OS X Lion and now OS X Mountain Lion (due out this summer) showcase that Apple’s increasingly interested in building global and focussed systems across its various devices. Some pundits misunderstand Apple’s ‘Back to the Mac’ approach as a medium-term goal to merge OS X and iOS. Really, Apple’s instead moving to a place where the OS itself doesn’t matter so much as the equalisation of services, such as messaging, the syncing of notes, and so on.

But one of the big wins on iOS that’s coming ‘Back to the Mac’ is a sense of focus. As desktop PCs have grown in power and monitors have gotten bigger, we’ve rapidly moved from an environment for work to one of distraction. It’s far too easy to end up with a monitor full of windows, each fighting for attention, the net result being that no single window (and therefore no specific task) ever gets your full focus.

As of Lion, Apple introduced a full-screen mode for apps. This went beyond the kind of full-screen mode found in operating systems such as Windows by taking over the entire screen (not even leaving a menu bar or app launcher visible) and also, in the case of well-designed applications, adjusting the interface to be more appropriate for a full-screen view. On first installing Lion, I wasn’t entirely convinced by this new feature, not least due to having a 27-inch iMac, which made many apps in full-screen mode look ridiculous. But the sense of focus was useful, and I started using a handful of apps—Scrivener, WriteRoom, iCal, Mail—in full-screen mode, and I was thoroughly enjoying the experience.

And then I got sick.

Something abruptly went twang in my brain, and I realised I was getting dizzy quite a lot of the time. It took about a day before I realised that I was getting motion sickness from the full-screen transitions in OS X Lion. (I didn’t realise this more quickly, simply because I’d never previously had motion sickness.) I suddenly realised how heavily eye-straining animations are used within Lion, and tried avoiding them entirely. The result of this: significantly less dizziness.

Animations and animated transitions in operating systems are something that’s becoming increasingly common, and Apple’s a huge fan of them. Often, they are extremely useful, because they provide an indication of something that’s just happened or that’s happening right now. That might sound laughable, but for a newcomer to computing, this is a major advantage over the ‘instant’ interface responses older operating systems offered. The problem is that Lion is full of sliding—aside from switching apps in full-screen mode, you also have things like Preview, where moving between pages slides between them, and slide-based navigation in Safari.

From a default standpoint, I’m still not against these animations/transitions, because they are informative and give someone using OS X a sense of spatial awareness in a virtual space. In the case of a page of a PDF sliding upwards, you know which direction to go to get that page back. Similarly, if apps slide around in full-screen mode as you switch between them, you remember which app is where and can easily navigate to it. The problem is that there is no alternative. Whereas the Dock gives you Scale and Genie effects (along with the ‘hidden’ Suck), the sliding in Lion cannot be replaced with something that’s easier on the eyes, such as a cross-fade.

I realise that I’m an edge case, but I’ve received messages on Twitter and by email from people who have similar problems. I’m also currently working on a website for a charity that deals with people who have motion problems, and they’ve said that any scrolling can cause those they care for to have major dizziness issues. To that end, Lion—or at least many of Lion’s features—is entirely inappropriate for them, and that’s sad in an operating system that otherwise strives so hard to be broadly accessible.

I’m not sure what the solution is, and I don’t hold out any hope that Mountain Lion will help me. Apple is, after all, a company that reduces rather than increases options and very much takes a ‘this is right’ approach. I’ve sent feedback to Apple and done that thing and written to Tim Cook, explaining the problem. But I’d love to download Mountain Lion this summer and at least have the option to adjust the transitions that are adversely affecting me and, it seems, other Mac users. By all means leave the defaults as they are, but a crossfade replacement for sliding—even if it’s something you have to activate via Terminal—would be the most ‘magical’ thing Apple could offer me this summer.

Further reading (April 17): ReSpaceApp could solve OS X Lion motion sickness problems.

Via Fraser Speirs, an article by Alan J Reid called Instructional Designers Wanted: No Experience Necessary:

Apple recently unveiled its digital book-authoring program, iBooks Author, and I’m scared.

