The Hindu News Update Service default/empty News Update Service Thursday, August 7, 2008 : 0935 Hrs
Sci. & Tech. Apple is turning its friends into enemies London, (GUARDIAN NEWS SERVICE) By Charles Arthur Apple's disdain for badly designed outside software is hurting it more than it knows. The developers who were ready to be its friends are turning into its enemies Good design is really rare. From this I think we can conclude that it's really difficult. I was thinking about this as I watched the comments pile up earlier this week on the Technology blog post pointing to a rant about the usability - or otherwise - of free software (bit.ly/use2). But as the commenters pointed out, it's not only free software that suffers from this problem, which implies logically that the problem lies not in the cost of the software, but in the process and the people involved. For instance, I've never come across a piece of software from Microsoft that left me breathless in amazement at its combination of simplicity and power. With Microsoft, you get either/or. You get software that does a couple of things and doesn't trouble you, or you get something that can do something near to a billion things, and tells you all about most of them all the time. I still find it a frustrating business visiting the network control panel in Windows XP: it's like the sketch, decades old but still relevant, of the man going into a hi-fi shop and asking for "a gramophone". At which the shop assistants turn like radar dishes and begin mercilessly poking fun at the man, asking absurd questions about what he wants. XP's network control panel treats me the same way. There are all sorts of weird things in there, most of which I'm not interested in. And the ones I am interested in are hidden or wrapped in such obtuse language that I give up. You're thinking that I'm going to say that Apple is a paragon of good design - and on both the hardware and computer software front, it often is. It frequently conforms to the idea that the zenith of design is reached when you can't take anything more away, rather than when you can't add any more. But here's the interesting thing. Apple is very good at design: you can measure its abrupt improvement in hardware design back pretty much to the day when Steve Jobs rejoined the company in 1996. The role of Jobs was to champion the winning design; because before that Jonathan Ive's genius was well-hidden in the boring beige boxes Apple churned out. However, Apple's top-down approach to design is a bust when it comes to its approach to the software for the iPhone. Developers for that are up in arms. People are astonishingly angry at the fact that Apple first won't let them talk about how to develop for the iPhone - because everything about programming for it remains under a non-disclosure agreement - and second, hasn't let them get at its most useful application programming interfaces (APIs). Mike Ash, a programmer at the independent Mac developer Rogue Amoeba, has posted a long and annoyed rant about this (at bit.ly/use3) in which he says that after a month using the new iPhone, with its new software: "I feel like I've gone back to the dark ages." Multitasking is a thing of the past, and it's impossible for third-party developers to design well, because Apple's keeping the best parts of the API hidden. Apple can design something that will multitask but others can't. The developers want in too. Apple's constant refrain is that it's all about making sure the phone isn't going to be destroyed by applications doing what they shouldn't. It's starting to wear thin, though. Palm opened its platform to outside developers, which helped it kill Psion. Apple's disdain for badly designed outside software is hurting it more than it knows. The developers who were ready to be its friends are turning into its enemies. And let nobody forget that Steve Ballmer's most memorable leaping-about moment - screaming "Developers! Developers! Developers!" - was greeted with applause. From developers. Look at how well Microsoft has done and compare it with the iPhone, which is teetering on a brink. Good design is rare. But eager developers are even more rare. Let them in, Apple. Join Access India convention: For updates on it visit: http://accessindia.org.in/harish/convention.htm Registration is now open! To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
