The cult of personality around Steve Jobs has mislead many. Articles looking to reminisce about his time at Apple in the mid-’80s tell big stories of his “mercurial asshole” tendencies. They overemphasize his insistence to simplify, and misstate it as “simplify until there’s nothing left”. It’s easy to forget that his early days at Apple could be summarized as “success in spite of himself”, and that he was fired from the company he co-founded.
The second Steve Jobs, the hitmaster at Pixar and Apple, is the one we should dissect and understand. Fast Company’s May 2012 cover story is about his “so-called wilderness years”. I can’t pull-quote it, because it’s a deep, arcing thematic discussion, not a series of punchy anecdotes. Go read it. The internet will still be here when you’re done, don’t worry.
If you didn’t read the Fast Company article yet, here’s a story about the Steve that no one should emulate.
Behind the Scenes of Apple’s ‘Think Different’ Campaign (via Buzz and implodr):
We played the spot once, and when it finished, Jobs said, “It sucks! I hate it! It’s advertising agency ****! I thought you were going to write something like ‘Dead Poets Society!’ This is crap!”
Clow said something like, “Well, I take it you don’t want to see it again.” And Steve continued to go on a rant about how we should get the writers from “Dead Poets Society” or some “real writers” to write something…
The original script we presented to Jobs is below. As you can see, it’s very close to the final script that would eventually go to air… “Jobs has seen a ton of scripts, and he’s gone full circle… we’re moving ahead with your ‘Crazy Ones’ script.”
Buzz Andersen discusses the Cult of Jobs at length, and has this to say:
The biggest thing that bothers me about the “Cult of Jobs” is that… people often seem to mistake the unfortunate, frequently counterproductive, side effects of the personality that made him great for the very cause of his greatness.
… An entire generation of entrepreneurs is learning the folkloric lesson that the secret to success is to be a mercurial asshole who abuses everyone and listens to no one.
There’s a reason people like Steve start successful companies: because they believe in themselves, envision their success unwaveringly, and don’t compromise. But there can be a dark side to that fanatical self belief: a disdain for the ideas of others.
I suspect one of the biggest [reasons for Steve’s late-in-life success at Apple] is that he finally managed to surround himself with brilliant people… who knew how to handle him, curb his worst tendencies, and present important ideas to him in a way that he would accept.
With those fresh in your mind as Steve Jobs, the CEO Anti-Pattern, read Fast Company’s story and round out your worldview.
Paintballing with Hezbollah
Mitchell Prothero, writing in Vice Magazine:
We figured they’d cheat; they were Hezbollah, after all. But none of us—a team of four Western journalists—thought we’d be dodging military-grade flash bangs when we initiated this “friendly” paintball match.
This is one of the most fascinating pieces about the Middle East I’ve read, well, possibly ever — certainly this year. Read every word.
Colin nerd-sniped with this at 1 AM a couple of days ago. I will never forgive him for it.
CEOs and the Candle Problem
A monetary reward will help your employees focus. That’s the point. When you’re focused you are less able to think laterally. You become dumber.
(via handbecomesclaw)
Face Hallucination
Machines simulating the human process of “up-rezzing” a face. Spooky, mostly. The Seinfeld example is particularly almost-right.
“The future we were promised, of living in space, of jetpacks and pellet foods, is simply not going to happen. … while we reject the macho dark survivalist future of envirotechnological collapse, we also must give up the NASA-Concorde extopia we have been pining for forever: these are the futures of an extinguished past, a worldline that didn’t work out, a dead end.”
“Hauntology is a coming to terms with the permanence of our (dis)possession, the inevitability of dyschronia.”
I’m in the midst of an adventure through the New Aesthetic. Pardon the pull quotes and half-structured thoughts and mumblings, I’ll make sense of it all soon enough.
“His explanation for why his novels have snapped to the now is that there’s not enough solid present around on which to erect a plausible future. There are too many wild cards around. Writing something set in 2060 demands you address so many issues that we know about now, but can’t imagine how they’ll pan out, that convincing prediction becomes impossible.”
Why New UI
iOS has been a playground for new and novel user interfaces for the last four years. Many experimental ideas for navigation and actions have been invented, and while not all of them have been intuitive enough to ship or stayed popular over time, many now-obvious and common interface elements started when one developer deciding to try something “a little different”. I’m not interested in writing a long-winded history of UI creation and evolution on iOS, though: instead, I’d like to examine one part of a new application in detail. I think there’s value in understanding the tiny changes between two similar applications, and in this particular case, it’s interesting to see a conscientious design decision forcing changes across an entire application.