The last three years that I have dedicated to pursuing my Ph.D. in instructional design & technology, which centers on interactive digital text, have given me a new perspective on the delicate balance that is necessary for classroom technologies to be productive and fruitful rather than novel and superficial. The seemingly endless hours that I have spent reading journal articles, writing papers, reading book chapters, taking in lectures, reading conference proceedings, and reading some more, have left me feeling as though I have earned some sort of badge that licenses me to make qualified observations about new educational technologies.

But that’s just the problem; you don’t need to be qualified. iBooks Author allows any Apple user to design and develop an interactive, multitouch textbook. No design experience necessary.

Reid’s text echoes concerns we’ve seen in practically every single industry where digital has marched (and, sometimes, blundered) in and opened up that particular discipline. We’ve heard the same arguments in desktop publishing, photography and web design, and now we’re hearing it about textbooks.

I can’t deny that user-friendly digital products can make things tougher for professionals, because there’s a line of thinking that ‘anyone can do it’. But here’s the thing: eventually, enough companies come to the realisation that everyone can’t do it. I’m seeing graphic designers I know getting more work of late as companies stop faffing about creating their own botched attempts at marketing material and instead get professional designers to produce it. And online, web designers are once again finding that companies are understanding that, no, the MD’s nephew armed with an old copy of FrontPage isn’t the best way to present themselves to the world. These things are always cyclical, with professions mostly reverting to the pros—or at least those professionals who truly are great at what they do.

But that doesn’t mean we should ever rally against opening up creative pursuits to the masses. The fact that anyone can now make a website, or publish some photos, or—in the case of iBooks Author—create an interactive book is a fantastic thing. It means some people will find talents they never knew they had; others may be able to fill niche gaps that professionals and publishers cannot or will not; and in cases where funds simply aren’t available, I’d sooner someone bashes together a (hopefully) factually accurate digital book with perhaps less-than-optimal design using iBooks Author than have those they are teaching go without.

In short, empowering the masses is great; but there will always be room for good designers for things that need good design.

Pocket Link’s Paul Lamkin, quoting Samsung AV product manager Chris Moseley on a possible Apple TV:

We’ve not seen what they’ve done but what we can say is that they don’t have 10,000 people in R&D in the vision category. They don’t have the best scaling engine in the world and they don’t have world renowned picture quality that has been awarded more than anyone else. TVs are ultimately about picture quality. Ultimately. How smart they are… great, but let’s face it that’s a secondary consideration. The ultimate is about picture quality and there is no way that anyone, new or old, can come along this year or next year and beat us on picture quality.

“PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

Late last year, I wrote about the increasingly absurd nature of IAP (in-app purchase) on iOS. The subject was Hipstamatic Disposable, which offered a bizarre pricing model that made you buy new and shiny virtual digital film for your new and shiny virtual digital film camera. I joked that we’d soon see driving games were you had to fill up your car with fuel, matching prices to the real world, just to enhance the realism. Several devs responded on Twitter, with at least some degree of seriousness, that I shouldn’t be giving certain publishers ideas.

The thing is, I’m not against IAP entirely, since it can be used for good. For example, it’s a great way to offer new content, or a ‘demo’ of a game that can be unlocked once you complete a few levels; it’s also a means to enable gamers to skip ahead through buying extras (i.e. cheats), which is fair enough if your difficulty curve is well-defined. The problem is that too many companies are now using IAP to gouge customers; they look at the top-grossing charts and see grind games performing well and therefore implement grind-or-pay mechanisms of their own. The vicious cycle continues, even infecting classic games like Tetris.

If you’ve not yet played it, the new Tetris for iPhone and iPod has the most astonishingly bat-shit crazy IAP possible. The sad thing is the game itself is, in my opinion, really good. You get a standard sub-optimal swipe mode, but also a new one-touch version that retains the game’s strategy but works well with the touchscreen. Additionally, there’s a compelling level-based puzzle mode that has you blast your way to the bottom of piles of junk. I’ve not had so much fun with a Tetris game since the version released for the original Game Boy.

