint and have only been willing to execute any action when they have determined that there is either a security risk or a breach of terms. We can debate whether their determination of what constitutes a breach is appropriate, but I have seen nothing from Apple to demonstrate that they aren't acting in their customers' best interests in these cases. I can't say that of any other company I've owned products from with similar capabilities so I'm inclined to give them a little slack.

It's also important to remember that Apps do not define the functionality of Apple's devices, merely extend them, and weren't even available until consumers demanded it. Users have never "owned", in the sense of control, everything about the applications they install on any platform and I don't think we can rationally say they ever will, unless they build it themselves. You want examples of devices that can be considered "owned" by the company that produced them? How about Playstation or Kinect (before MS' shift)? There are plenty of examples of companies that publicly used the big hammer approach to dealing with things before they went with warnings, notices, policy change deadlines, service termination, or any other remediable approach, but so far I haven't seen Apple go that route and they don't deserve to be vilified for doing what we all wish everyone else would do when faced similar kinds of things. As far as I know Apple can't arbitrarily disable your phone from working as a phone.

I wouldn't want my business model challenged by the company that created the product I had based my business on either, but it is the height of folly to assume it wouldn't be when the model depends on "bending" a few rules that are otherwise considered to protect customers from foul play.

edit: edits.

It's certainly "fancy", but... as someone who has been forced to go down this road more than a few times for desktop and mobile platforms please do NOT encourage this. The level of manipulation and monitoring of key events necessary to get even close to parity of normal input behavior and accessibility, which this example unfortunately doesn't do very well, is enough to drive one into voluntary retirement.

It's fun to look at and play with, and I know it has some useful applications, but it quickly becomes incredibly fragile and is guaranteed to waste time and effort that can, and should, be spent on other stuff. Unless of course there is nothing left to do and you're just looking for ways to torture some poor soul hopped up on Red Bull or Mountain Dew.

That said, I definitely do encourage anyone interested to explore how this stuff works. My experience has been that design pretty much overlooks input behavior in general, but there are some pretty impressive things that can be done now without painting yourself into a corner and exploring stuff like this is probably one of the fastest ways to figure out where the boundaries are.

1) In some ways they already do this by collating anonymized crowdsourced data (ex. the overblown debacle over the location cache and the subsequent discovery that they were crowdsourcing traffic data).

2) To my knowledge, this just doesn't happen at Apple for high profile launches like iOS, iPhone, iPad etc. While there are always going to be egos at play in any corporation, the executive team is very solid at Apple and struggles like that just don't get far. Apple demonstrated over and over again that they have no problem killing hardware and software that they feel they must for the sake of progress, or whatever, and you can bet that there's always a team with something at stake when they do that.

3) Given the thoroughness of focus on iOS at Apple over the last 5 years, and maps being a rather major change for a key functionality for iPhones, and any smartphone now really, this seems impossible. What I'm not clear on is why Apple didn't expressly announce the feature as a work in progress, or "beta", that is at the point that it requires real world usage and feedback to bring it up to the standards of, what are now, significantly more mature products.

The Maps app in iOS5 really hasn't changed much since it's launch with the first iPhone while Android, etc. have been able to add features to theirs. My money is on licensing restrictions being the primary culprit behind this and given that Apple's license with Google was up this year, it just seems far too much of a stretch, for the sake of finding any kind of fault in Apple's diamond polished veneer, to assume that Apple had any other intention than wanting to improve the utility of a key mobile computing feature they were otherwise not allowed to do, or were not able to come to agreeable terms with Google when talking about renewing their license. It's unfortunate that it's so significantly lacking in accuracy, but I'm not entirely sure there was much they could do about that before launch beyond removing Maps entirely?

First, I find these pre-teardown estimates and price guestimates to be completely misleading and uninformative. It's foolish to base any opinion on a guess using information that has not been confirmed in an even moderately rigorous manner. The sun doesn't revolve around the Earth despite opinions to the contrary.

