I yesterday wrote about TechCrunch’s article that referred to Samsung out-innovating Apple. To be fair to author Peter Relan, his piece was largely balanced and generally non-mad. CNN, on the other hand, has gone all out into Crazy Zone territory, with Steve Kovach’s How Samsung is out-innovating Apple. He first sets the scene:

Competitors have built upon the foundation Apple laid in mobile and are now leapfrogging it with [a] bunch of useful features you can’t find on iPhones and iPads. The evidence is everywhere, but it’s most apparent in products made by Apple’s biggest mobile rival, Samsung.

He then equates innovation with what I yesterday referred to as Samsung’s “out-flinging-stuff-at-walls-and-seeing-what-sticks-ing Apple”:

[You] can’t ignore the fact that the company has innovated a lot by creating popular new product categories that Apple is wary to try.

Well, you certainly can’t when people writing for CNN keep banging on about it. Kovach mentions the Galaxy Note, which people criticised, and then which subsequently sold quite well. Then there’s the Galaxy Note II, with an even bigger screen and that sold five million units. This, according to Kovach showed how Samsung

created a new category of smartphone that people didn’t even know they wanted, much like Apple did when it released the first iPhone.

Yes, exactly like the iPhone. Because without the iPhone, Samsung would quite obviously have created a slightly larger iPhone-like device. That much is certain.

Samsung isn’t afraid to tout its cool factor either. Since the first commercial debuted in late 2011, you’ve probably seen those “Next Big Thing” ads that make fun of starry-eyed Apple fans waiting in line for the next iPhone.

While hoping one day people will also queue up like that to buy one of its devices.

On the software side of things, Samsung is taking advantage of its mobile devices’ processing power to layer premium features on top of Android, such as the ability to run two apps at once in a split screen or separate window.

Sounds great. Let’s hope there’s not a downside to that!

There is a downside to the split-screen thing, however.

Oh.

Developers have to tweak their apps to work in split-screen mode on the Note 10.1. There are only about 20 apps right now that can do it.

Oh.

Samsung isn’t alone, of course. Microsoft’s new Windows 8 operating system is built for touchscreen devices like tablets, too, and it offers a lot of advantages over iOS.

Fewer touchscreen-optimised apps, for a start, meaning you don’t waste any time actually using the device like a tablet and immediately wish you’d bought a proper laptop instead.

Microsoft even has its own line of Surface tablets that blur the line between PC and laptop thanks to a clever snap-on keyboard cover.

Of the type that’s completely absent from the iPad ecosystem.

Based on all this evidence…

Evidence?

… Apple feels behind. Take a look at its newest fourth-generation iPad. It has a killer processor and other great hardware features, but the operating system doesn’t take advantage of any of that. The home screen is still just a grid of static icons that launch apps.

Because, as everyone knows, an operating system and the hardware it runs on is only judged by its app launcher, not everything else it can do.

Apple also isn’t nearly as versatile at adding new software features to its devices. Apple usually makes users wait a year or more for a new version of iOS, and even then some older devices can’t access all the latest and greatest features.

Because Android has such a good reputation compared to Apple in updating device operating systems. Still, the original Galaxy Note is now getting an OTA update to run Jelly Bean, which came out in, uh, July 2012. That clearly keeps products alive in the same way Apple’s same-day across-the-board iOS updates don’t. IN YOUR FACE, CUPERTINO!

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Steve Kovach.

“We paid for this? Shit. Yeah, I know you warned me. Anything we can do to disassociate us from this garbage in as obvious a way as possible? An ‘opinions expressed’ line? Sounds great.”

Via The Loop, a nice post by Louie Mantia on skeuomorphism. I’ve written in the past about Apple’s heavy use of textures on iOS, defending such decisions and also highlighting what can happen when the other extreme (over the top minimalism) is instead used.

Mantia rightly notes that a lot of what people are complaining about as ‘skeuomorphism’ is in fact simply custom textures integrated with standard interface design, because something skeuomorphic is supposed to have a connection with an older/familiar way of doing things. Therefore, a direct translation of some music hardware—knobs and all—to the iPad is clearly skeuomorphic. Find My Friends, with its leather stitching, is not, because you never used to use your leather stitched ‘thing’ to find your friends. Unless you were a serious weirdo in a leather suit, often getting arrested on ‘scaring the shit out of people’ charges.

However, the part of Mantia’s post that really struck with me was this:

More importantly, a visually distinctive app such as Game Center, Find My Friends, Podcasts, or iBooks helps you to remember which app you’re in. The colors, textures, and environment paint that picture instantly.

