So the Mac App Store just showed up as part of Mac OS X 10.6.6 (check Software Update if you don’t already have it installed). As expected, it pretty much confirms my thoughts that someone decided to shoot most of Apple’s designers some time around when brushed metal appeared, along with giving everyone at Cupertino a taste-ectomy. The app UI is just hideous, kicking conventions in the bollocks, laughing in the face of clarity, and mercilessly setting fire to UX and pushing it off a cliff.

Here’s what it looks like (with an front-page app slot shown at full size):

There are two major problems with the Mac App Store as it stands:

The toolbar. The Mac App Store lacks a standard toolbar for dragging the window about. Instead, it shoves the window controls, navigation and search field into a non-standard chunky toolbar. This is bad on several levels:

• There’s no standard ‘blank’ drag strip, enabling you to drag the window about. Instead, you must aim for and click specific blank areas between the various navigation items. This reduces usability and also obliterates accessibility for users who have less dexterity.
• The window controls are positioned in a different place to usual. This screws up muscle memory for Mac users used to ‘snapping’ to specific points to interact with controls. (Consistency is a cornerstone of good application design. It enables users to intuitively know how to interact with things. Apple is one of the worst offenders for breaching Mac OS X interface guidelines, despite chiding third-party developers for doing so).
• The window controls and primary back/forward navigation buttons are close together in terms of horizontal spacing, which may lead to accidental window zooming when attempting to navigate ‘back’. (Compare this to Safari, where the navigation controls are at the far left of the window.)

Still, Adobe might be happy, since Apple’s effectively validated the dire ‘Application Frame’ in the Creative Suite applications by doing the same thing itself (i.e. icons in the toolbar).

Clarity. I zoomed the Angry Birds box for a reason. Look at the price tag. It’s pretty indistinct and not easy to read. When slightly darker on a mouseover… well, it’s still pretty indistinct and not easy to read. Perhaps this is intentional, with Apple trying similar mind games to those used on restaurant menus. To me, it just looks like poor design. Someone liked the shade of grey and small text and went with it, rather than thinking if it offered enough contrast and clarity (a problem relatively common throughout the application). It reminds me of an era of web design, where designers became infatuated with small grey text on slightly darker grey backgrounds. And like many web pages of old, you of course cannot zoom the text in the Mac App Store.

I should point out that in terms of general use, the Mac App Store is fine. Applications download and install with a single click, and the process seems flawless. The clarity issue also improves somewhat on individual application pages (although the layout here is, to be kind, a total mess, like someone’s just slapped a wireframe together and a lazy boss has gone “yeah, whatever”). Furthermore, Apple’s also done some extremely aggressive pricing on its own products, which is great to see and should encourage more people to buy rather than copy software.

However, Apple used to stand for more than ‘good enough’ when it came to design in computing. While this is something that certainly still exists in Apple’s perfectionist approach to hardware design, something’s gone very wrong with its software interface design. Apple is fast becoming one of the worst developers in this area on its own platform.

I get how companies have to big up their products, but RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie needs to lay off the crazy juice. As reported by AppleInsider and others, Balsille got a little over-excited and bullish when RIM beat Wall Street expectations with its quarterly earnings call, and, not for the first time, he decided to take a pop at Apple. The iPad was the target, with Balsille claiming RIM’s PlayBook is “way ahead” of Apple’s device. This being the PlayBook that’s not actually out yet, and won’t be out until March, according to Macworld, an entire month before the iPad 2’s likely to show up.

But what, specifically, makes the PlayBook so special? Balsille eludicated in a rant that some poor bastard at Yahoo transcribed in full. Some highlights follow.

I think the PlayBook redefines what a tablet should do.

Fair enough. It’ll be great to have some massive competition for the iPad, to kick Apple’s arse and ensure it continues to innovate. Do tell us exactly how you’re ahead…

I think we’ve articulated some elements of it

You’ve “articulated some elements of it”. Uh, OK. That sounds… positive.

and I think this idea of a proprietary SDK and unnecessary apps—though there’s a huge role for apps—I think is going to shift in the market, and I think it’s going to shift very, very quickly.

