Obviously this has aged badly overall, but I think this is quite interesting and insightful:
I was having lunch today with a good friend of mine, Ross Carlson, and we were lamenting how Apple creates innovative products, but then only implements that innovation to a very limited extent. Yes, the iPhone has a finger-based gesture interface. And the image rotates on the screen, but only for a limited set of applications like the Safari browser and displaying pictures. Many applications on the iPhone aren't "rotation aware" apps. Even WM6 supports rotation of the interface no matter what the application.
That’s true, handling rotation correctly on iOS was always a bit of a pain, even though it’s a key feature of the platform! It’s really quite similar to the original Mac OS, where despite having a rich toolkit of functions for the famous UI, you had to jump through a ton of hoops to actually implement a properly Mac-like app.
And yet both the iPhone and the original Mac have lots of really well-written apps that work hard to adhere to the UI guidelines. It’s like Apple (at their best) sets an example to developers of what a high-quality UI should be like, rather than providing them with great tools, and developers are happy to put in the extra work to make their apps good.
I was having lunch today with a good friend of mine, Ross Carlson, and we were lamenting how Apple creates innovative products, but then only implements that innovation to a very limited extent. Yes, the iPhone has a finger-based gesture interface. And the image rotates on the screen, but only for a limited set of applications like the Safari browser and displaying pictures. Many applications on the iPhone aren't "rotation aware" apps. Even WM6 supports rotation of the interface no matter what the application.
That’s true, handling rotation correctly on iOS was always a bit of a pain, even though it’s a key feature of the platform! It’s really quite similar to the original Mac OS, where despite having a rich toolkit of functions for the famous UI, you had to jump through a ton of hoops to actually implement a properly Mac-like app.
And yet both the iPhone and the original Mac have lots of really well-written apps that work hard to adhere to the UI guidelines. It’s like Apple (at their best) sets an example to developers of what a high-quality UI should be like, rather than providing them with great tools, and developers are happy to put in the extra work to make their apps good.