As I’ve said in the past, I find it strange people now see Jony Ive’s shift to looking after all of Apple’s human interface as an indication that future software will be as minimal as the hardware. If that is the case, either they don’t understand Ive or—more worryingly—Ive doesn’t understand good software design. I don’t have a problem with Apple perhaps toning down some of its excesses, but to remove every texture and all the fun from its software and head towards Office 2013-style minimalism would be the wrong decision.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with somewhat minimal design when it’s the best decision for the app in question (such as Letterpress), but as a default it would make it difficult for people to immediately know what application they are in. On OS X, people have complained enough about Apple removing colour from Finder, and removing textures entirely from iOS would be rather similar. Also, the point of iOS hardware is that it is a blank canvas—it’s designed to get out of the way and enable the device to become the application or game that is running. But in making apps extremely minimal, Apple would be in danger of painting shades of white on its blank canvas, which won’t excite anyone and would even cause minimalist advocates to rapidly start griping that iOS was now boring and less usable.

It’s hard to expect too much from a TechCrunch op-ed, but there’s no denying this headline grabbed my attention: The Post Post-PC Era: Will Apple, Google, Samsung, Amazon Or Microsoft Win? I wasn’t expecting answers—I’m not crazy—but I was expecting at least a slice of BWUH? from former something or other for Oracle, Peter Relan.

To be fair to Relan, he doesn’t spend his entire time frothing at the mouth over Android marketshare, nor suggesting that Tim Cook should set fire to his eyebrows and let Jony Ive run the Cupertino show. However, he does smack into a wall when trying to predict the ‘winner’ in tablet device distribution channels:

Though Apple owns the market now, Samsung will likely push ahead since the brand seems to be out-innovating Cupertino and may continue to do so on tablets.

That’s a pretty vague statement. Out-innovating Apple how, exactly? Is this a general claim, in which case it’s pretty difficult for Samsung to out-innovate Apple without some kind of time machine, where its designers can scoot back into the past and come out with its iOS device clones before Apple even releases its own products. (Hint to Samsung: Apple’s Time Machine is merely back-up software, not an actual time machine. You’ll have to look elsewhere or, heaven forbid, actually invent one of your own.)

If we’re talking strict distribution channels, I also fail to see where Samsung is out-innovating Apple. It’s certainly out-spending Apple, and it’s also out-flinging-stuff-at-walls-and-seeing-what-sticks-ing Apple, through selling approximately eight billion different devices. This potentially gives Samsung more widespread distribution in certain markets simply through being (in some cases) cheaper—a race-to-the-bottom that’s worked so well in the PC industry. By contrast, the iPad’s available in Apple’s growing number of genuinely innovative stores, along with being possible to buy from countless other stores worldwide. There’s also now the iPad mini, grabbing a chunk of the lower end of the market.

Still, perhaps Relan is right and Samsung will soon truly out-innovate Apple—once Apple releases something new and innovative that Samsung can innovate from in an innovative fashion.

Rob Griffiths recently penned a piece for Macworld, grumbling about Mountain Lion. He tore into two aspects of the OS: Apple’s tendency towards removing colour, and its decision to mess about with scrolling. On colour, I absolutely agree with Griffiths: colour is regularly used by people to rapidly differentiate objects. Cognitive load is lowered, enabling you to get to something far more quickly and efficiently. This is a trend in Apple’s interface design I’d like to see reversed, and perhaps it will be if the no-longer monochrome prefs icons in iTunes 11 are anything to go by.

The other points in the piece centre on scrolling. First up, hidden scrollbars:

Of these changes the invisible scroll is the worst: an invisible scroll bar is a useless scroll bar. Without a visible scroll bar, a user is required to take action to reveal the fact that a dialog or window contains additional information.

This is something that used to annoy me about iOS, and I thought it would drive me nuts on OS X. In reality, it’s bothered me little. Perhaps it’s because I’ve often attached the idea of scrolling to pages, and pages are rarely relevant any more. Perhaps it’s because in the majority of cases, it’s obvious if there’s more content outside of your view (due to the way in which it’s cropped). Maybe OS X’s little ‘scroll preview’ that pops up on opening an item that’s bigger than the viewport is enough for me. Who knows?

Where I very much disagree with Griffiths is on the subject of scroll direction.

The backwards scrolling also drives me crazy; Apple calls this “natural” scrolling, while I call it “insanely stupid scrolling.” The change was made to match the way people scroll iOS devices. However, interaction on an iOS device is directly with the screen, and it makes logical sense that the content moves the direction your finger moves.