Those would be the unnecessary apps that are selling like hot cakes? And the proprietary SDK demanded by devs furious at Steve Jobs when he initially told them to bugger off and make web apps? Uh, OK.

And I think there’s going to be a strong appetite for web fidelity and tool familiarity.

Areas the iPad utterly fails in, what with its excellent web browser and consistent, usable interface, along with increasingly strong support from the likes of Google with web apps designed to work better on the iPad than any other platform.

Now, how do you align or go over the top on carriers and content providers? Well, we have different strategies, and that’s fine, and there may be room for more than one model, who knows.

It’s good that you’ve thought this through. You’re making Steve Jobs’s responses during Apple’s earnings calls look shoddy and ill-prepared by comparison. (Top tip: “Who knows?” doesn’t make for a confident-sounding co-CEO when you use it once. When it’s seemingly your favourite phrase, you need to be locked in a cupboard until you can learn to speak without embarrassing your entire organisation.)

And, you know, it’s a very dynamic market. Plus, there’s enormous growth and shifts happening around the world, you know.

The biggest shifts being from analysts who said the iPad would fail and who are now trying to pretend that they knew from the start it’d be huge, along with people who claimed Android tablets would immediately wipe the floor with the iPad, despite, in the main, not actually being much better than something you’d wipe from your arse.

How many fronts people want to take on contention, that’s a question you can ask. Do you want to go over the top of banks, do you want to go over the top on content, do you want to go over the top on carriers, do you want to go over the top on video content providers? I mean, who knows, you know? What part of it’s good strategy and what part of it’s a bridge too far? I mean, who knows?

And who knows what you’re talking about at this point? I’m pretty sure I don’t. More worryingly, I’m pretty sure you don’t.

There’s a lot of moving parts, but I think we’re just well ahead on the PlayBook, well ahead internationally, and extending very very well.

This being the PlayBook that’s being released in March 2011, remember.

And so, people can have their views on sentiment, but when is it a good entry strategy, and when is it a bridge too far? Who knows? We have turbulent ecosystem right now. How do you work with banks, how do you work with carriers, how do you work with content, how do you work with enterprise ecosystem?

How do you work with a co-CEO who doesn’t know what they’re talking about? Still, RIM’s certainly ahead in terms of babbling, ‘something exciting that might happen in the future, if its own bluster is to be believed’ and in looking at something successful in a market it wants to enter and yelling ‘you’re doing it wrong’ while the competition makes money hand over fist.

Oh dear, Joshua Kors, ‘Investigative Reporter’, if only you could find your way to investigating a manual. Then you wouldn’t have had to tell everyone why you’re returning your iMac.

Kors’s story is more than a little astonishing, because it reads like something torn from a Microsoft marketing exec’s wet dream, but it’s so unbelievably bad and stupid that it’s the kind of thing even Microsoft wouldn’t run with, because they’ve too much class. Really. And yet Kors’s Onion-like article made the Huffington Post’s tech section.

The journey begins when Kors got bitch-slapped by a news director. Kors said he was working with a video editor to compact a hearing into a YouTube clip, and the director said even his interns can edit videos. Thinking video-editing skills could give his career a shot in the arm, Kors decided to invest in a Mac. (Why at this point he didn’t buy Premiere Elements for his PC is never explained. Maybe Kors thought he could grab a Mac, learn Final Cut Pro in eight seconds, and then go back to the news director and yell WHO’S THE DADDY NOW?, while rubbing his nipples in the director’s face.)

But things went wrong right away for Kors when he booted his Mac:

Turns out there’s a video camera embedded in the screen, and before I could boot her up for the very first time, she wanted to take my picture.

This is true—all Macs with a camera do this. (I’m not sure they’re overtly feminine though. Maybe Kors got a ‘special’ iMac, with boobs.) It also happens to be optional and a really nice touch. But Kors seemingly considers this neat idea for a little personalisation of your computer some kind of BIG BROTHER EVIL.

