Jony Ive

Just finished reading a book about Jony Ive, who’s the main industrial designer behind most of Apple’s hardware over the past 20 years. (And since Job’s death; all the software as well.) The book was written by a clearly devout fanboi, but still had a lot of great insight. The book gave me a lot of conflicting feelings. Because I love the fact that a company created a culture in which a singular vision of products could be developed. I love that a design philosophy was given the chance to overrule production, budget, engineering and tradition. Not because I think design is the most important thing in the universe, but because an experiment like that is a great object lesson. The fact that Apple has had such massive success coinciding with this process is fascinating.

My personal problem is that almost all my experience with Apple products have been frustrating, disappointing and baffling. Due to both the industrial design and software design. A prime example of this is the slick, smooth rounded backs that all portable Apple products have. It’s like they were purposefully designed to slip out of your hands. Now… I know that everyone gets a cover for these devises. But that completely negates Ive’s point in making them this way in the first place, which was for aesthetic reasons.

For better or for worse the Apple aesthetic -Jony's aesthetic- has become the de facto future aesthetic as evidenced in countless movies and tv shows. I just wish the fanatical devotion to external minimalism didn't end up pushing the complexity under the rug where users who want to do ANYTHING other than a very narrow, linear prescribed path have to pay the price.

As to the software design… 90% of my experience with Apple software is iTunes. I don’t think I need to say any more on that subject.

https://www.amazon.com/Jony-Ive-Genius-Greatest-Products-ebook/dp/B00C5R71U8?ie

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Epic Weekend

Image
Wow… I am worn out.  My team’s big project at work is live now, and we just released a big patch to fix some terrible difficulty spikes.  The last time we released Super Adventure Box: World 1 it got pretty universal praise.  (Which I put up here back in April)  Since then our founder/president has used it (Along with the Mad King Clock Tower I designed and built back in October 2012) as examples of content we release that raises retention rate, and therefore revenue.  So expectations were high for this World 2 release which came out on Tuesday.  The day after Labor Day and the Penny Arcade Expo.     Saturday (3 days before SAB World 2 launched) my company held a party at a hotel near PAX for fans, and my project, Super Adventure Box was the main feature.  We were running speed run competitions all night where players tried to be the first to get to the end of the new zones.  I ended up MCing the whole night.  I guess there’s a first time for everything.  Seems like people had a re
Read more

Covid: 4 Years Later

Image
Before I begin let me quickly sketch the readers I'm writing this for, so you can decide if it's worth your 10 minutes. Firstly, this is for those of you who are at least somewhat sympathetic to people who are still worried about Covid and are sincerely curious why we are this way. I'm trying to present our case as coherently as I can, with references. (As well as I, a not-quite-professional writer can.) I'd like to convince you our stance is not based on fear, hypochondria, conspiracy theory, etc. But based on peer reviewed science. I'm also writing for myself and other folks who are taking Covid very seriously. I'm an ambassador by nature, so I like to facilitate understanding between groups where there is none. Many in my cohort simply cannot fathom how most of the world is not seeing the problem. Here's the agenda. First I'll quickly cover history of this pandemic, then some of what the science says about infectious disease and protecting ourselves.
Read more

A Covid Mask Prediction

Image
In speaking with several other covid conscious people I got a very nicely detailed prediction I wanted to record for posterity. They do not want to be credited with this out of concern for messenger-shooting. So I asked them if I could post it here anonymously and they agreed. Anon:"We are going to have mask requirements. I've done the math on all the possible interventions, and masks are the only one which can get the Rt down below 1 and actually stop the pandemic. Without masks, you can't do it; the other tools put together just aren't good enough (the best one, air filtration, maxes out at 80% effective, and so does Far-UVC, and this simply isn't enough with the infectiousness of Covid -- short-range transmission, which neither intervention stops, will keep it going at pandemic levels). Therefore we're going to get masks. I don't know how many maskless people will die before we get masks. But the math is inescapable. We start using respirator masks. Or m
Read more