[OT] More Apple Foolishness

[Chipp Walters]

Well, turns out with a little digital sleuthing, we can find out exactly
what Tog thinks, and he's pretty much thinking the same thing:


"In Part 1, I discussed the ill-effects to the Macintosh of Apple's Flatland
aesthetic, a visual simplicity that threatens to bury Apple's users with
unnecessary clutter and complexity."

and at:
http://www.asktog.com/columns/076AppleFlatlandPart2.html

iPhone/iPod Touch Home Screen

You'll see the now familiar Flatland ethic on the home screen of the iPhone
and iPod Touch, where it's impossible to, for example, drag all your games
into a folder. Instead, you are offered eight distinct, flat, unlabeled
pages that you must spin back and forth through in search of that one
elusive program.

Apple has thus created eight faithful copies of the Windows ‘95 desktop,
where new icons cling to the uppermost, leftmost corner of the screen like
helium balloons in a leftward-blowing wind.

At least with Windows ‘95, you could also have folders, not just Apps and
documents, on the desktop—not where you wanted them, true, but at least they
were there. However, the iPhone/iPod Touch desktop doesn’t even allow
folders, part and parcel of the endless prairie of Flatland.

This flatness mania is damaging Apple developers. When the App Store first
opened, I was buying everything. I’ve now stopped buying. I no longer have
anything I want to throw away and nowhere to put anything new. I’m an early
(and compulsive) adopter, but millions of others will soon reach this same
point. The gold rush is going to suddenly be over, and it has nothing to do
with people getting bored or the Apps becoming less interesting.
(See, "Right Study, Wrong Prediction," below.) It’s just that Apple has
failed to give people a means of storing what they might buy.

To copy such a poor example of design as the Windows ‘95 desktop, ten-plus
years later, is almost unbelievable, and I’m quite confident that, as with
George Harrison copying “She’s So Fine” when composing ‘My Sweet Lord,” it
was inadvertent. However, it was also naive and misplaced, and it needs to
be corrected before Apps sales collapse on their developers.