Next up, Kors discovered that those bastards at Apple hadn’t installed Microsoft Word on his computer, for free:

I had an article to write, but the only word processor I could find on my iMac was TextEdit, essentially a stripped-down version of Notepad.

After all, PCs are well known for arriving with suites of high-end software. I’m sure if you pick up a cheap Dell, it will be bursting at the seams with all the Photoshops and Offices of this world. (Also, TextEdit is, if you’re not a befuddled idiot, a surprisingly capable text editor. It can happily open basic Word documents, and it forms the text layer of many Mac writing tools. Of course, you actually have to learn how to use it, rather than dismissing it out of hand as somehow being inferior to Notepad.)

At this point, Kors also decided he hated the Mac mouse and had began to miss his old, five-button one. Oddly, it never occurred to him to plug said five-button mouse into his Mac. After all, he had more moaning to do:

I booted up my bank account before realizing the Mac keyboard had no number pad and was heartsick to learn that the thesaurus WordWeb, every author’s best friend, didn’t work on Mac’s OS. Neither did Ipswitch FTP, my file-uploader.

Man, Apple really are bastards, in not providing a full compatibility layer with software designed for their (formerly) biggest rival in software terms, Microsoft Windows. I personally find it hell EVERY SINGLE DAY having to dodder through life without a thesaurus on my Mac (apart from the built-in one) and an FTP client (apart from the several I have installed). It’s like some kind of tech nightmare.

Following Kors’s software pains are some simply bonkers claims. Unlike on a PC, he said, he knew he wouldn’t be able to connect one computer to another and transfer over documents. This is fair enough, because if I totally ignore all the many times I’ve happily connected Macs to Windows PCs, I know it’s literally impossible to connect Macs to Windows PCs. Kors decided to use an external hard drive to move files about, presumably while making burbling noises, ringing up his editor and yelling: “I’m technically incompetent! Why the fuck are you having me write for the tech column of your paper, you total dick?”

Next, Kors made more exciting discoveries:

Even moving over my iTunes playlist, I soon learned, was going to take intricate coding tweaks.

Last time I moved iTunes content between platforms, it did indeed take intricate coding tweaks. Mind you, I’ve suddenly decided that I’m a programmer and intricate coding involves ‘dragging a folder’ and intricate tweaks involve ‘dropping a folder’. Man, I’m such a great coder. Maybe the Huffington Post will give me a series of columns!

Oh, wait—Kors isn’t done!

My frustration beginning to boil, I figured I’d cool down with some swing dancing videos stored on my hard drive. But QuickTime wasn’t in the mood to play. My .flv and .mkv files triggered only error messages, and some of my .mpg clips opened to blank screens.

And, my, a moment of non-crazy. The lack of compatibility for Kors’s porn—sorry, swing dancing videos—is stupid. It’s not Apple’s fault—it’s down to the horror that is video codecs—but it is frustrating. I’ll now ignore the many apps and add-ons you could install for the Mac that would make said videos play, obviously. After all, I don’t want to make Kors look like he’s hopelessly out of his depth writing a tech column about using a Mac. No, wait:

I opened Mac’s Thunderbird, and my jaw dropped again. The font on every email was so small, I was going to need the Hubble telescope just to answer my morning mail.

This bit is followed by semi-comprehensible babble about font sizes and how they’re apparently really small on the Mac but giant-sized on a PC. Fonts do differ across platforms, but not to that extent. I’m guessing he was running his PC on blind-o-vision. Later in the article, he claims an Apple Store employee reckons:

Yeah, that small-font thing really is a problem. We have a lot of people who face that, then come back to return their computers.

First I’ve heard of that one, but we should all take Kors’s word for it; after all, the rest of his article is clearly full of win.

I had battled the QuickTime player, which proved unable to make playlists, […] and grimaced at the dock shortcut to my MP3 folder, which malfunctioned after one day, topping the inert folder icon with a question mark.

