Here we go again. The New York Times asks Will Apple’s Culture Hurt the iPhone? Cue: the usual arguments about how Android’s going to pound Apple’s head into the dirt, because—shock!—Android marketshare is about to leapfrog iOS and there are a billion different devices to choose from.

Newsflash one: Apple doesn’t care about the low-end fights where most of this marketshare battle is taking place. It cares about profits. As the PC industry as shown, marketshare counts for shit, unless you’re also making money from what you’re selling. Apple, by comparison, makes money hand over fist with a relatively small chunk of the market. The same would happen if iOS lost a decent-sized chunk of its mobile share.

Newsflash two: Having ‘only’ one device isn’t a drawback—it’s in many ways a benefit. It simplifies things. Customers dither when faced with choices, and many then take the choice to not buy anything. Also, fewer hardware variations typically means tighter software integration and robust devices.

So, New York Times, to answer your question: Will Apple’s Culture Hurt the iPhone? No.

BBC News reports that Gap’s scrapping its new logo a week after introducing it, after thousands of people told them it was utter bollocks. They cunningly binned a well-known, iconic logo and replaced it with generic, dull type that had a blue square behind it. Or did they?

The more I look into this story, the more it reeks of a PR stunt. Scrap a logo, replace it with something that looks like it was knocked up by a junior web designer, wait for the vitriol, get publicity. And then, when the ranting’s at its loudest, say the following:

We’ve been listening to and watching all of the comments this past week. We heard them say over and over again they are passionate about our blue box logo, and they want it back.

So we’ve made the decision to do just that—we will bring it back across all channels.

Those are the words of Mark Hansen, president of Gap Brand North America, who didn’t go on to say: “Ha! We pulled the wool over your eyes, didn’t we, you stupid idiots.”

Mind you, he did add a rather worrying point that suggested maybe this wasn’t a stunt and that Gap really doesn’t know its arse from its elbow regarding branding. He said Gap “did not go about this in the right way” and “missed the opportunity to engage with the online community”. Er, what? The last thing you want to do is ‘engage with the online community’ regarding your branding, because the online community knows shit. All you’ll get are people moaning about any kind of change, or offering My First Logo™ designed in MS Paint, which they naturally think is also The Best Logo Ever™ and ignoring the fact that a logo and a brand aren’t the same thing.

When it comes to branding, engagement is key, but you talk to your customers about what they think your brand represents; you talk to your staff; you figure out what you’re trying to say. You don’t open it up to the world, creating a brand designed by the largest committee possible, otherwise you end up with something even worse and more watered down than what Gap was using until today.

As you may have noticed, this blog got a natty new theme last week. One of the things I wanted to do was make it hugely obvious which links have been followed. I therefore decided to style visited links with text-decoration: line-through. The thing is, this didn’t work. I was baffled, and so stood up, pointed to the sky and yelled: “TO THE GOOGLETRON!”

After my dog did his “what are you on?” face, I ended up finding Apple KB article HT4196, About the security content of Safari 5.0 and Safari 4. It says this:

WebKit

Impact: A maliciously crafted website may be able to determine which sites a user has visited

Description: A design issue exists in WebKit’s handling of the CSS :visited pseudo-class. A maliciously crafted website may be able to determine which sites a user has visited. This update limits the ability of web pages to style pages based on whether links are visited.

Further testing this morning regarding :visited suggests that the limits in WebKit are now severe. As far as I can tell, this is the list of properties now available to you when styling :visited in CSS:

• color

Great, huh? (Do leave a comment if you know of any others that work.) And with a good chunk of the world being colour-blind, what’s supposedly a fix for security is in reality also a punch in the face for accessibility.

I’ve just spent a happy half-hour reading through the entirety of The iPad Project over on Fraser Speirs’s blog. Amusing that at the end of day one, the kids had already figured out how to make mischief with their new devices:

We installed a drawing app – I forget which one but it might have been Doodle Buddy – that allows kids to collaborate on drawings over the network. The kids were fiddling around with this app when there was a knock on the door. “Errm….Mr Speirs? Are your children doing something to my class’s iPads?”

Turns out some kids had been joining shared whiteboards on iPads in the other classroom. Hilarity ensued, of course.

So I just installed iTunes 10 and… wow. This isn’t a good ‘wow’. It’s just a… wow. Here’s why:

Yup. Apple’s decided it’s been at least a few months since it screwed with the iTunes UI, and so it’s made some changes. Some of them actually work. There’s a decent ‘hybrid’ list view, and the main interface pane offers more clarity. However, two changes are mind-boggling:

1. iTunes previously coloured its sidebar items. This enabled you to—without thinking—associate certain items with certain colours; even if you didn’t do this, each item was differentiated. Now, you have to think before you click, and the usability of this area of the app has been substantially reduced.
2. The close/minimise/zoom buttons are now aligned vertically in the full window mode. In the mini-player window, this was always the case, but in the full window mode, it’s a baffling decision. Even though Mac OS X’s hardly a bastion of total consistency these days, these three important buttons usually stay put, and people’s muscle memory enables quick access to them. Now, iTunes 10 chucks Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines (the ones Apple seemingly expects every developer but itself to follow) out the window, in order to save a little horizontal space. However, this again reduces usability—not only are these buttons now in the wrong place, they’re also much smaller and harder to hit.

In the past, iTunes has foreshadowed subsequent updates to the look and feel of Mac OS X. I seriously hope that isn’t the case this time, because the iTunes 10 UI is a botch job—a collision of fairly good ideas (which are incremental updates) and the very worst in interface design. To that end, I wonder where all Apple’s best UI designers have gone. They’re certainly not on the iTunes team.

UPDATE: In the comments, mr_phillip writes: “For what it’s worth, defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -1 restores the default close/minimise buttons”. So at least Terminal-savvy Mac users have an option to deal with the second of Apple’s UI disasters.