Apple and Ive Flat Design Assault

via Former Apple Design Gurus Criticize Apple’s Current Designs.

via “Flat Design”? Destroying Apple’s Legacy… or Saving It.

Wake up, Tim! Many years ago, Apple used a great deal of research and creative thought to revolutionize, popularize, and consumerize “Personal Computing” by creating interface rules and guidelines that made most Macintosh applications work consistently, regardless if the application was written by Apple, Microsoft, or one of the hundreds of other software companies that have passed into obscurity at the hands of change and monopoly. (Remember WordPerfect? pfs:Write? ThinkTank? Aldus Pagemaker?) It wasn’t always that way.

The power of this innovation is lost today because—like so much of technology—it is taken for granted. Apple designers, most notably Jonathan Ive, have placed form far above function. The result is inconsistency in the interface, hidden interface elements, huge assumptions about users knowledge, or perseverance, or desire to explore, and the capacity of users to remember invisible elements and features.

If you struggle figuring out how to do something on your iPhone or iPad or Mac, especially something that ought to be simple and obvious, then you’ve encountered the new design philosophy. Learn more about how it ought to be – read the articles linked at the top of this article. And, heck, you could tell Apple what you think! (Maybe they’ll hear you.)

http://www.apple.com/feedback/

What if you are one of the unusual folks who wants the free U2 album, but can’t get it?

TidBITS: How to Get (or Delete) Your Free U2 Album.

I’ve been waiting around to see if the U2 album ever shows up on any of my Apple stuff.

I’m not whining because Apple gave me a free album and pushed it down to my stuff without even asking if I wanted it. There are plenty of whiners out there to handle that. And I don’t know, I suppose a Beyonce or Taylor Swift album appearing on my iTunes might have pushed me to whining (or worse). I have compassion for those who don’t like U2. I’m not one of them.

Apple isn’t perfect. They could have handled this better. If the Executive VP in charge of Doing The Right Thing (EVIP of DRAT) had been consulted, I imagine she would have said, “I think we should give people the choice. Isn’t that what Apple is all about? Great choices? If we threw in another gigabyte of iCloud storage, how many people would complain? Then we wouldn’t have to even think about  how many people didn’t choose the download!” But clearly The Tim wasn’t listening to the EVIP of DRAT that day. And the U2-hating-whiners have deluged Apple with complaints. It could have been avoided.

But back to me. I never even got the download. I waited over a week. And after a couple of fruitless Google searches that turned up article-after-article and blog-after-blog of whining about Apple giving people free U2 albums without even a whit of free extra iCloud storage, I found this article in our old friend TidBITS.

I followed the instructions for how to get the album if you are one of the unusual folks who actually want it, but can’t get it. And I got it.

Thank you Adam Engst and team for, once again, publishing the right stuff at the right time. Well written!