I can’t make playlists in QuickTime Player either, to be fair. Mind you, I can’t make toast in Photoshop. Question marks instead of Dock folders? That’ll be Kors either deleting the source or having it on a disk no longer connected to the Mac, then. Mind you, I do hate the way Macs cannot connect to things that they’re no longer connected to. Steve Jobs and Apple and Macs and unicorns really suck like that.

The final straw came when Mac’s Firefox took me to my website. To my horror, all the spacing was askew, the graphics tossed left and right like the wreckage of a hurricane. I asked myself: As a web designer, how can I design web pages when I can’t see what 90 percent of my viewers are seeing?

I asked myself: as a web designer, I wonder whether Joshua Kors is a web designer, or whether he threw together some shit in Dreamweaver years ago, and has in fact left it to fester on the internet, like a mouldy cabbage. I then discovered, as a web designer, that, indeed, Kors’s website looks the cat dragged it kicking and screaming from 1998, and then the cat thought “You know what? I’ll just put it out of its misery” before shooting it through the head. Twice. Kors: as ‘a web designer’, perhaps explore some trends and technology that’s standards-compliant as of this century.

For a second I thought, well, I could load Parallels, the Mac OS program that allows you to run Windows applications on your iMac. But that plan was squashed fast. Before I could complete Parallels’ installation, it asked for a copy of the Windows CD. I shook my head in disbelief

Yeah, those bastards at Parallels are nearly as bad as the ones at Apple. What they hell are they thinking in not giving you a free copy of Windows with their inexpensive, powerful and hugely impressive virtualisation software? Kors: you should sue. Hell, you’re American, so you probably already have.

I’m returning my iMac, then headed to Best Buy to snag a PC, one four-times faster than my current computer and $400 cheaper than that iMac. I’ll spend the difference on a video editing program, a new haircut and a first-rate pair of swing dancing shoes.

Maybe you should spend the difference on getting a clue.

Some of the devs on my Twitter feed have started complaining about the Mac App Store approvals process. Like the equivalent for iOS, it’s down to Apple what makes the store and what doesn’t, and mistakes are already being made.

The latest victim is LittleIpsum, an application that provides a quick and easy way to copy ‘lipsum’ text to the clipboard; while not something every Mac owner needs, dummy text is used by most designers at some point, and this seems the kind of 59p app that would work very nicely in a Mac App Store, but that would be pointless from an admin/infrastructure standpoint elsewhere.

Apple’s response is that LittleIpsum does not meet the following guideline:

2.8   Apps that are not very useful or do not provide any lasting entertainment value may be rejected

What’s ‘not useful’ or doesn’t provide ‘lasting entertainment value’ is subjective and is the heart of the problem with the approvals process. Myriad games I’ve reviewed for iOS offer zero lasting entertainment value, yet the iOS App Store is littered with the things. And yet here is a Mac app that clearly has both a use and an audience being rejected, presumably because some poor sod at Apple is reviewing dozens of apps per hour and didn’t get why the app might be handy to have if you’re a designer.

Another ‘analyst’ clearly earning their money, commenting on iOS making ground on the PSP and DS in mobile gaming:

Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Morgan Securities:

what’s the difference if you play Tetris on an iPod Touch or on a DS? Well, you pay a buck on the iPod Touch, you pay $20 on the DS. Parents prefer $1 or free software. I think the iPod Touch is going to sell really, really well. I really think as the iPod Touch gets more and more powerful, you’re going to see a lot of free games over there.

Yes, because iOS doesn’t already have a lot of free games. And the iPod touch isn’t already selling ‘really well’. Let’s also ignore the primary reasons behind the success of iOS as a gaming platform: huge range, bringing fun and novelty back to gaming, millions of credit cards already being hooked up to iTunes, the ability of bedroom coders to fight alongside industry giants. But, no, it’s all about cheap shit, says the analyst.

Gah.

Also, Tetris. Great example. First, it’s very rarely a buck on iOS (usually $2.99); secondly, it’s a pretty mediocre version, unlike the rather spiffy DS one.

GAH.

…

Just… GAH.