You might have noticed that Jony Ive recently got knighted, and he spoke to the Telegraph about all things design. Naturally, he was asked about Apple’s software design, including iCal’s nasty stitched UI. He apparently winced a bit, but diplomatically offered the following quote:

My focus is very much working with the other teams on the product ideas and then developing the hardware and so that’s our focus and that’s our responsibility. In terms of those elements you’re talking about, I’m not really connected to that.

Initially, this seems surprising—Apple’s hardware and software people being so separate. However, the perceived clash between Apple’s minimal hardware and increasingly ‘real world’ software interfaces actually stem from the same foundation of usability. In other words, both methodologies are designed to make things easier for users—the hardware should get out of the way, and the software should be welcoming, intuitive and, where possible, familiar. Apple certainly doesn’t always succeed in terms of software UI design, but in aping real-world items, it often gives users a head-start they wouldn’t otherwise have (while simultaneously typically infuriating tech-savvy users).

Quite how Jesus Diaz extrapolated this into What Jony Ive Wishes He Could Say About Apple’s User Interfaces, I don’t know. There’s quite a lot of projection within his piece, and he bangs on about the usual things people (including myself) have banged on about in the past, but it’s clear Apple has fairly set thinking regarding software interfaces, and it’s not about to follow Microsoft down the path of UI minimalism. Sales figures suggest the company’s right, but the way things are—and Ive’s quote—doesn’t suggest Ive himself wants to kick Scott Forstall in the face. It just suggests that Apple’s got what the company perceives as the right person on hardware and the right person on software.

Over at Daring Fireball, John Gruber seems quite convinced about the latest iPhone rumours, which claim the device will move to a 16:9 display, which in portrait will be 9:16. On Gizmodo, Jesus Diaz wrote a rebuttal to this rumour, making salient arguments: no-one’s been screaming for this; the iPhone still outsells other smarphones; fragmentation would be introduced; universal apps would be tough, because 16:9 is further from the iPad’s 4:3 display than the current iPhone’s 3:2.

Of course, some people have been clamouring for a larger iPhone screen, but as far as I can tell, these are the reasons:

• Video would be in full widescreen, without black bars (if not necessarily 720p).
• Bigger screens are better, just because.
• Everyone else is doing it, and, more specifically, it’s what those Android guys do.

These don’t seem particularly compelling arguments to me, and if Gruber’s right in the next iPhone sporting a screen that effectively adds 176 or so pixels to the top of the display (making it 1136 × 640 rather than 960 × 640), you get black bars around all non-optimised apps, and those that are optimised will require more work for developers. Fixed-width apps (i.e. many games, most interactive books, lots of music-creation apps, and so on) will require another bespoke layout. Games that are more flexible (3D racers, say, or 2D action puzzlers like Angry birds that have scrolling levels) will require clever gameplay balancing and plenty of testing regarding any on-screen controls. Even ‘flexible’ apps will require a ton of usability testing and optimisation. In many cases, the ‘extra’ space would be largely empty, because filling it with something important would risk alienating every single current iPhone and iPod touch user.

For more flexible apps, there could be minor benefits—an extra tweet, an extra couple of lines of text—but 16:9/9:16 is sub-optimal for books, magazines, photos and other content types, and so it strikes me as a strange decision. Gruber argues:

I suspect the answer is, why not? The design tension in post-iPhone mobile phones is between screen size (where bigger is better) and device size (where smaller is better). You want a physical device that is small enough to fit easily in your pockets and is comfortable and easy to use while holding it in one hand.

But I still simply say: why?

.net’s currently running an interview I did with Jeffrey Zeldman, one of the most famous web designers of them all. The piece regards his recent redesign, which has proved divisive. On first seeing it, I was certainly taken aback by the MASSIVE TEXT and the seriously stripped-back layout. But then on mulling it over for a bit, I decided not only that I liked it, but that the redesign of my own blog probably needed another look.

Oddly, my own unreleased redesign chimes in part with what Zeldman says in the interview. I now do most of my reading in Instapaper and that’s because it strips crap from web pages, and the new layout I’d crafted went part-way there, if not quite as far as Zeldman did. It needs to go further.