I don’t see the opposite as being any more logical on OS X. It’s certainly what people have been used to for a long time, but I’d say Apple’s ‘natural’ scrolling makes at least as much sense. The old system evolved from you manually dragging a scrollbar. This was further abstracted on laptops that made it possible to scroll a viewport without you having to bother with clicking on the actual scroll bar. Therefore, your cursor could be over some content, and you’d be two-finger scrolling, updating the position of the scrollbar, which updated what you saw in the viewport.

The current system is simpler: you’re manipulating content. This is how things always worked on iOS, but with multitouch trackpads being extremely commonplace on Macs (since laptops are by far the most common type of Mac sold, and trackpads are also a built-to-order option for laptops), it makes perfect sense to me. You push up and the content moves up. You pull down and the content moves down. This isn’t backwards at all—and you can still, if you want, grab the scrollbar and move content that way. (Additionally, you can go into System Preferences and click [x] I HATE CHANGE—possibly actually labelled ‘scroll direction’—if you like.) As a sanity check, I asked my parents about this, whose Macs were recently ‘forcibly’ upgraded to OS X Mountain Lion when I got sick of doing Snow Leopard support. “Oh, it makes much more sense,” said my dad, dismissing any notion in my mind that scroll direction was a big deal for the most part.

On Twitter, David Marsden asked me for some thoughts on his piece on upcoming Apple kit. As is almost law these days, the Apple TV got a mention, with Marsden quoting The Loop’s Jim Dalrymple on a formal launch of an Apple television product.

Nope.

Marsden subsequently mulled over the possibility of an Apple TV SDK, and suggests that could start a progression towards a fully-fledged TV unit:

Let it sink in what the platform is about, then release the SDK at WWDC with big players on day one [… and] start the ground work for a fully fledged TV system late this year, or early next.

I’ve on occasion been very wrong about Apple in the past. I don’t still have a link, but one ex-MacUser wag once dug up my scathing dismissal of the original iPod, and I also once wrote about iPhone gaming, arguing it would end up floundering in the shadow of the DS and PSP. (Months later, I at least took my lumps and said “hey, what a total idiot I was” and set about yelling from the rooftops about iOS gaming at  every opportunity.)

The idea of an Apple TV still makes no sense to me though. Apple makes money on regular hardware refreshes. It would have to convince people to refresh televisions every two or three years. This is a very big ask. Marsden on Twitter suggested Apple would “need to have it as a screen with a swappable Apple TV brain”, but that runs counter to the Apple of today, which won’t even let consumers upgrade RAM in their laptops. The idea of enabling consumers to increase the longevity of an expensive unit by offering an inexpensive upgrade sounds more Windows PC than Apple TV.

Also—and importantly—the more interviews I do with media folk, gamers and the like, the more people talk about the ‘second screen’ taking over from the first. I don’t imagine televisions will vanish from sitting rooms any time soon, but people are now increasingly likely to watch video on mobile devices, and so concentrating effort on better iPads, iPods and iPhones seems savvier than working on a standalone television unit.

However, the existing Apple TV remains an interesting component—a relatively cheap ‘link’ to get what’s on your iOS device on to the television the Apple TV is connected to. The box itself isn’t that impressive (its innards being roughly the same as a cheap iPod touch), but what it does is modularise the ‘smart’ bits of ‘smart TV’, while remaining cheap enough to upgrade on a semi-regular basis. Furthermore, the software itself can be updated whenever Apple wishes, adding new services and content. Now that sounds very Apple, hence, I guess, why Apple’s actually released the thing!

To that end, I still don’t see an actual television in Apple’s future. Perhaps on this subject I’m lacking in imagination, but it seems no better a market to enter into than making a games console—Apple’s existing products already overlap with traditional media, and there seem few—if any—advantages in spending many millions of dollars going up against existing players.

On the current Apple TV, I expect to see more services—primarily US-centric ones—being drip-fed out over the coming months and years. I do hope Apple improves that particular situation. Although AirPlay is very handy, too many companies stupidly block video feeds, meaning the obvious tactic of starting a show on your iOS device and firing it at your TV via the Apple TV is too often scuppered. Beyond that, there’s perhaps some scope for bettering gaming on the Apple TV (most notably, reducing lag), but with the majority of iOS titles designed for touch interaction on the screen you’re holding, anything created specifically for the Apple TV will almost need to be thought of as being aimed at a different system entirely.