Second, by your own admission component costs have declined. Why would you leap to the conclusion that Apple would be skimping purely on the price difference alone? Perhaps they are benefitting from the variety of factors that have caused component costs to be reduced during that time? It makes perfect sense to use today's prices to compare the component costs of the two devices, otherwise it's disingenuous unless all the factors that led to today's reduction in costs for the components in question are accounted for.

I get the impression that a lot of the anti-Apple camp get the same sense about people who "support" the decision, and I use that term loosely. I'd like to offer the following:

Apple has been consistent in actively defending any design element, hardware or software, they feel is uniquely identifiable as Apple. This has always been about brand identity, but something so amorphous and difficult to regulate have few tools to protect them so instead the fights focus on technicalities. A patent here, a copyright there, a trademark, whatever. It's always fun to point and laugh at the specifics, but it's the bigger overall picture at play that's defining the actions, not the actions themselves. Long debates exist over whether the ends justify the means ect. so no need to get into it here.

Samsung is just the latest in this trend and sort of the current poster child of businesses who's modus operandi is mimicking the successful designs of market leader products (whether it's software, hardware, appliances, whatever) and offering them at lower costs to cannibalize (couldn't think of a better word) the market as much as possible. There's nothing explicitly illegal about it since they aren't 100% knockoffs, but they skirt a very fine line, and I, like many others, seem to find it a morally detestable practice which can have a negative long term impact on the market and can debatably hurt consumers in ways they aren't always aware of. (apologies, still looking for a source on this).

I think you'll find that most people who support the decision also agree that the need to weaponize a patent on an arguably questionable "innovative UI" in order to convince a bad actor to stop copying other people's work is absurd and has a serious chilling effect that can hurt more than it can help. IANAL, but my feeling is that if the market is significantly large enough scale the tools available that would be more appropriate to use don't carry enough weight behind them to create an equally compelling incentive to "play fair". Many companies seem to be resorting to using patents, copyright, and trademark instead to create an incentive compelling enough to negotiate some sort of mutual agreement (forced or otherwise). I think we can all agree that this activity is an abuse of those "protections" and a very compelling argument to have a good long look at them and determine what positive and negative motivational forces they create. However, while two wrongs don't make a right, it doesn't negate the fact that there is a genuine grievance in this case where the systems, as they currently exist, have not been able to resolve without heavy dependance on technicalities that taken individually may not mean much to the original issue. This is at least how I've personally been able to rationalize the disparity I have of the two positions and I get the feeling from other "supporters" that something similar is going on.

My apologies for singling you out with this, but many people seem to be jumping on this bandwagon all too much and I've about lost my patience with it. This isn't something that Apple, or Amazon, or Netflix, or Hulu etc. can take the blame for in my opinion.

Dealing with multi-national accounts is terribly complicated, especially when it comes to selling the content that Apple does. I imagine it would be extraordinarily difficult to convince music labels, TV producers, Movie studios etc. to provide the earliest possible access to their content at reasonable market prices if Apple were to say "we have millions of customers with credit cards, but that regional release restriction thing you like so much, yeah you're going to have to let that go because we allow a single account to pay using credit cards from multiple countries and they might actually, you know, be in another country at the time they buy something." All content companies face this issue, just try watching Netflix or Hulu outside of the US and compare what you can and can't get access to.

It's a backwards way of doing things in the internet age, but I haven't seen anyone who's found the key to get passed the gatekeepers yet and until someone does, we'll continue to be stuck with this problem.

> See: people talking several years ago about why anyone who wanted copy/paste in iOS didn't understand why that was unnecessary.

When did this happen? I don't recall anyone saying any such thing. I do recall many being very frustrated, but nevertheless reiterating Apple's position of "well release it when it's ready" despite the genuine need that any solution would have been better than no solution.

Apple doesn't ignore the long tail nor do they actively try to convince people that they don't want what they want. They do seem to take their sweet time in putting a solution out there if they don't happen to think the solutions available work very well.