But EA had to weld IAP to the game and ruin things. The puzzle mode has power-ups and these are paid for using T-Coins. You can either get T-Coins by grinding away scoring in the main mode, or by paying cold, hard cash. 200,000 T-Coins? A snip at $99.99! That’s a $99.99 IAP. For Tetris. Or you could ‘just’ pay $29.99 for a 12-month T-Club subscription, which earns you 15 per cent more T-Coins with every game! That’s right: for just 43 times more than the game itself costs, you can get a slight speed bump to how fast you acquire coins to spend elsewhere in the game. Of course, you don’t have to pay, but without doing so, you’re effectively screwed in the puzzle mode when it comes to decent scores and ratings (which is essentially what any iOS puzzler is about).

This is hateful, but it’s becoming all too common in the iOS gaming world. We now see freemium sports games that demand you pay for more ‘energy’ that is otherwise replenished at a painfully slow rate. And similar mechanics are evident in other genres, too. To my mind, this is the greatest threat to iOS gaming, which could become known not for great games, but for the fact it costs tens of dollars to buy yourself a right to play a bit of a game, but only for a set (and short) period of time, regardless of your level of skill and investment to that point.

I’m really not sure what the solution is. I’d started off thinking about 1980s arcades, which rewarded skill, in the sense that you still paid per play, but the better you got, the longer you stayed on the machine. The thing is, such ‘hardcore’ mechanics would alienate many contemporary gamers, who don’t expect to be booted off a game for not having perfect reflexes. But ‘pay for a slice of time’ in a more general sense feels even more like a corruption of gaming’s purity. Perhaps it’s a sign of the times and of my age. Music continues a move towards a subscription model, with you paying monthly for as much music as you can take in, rather than owning a more limited number of albums forever; television and movies, too, increasingly drift towards such models. But I still fear for gaming when instead of you paying a sum of money upfront for a finite slice of entertainment, you’re instead presented with absurd difficulty curves or arbitrary limitations that can only be overcome by delving into your wallet. And even then, you’ll be expected to delve at regular intervals.

I hope this is just a blip. I hope that the efforts of indies such as Zach Gage and Jeff Minter, both of which offer fantastic iOS games for set prices, encourage other developers to take this path, rather than gouging. But every month I see more developers dipping a toe into the freemium waters, under the guise of ‘social gaming’ or ‘value’, when what they’re really doing is hoping our wallets will chunder coin vomits into their banking toilets.

I wrote about the recent Path cock-up for .net earlier this week. The short version is that a dev was making a Path client for OS X and realised the iOS app was uploading his entire address book to Path’s servers. Path has since nuked all data it took and made the process opt-in, although the CEO had previously argued:

This is currently the industry best practice and the App Store guidelines do not specifically discuss contact information.

Since then, it’s been discovered that uploading your contacts isn’t an uncommon practice, and this led UI designer Dustin Curtis to say:

I fully believe this issue is a failure of Apple and a breach of trust by Apple, not by app developers. The expectation of Address Book privacy is obvious; in fact, one person on Hacker News, in response to learning about Path’s use of the data, said, “Apple would never do this to their users.” Because Apple has your trust and yet gives this private information freely to developers, Apple does do this to their users. All of them.

I find this argument outrageous. Apple’s terms state:

17.1: Apps cannot transmit data about a user without obtaining the user’s prior permission and providing the user with access to information about how and where the data will be used

17.2: Apps that require users to share personal information, such as email address and date of birth, in order to function will be rejected

But more to the point, why should Apple become a watchdog for the less-than-moral behaviour of some developers? Just because you can do something, that doesn’t mean you should. And if your app is grabbing and uploading personal data, you should figure out whether this is absolutely necessary, and also decide on how you’re going to inform the user that this is happening. It isn’t Apple’s job to stop you or make the decision about how you handle such data—that’s your job as a trustworthy developer.

Update: Ben Brooks disagrees:

If you live and play in the Apple world, you need only trust Apple. This is what Apple tells us — it’s a ‘feature’ of the Apple ecosystem.

The fact is, that in this instance, Apple broke that trust.

I’m not sure what the alternative is. No access to the data? Access only on opt-in (which people tap anyway, regardless and without thinking, and that drives admins bonkers)? But my point stands that Curtis’s argument that this is all down to Apple and not down to devs, despite the existing Apple terms, is hogwash.