To be fair, this blog at least doesn’t have much crap, but it has a few things that are essentially irrelevant (not least the search, which does a worse job than Google at getting relevant content). Elsewhere, though, the web is frequently a mess, with sites bombarding us with tiny text and adverts. The take-home, ultimately, of the Zeldman interview is this:

If we don’t focus on the content the reader came for—if we continue to bombard and bamboozle our users with cluttered interfaces that satisfy stakeholder committees but frustrate the people who actually want to use our sites—our users will retaliate by removing our designs altogether.

In a sense, it’s about the same things that make for good design everywhere: focus; elegance; simplicity. Websites shouldn’t be the modern equivalent of a broadsheet newspaper—cramped design; tiny text; ads peppered about the place. They should be beautiful, usable and, where relevant, entirely new. It’s time to cut the apron strings from media’s past.

BBC technology reporter argues Apple will want to forget the new iPad. Bar the conclusion to his piece that infuriatingly dredges up the “Apple needs to fire magic unicorns at the market with the new iPhone or it will appear rudderless and DOOMED” notion, the rest of the piece has some good points. He notes that the new iPad is in some ways a ‘backwards step’, notably in being heavier than its predecessor. (Although Lee’s comment that it’s too heavy—something he states four times in two small paragraphs, just in case you missed it, ignores the new iPad being lighter than the original one. The weight might be a problem for iPad 2 users, but anyone—like me—upgrading from the original will wonder what all the fuss is about.) Lee also adds that Newsstand leaves him cold, that apps are bloating, iMessage is a damp squib, and iCloud is annoying regarding its upgrade nags. I would add to his points that the new device does get noticeably warm, and I very much agree that Apple really needs to figure out how to serve delta updates for iOS apps, because downloading massive game and app updates is getting really old.

On Twitter, Lee argued the following when we were discussing his piece:

It’s a progress thing, I think. For the first time, they prioritised power over usability

It’s here where I very much disagree. With the new iPad, Apple prioritised one thing: the display. That’s it. Everything in the device—including the compromises—is designed to get that Retina display up and running, and that’s not about power. In fact, with the display being the thing you view and interact with—the device effectively becoming the app that’s being run—the update was entirely about usability.

The new iPad isn’t perfect, and there are clear compromises, but in hindsight you can say the same about many Apple products. It is, however, a step up in the one standout feature that matters most, and to that end while I don’t think the new iPad will be remembered as Apple’s Best Product Ever™, I can’t imagine the company will want to forget all about it either.

I’ve owned a lot of computers in my time, but only one of my own PCs. It was a heap-of-junk Acer laptop that I had to buy to work on PC mags, and, well, I hated it. It was bulky, badly made and had an annoying amount of pre-installed crap. Luckily, WSJ reports that pre-installed crap might soon be a thing of the past—if you live near a Microsoft Store and are willing to pay $99 to have it removed from your shiny new PC.

Coming from the Apple side of the PC fence, this article really is an eye-opener. It’s bonkers that Microsoft’s felt the need to offer a marketed ‘Signature’ line of PCs, which

retain the maker’s brand, but sport a special Signature desktop and configuration

—which essentially means ‘crap free’. That the vendors didn’t think “hey, maybe users don’t want loads of adverts and other junk on their desktops”—well…

Elsewhere, we see similar problems affecting smartphones and tablets. Android manufacturers are known for pre-installing garbage on devices, in order to differentiate their models from those offered by the competition. But while the occasional special offer might chime with some users, most don’t want demos and other rubbish clogging up their shiny new hardware, especially when such things are often hard or impossible to remove.

Crap-free in technology shouldn’t be an option—it should be the default. Apple comes close in this regard, but it isn’t perfect either. iOS has pre-installed apps from Apple but nothing from third-parties. However, Apple’s apps (Stocks, Compass, Voice Memos, and so on) can’t be removed from the Home screen—Apple should provide a Settings toggle for doing so. By contrast, OS X is at least essentially crap-free, and when Apple has preinstalled a demo in the past (such as with iWork), it’s just a question of dragging a folder to the trash if you don’t want it. This is a long way from, as mentioned in the WSJ article, a SOny EH37FX (snappy name!) that

included an app from Best Buy that launched every time the PC started

Classy.

Via: Daring Fireball.