I find humility in things like deciding to ship without copy/paste, or the decision to ship the initial phone without an SDK. These decisions are an implicit admission that the company wasn't able to get these things sufficiently polished or thought-through to include in a given iteration.
That's an interesting take. I've not thought of it that way. Apple doesn't include everything a device obviously should have in the first iteration but what it does include it does very well.
All of the iPad competitor devices absolutely suck at looking up the definition of a word in an ebook. (The ones I've tried that is.) On the iPad it is so simple, so intuitive, and quite fast. When they do something they do it well.
You don't understand that the Kindle is geared towards something very specific. Apple is building an entire OS. You can three-finger tap to get the dictionary, after highlighting, in iOS 5.
Sidenote: Apple views these gestures as the equivalent to keyboard shortcuts. For the end user you want to create the obvious so they won't be confused.
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I have to agree. It's been awhile since I've read something like this from him. Well-chosen words throughout the whole post.
The company is a fractal design. Simplicity, elegance, beauty, cleverness, humility.
Good text, but maybe not well-chosen words throughout the whole post. Humility is a little too much.
I find humility in things like deciding to ship without copy/paste, or the decision to ship the initial phone without an SDK. These decisions are an implicit admission that the company wasn't able to get these things sufficiently polished or thought-through to include in a given iteration.
That's an interesting take. I've not thought of it that way. Apple doesn't include everything a device obviously should have in the first iteration but what it does include it does very well.
All of the iPad competitor devices absolutely suck at looking up the definition of a word in an ebook. (The ones I've tried that is.) On the iPad it is so simple, so intuitive, and quite fast. When they do something they do it well.
Er, what? At least in the Kindle app on Honeycomb, you just long press a word to see its definition.
You don't understand that the Kindle is geared towards something very specific. Apple is building an entire OS. You can three-finger tap to get the dictionary, after highlighting, in iOS 5.
Sidenote: Apple views these gestures as the equivalent to keyboard shortcuts. For the end user you want to create the obvious so they won't be confused.
I don't think that select and three-finger-tap is anywhere close to obvious- doing anything with more than two fingers is already pretty rare on iOS.
Yep, I read using the Kindle app every day and since I am not a native english speaker I use this function a lot and it works quite well.