The Macalope‘s latest column for Macworld nicely sums up why people are so boneheadedly wrong with the whole ‘Android is Microsoft in the mobile wars’ thing:

Everyone wants to compare the Apple/Google mobile OS wars to the Apple/Microsoft desktop wars of the 1990s. But if Compaq ever got out of line, Microsoft always told them to go jump in a proverbial lake. And then it pushed them in an actual lake. Filled with sharks. A special breed of freshwater great white sharks that the company had genetically engineered for that particular purpose. And then it poured petroleum into the lake and lit it on fire.

He argues that Google being ‘forced’ by operators to do things like make Bing (instead of Google) the default (and sometimes impossible to change) search engine means Google’s a world away from Microsoft; it also highlights that Google has significantly less leverage than Microsoft had over PC vendors before mobile became so astonishingly important.

I’d add that it also seems that Google appears to have less leverage than Apple in this space. Can you imagine a carrier forcing Apple to install apps that can’t be deleted, or telling Apple to use Bing for search and also remove Google and Yahoo? Rumours at the moment reckon this is precisely what’s going to happen with a Verizon iPhone in the USA; frankly, I think hell will freeze over first. To that end, one might argue that the company closest to playing the role of Microsoft in the mobile wars is Apple.

So I just installed iOS 4.1 on my iPhone and started farting about with Game Center. Like Ping, it does make me wonder if Apple understands that when it comes to social networking, it’s best not to avoid the ‘social’ and ‘networking’ bits.

The good

Game Center has a pretty straightforward interface that shows up the likes of OpenFeint as being even more of a mess than you originally thought they were. I can take or leave (well, if I’m honest, leave; well, if I’m really honest, set fire to) the casino-like gambling table green-fuzz and wood visual appearance, but at least the navigation is fine.

The bad and the bonkers

In the case of Game Center, ‘the bad’ and ‘the bonkers’ are both the same thing. Currently, most of my social gaming happens on Facebook, but via iOS games that happily connect to my Facebook account. I sign in, and immediately I have an arcade-game-style high-score table, populated with my friends’ scores. It’s great, and it’s simple (one click and a sign-in).

Because Apple hates relying on others, it’s eschewed this approach, instead forcing you to go through a protracted set-up to get your Apple ID talking to Game Center, followed by an invite system that’s either by known username or by email (seriously).

The modern web and online services are entirely based around networking, and are successful when these services all talk to each-other. By sealing itself off from the rest of the world and existing social networking (be it Facebook, Twitter or other services), Game Center irks. I don’t doubt it’ll be a success—there are too many iOS gamers and excited developers for it not to be. But it is awkward, unwieldy and unnecessarily time-consuming to deal with, and these are direct opposites to the things Apple has historically been known for.

Update: Game Center also cunningly provides usernames only with friend requests. I’ve already had a request from someone who I’ve no idea who they are. Gnh.

Update 2: ‘The Rev’ writes in the comments: “It’d be nice if it worked, too – the Flight Control leaderboard is showing my first score today, not the better score from my next attempt and not my best score from before Game Center launched.” Oh dear. Follow-up-o-tron: “It’s actually my FIRST since GC – not best since. I’ve done better today and it’s not uploaded. Other people okay, though.” Fire up the Bug Kill Machine, Walter!

If you’re in education, go and read Fraser Speirs’ blog. Of late, it’s recounted his fascinating experiment of introducing iPads into the classroom for his young students. Inevitably, the Apple-hostile crowd has leapt on every article reporting on the story, and the national press has wrongly claimed that iPads are being used for everything in class, rather than as a supplementary tool; therefore, going to the source is your best bet.

Today, Speirs answers some of his critics, and the point I wanted to highlight was this one:

“Won’t the children lack ‘proper’ computer skills?”

This has been a criticism levelled at Speirs since he revealed the iPad experiment, and it is, frankly, utter bullshit. Think back to when you were at school. How does the technology compare to what you’re using today? In my case, rampaging as I am towards my mid-30s, I grew up with BBC Micros and then, in secondary school, the Acorn Archimedes. By sixth form, the school had some Macs in the graphics department, but both the hardware and software was a world away from even the technology I used at university (Macs for video editing, PCs for web access) and it certainly has little resemblance to what I work with today.

Even kids who grew up with PCs at school during the 1990s or later will find that many things have moved on. To that end, the only things that are really important are:

1. Providing the best environment for children to learn in, regardless of the technology. If PCs work for you, that’s fine; but if iPads (or some other tablets) engage the children more, and are more practical and manageable, by all means use them. Or have a mix of technology (as in Speirs’ school);
2. Ensuring that you’re teaching the children foundation skills in technical subjects, and that you use transparent software elsewhere. In other words, don’t teach software. Most applications in use today simply won’t exist in over a decade’s time when kids entering school leave education. However, fundamental skills (even in the likes of spreadsheet work, word processing, image manipulation and video editing) will always have some kind of analogue.

Speirs sums this up nicely in his article:

This is a constant tension in educational technology: do you teach for the current ‘business environment’ or do you teach for learning? I prefer the latter. I’m not doing this just to produce the next generation of cubicle fodder.

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.

Apple yesterday had another of its special events, which I noted would provide immediate disappointment with its open streaming that was only available to Snow Leopard-equipped Macs and iOS devices. (Good move, Apple! That’ll show Google and Adobe!)

As it turned out the event was, as usual, a mix of WOW, bleh, and eh? I was going to write a piece about it, but journo chum Adam Banks got there first and, spookily, his thoughts on what went on in San Fransisco yesterday mirror mine exactly. So, er, go and read Adam’s piece to see what I think about Apple’s announcements.