Sparrow is a new email client on iOS. It has a couple significant interface and interaction differences for users accustomed to iOS’s Mail. While it may seem like rearranged furniture just to appear different, these small design changes had a measurable impact on how quick and easy it is to perform some actions.
I’ve used Mail on my iPhone and iPad for a long time. I have a deep hatred for the time devoted to the “throwing away this message” animation, since it prevents me from interacting with the application, and I still await the day I can create a mailbox or folder on an iOS device and not my Mac [Ed: mailbox creation was added in iOS 5.0]. I’m happy there’s a development studio that not only made a great mail client for iOS, but tried to one-up Apple’s efforts in many tiny ways. It’s valuable to look at a few of their changes in greater detail to understand the trade-offs made by each application.
Sparrow has a laundry list of features worth liking (I list mine in the Features Addendum), but there’s one change in particular that I love: it has no bottom toolbar. This has been a trend in iOS applications recently, and I support it: it maximizes how much screen is available for the main view of the application. To be more efficient than a standard toolbar or tab bar is easy: if you don’t devote 10% of the screen to static pixels, you’re in the lead. However, this requires a serious re-evaluation of each function performed by buttons or labels in those bottom bars. In Sparrow, removing the toolbar forced a basic rethinking of what each button does, when they’re most used, and where they should live.
There’s two places where Sparrow removed the toolbar: in the message list, like an inbox, and in the message view, when you’re reading an individual message.
The Message List Toolbar: to kill it without removing any functions that Mail contains, Sparrow needed to find a home for three items: a way to refresh the mailbox, a display of the refresh status, and a way to compose a message.
Refreshing the mailbox and the refresh status can be neatly combined and moved to the top of the messages list, into a pull-to-refresh header. Compose, interestingly, stayed put, but moved from having a roomy toolbar all to itself and into a floating Compose button.
The Message Toolbar is a much tougher interface item to remove: it has Refresh, File message to a mailbox, Archive or Delete message (depending on the account’s preference), Reply to message, and Compose a message.
Refresh, once again, is the easiest: simply kill it. (Why was this ever in a message view, I can only wonder.) Reply moves to the navigation bar. Compose, Archive, and some other functions migrated into a floating button similar to the one in the message view. When selected, that button shows a small pop-out bar that temporarily covers the space normally taken up by a toolbar. Compose and Archive are on this pop-out, along with a few actions that Mail lacks: Delete (which Mail only exposed if archiving was disabled for the account); a dedicated button for Forward; a dedicated button for Flag. (In Mail, Forward is an option under the reply sheet, and Flag is an option under “Mark”.)
These changes affect the number of taps required to perform these actions. Compose has gained a tap: tap to show the pop-out, tap to Compose. Forward has neither gained nor lost taps, but, by moving into the pop-out, it got out of the way and made Reply faster: Reply is now one tap instead of two. Flagging helped out Unread in a similar fashion: Flag is still two taps, but Read/Unread is fast. (Again.) (Before Mail supported flags, the message view’s unread indicator was a one-tap Read/Unread toggle. It was glorious.)
Now these small changes have had even more cascading effects. Filing of messages into a specific mailbox was removed from the message view, and has to be done from the folder view. Printing is gone (but unmourned). (In Mail, it was, quite unnaturally, under the reply sheet.) Reply has replaced the next and previous message buttons in the navigation bar which are now gone.
I do not blindly celebrate this redesign: I liked filing a message while viewing it, and even worse, Sparrow doesn’t support cross-account filing at all. But other changes made my common email actions quicker, smoother, and much less dialog-based: one-button reply and one-button mark-as-unread are my favorites. I’ve heard similar mixed feelings from other users as their common actions got slower: compose and archive are now two taps instead of one, and the next and previous message buttons saw more use than I had guessed.
Sparrow’s changes have their strong and weak points. It’s not a redesign for the sake of a redesign, though: it’s a subtle and careful improvement of lots of actions and common movements through the application. I appreciate the work they did, and applaud their willingness to throw a common interface affordance away and see where it leads them.
A Features Addendum:
Sparrow also has lots of small UI animations and a few big features that Mail doesn’t. When you mark a message as unread, its unread dot doesn’t just change from blue to white, it “pops” out while changing. The layout of “From” and “To” has a tennis-like back-and-forth to it (ed: add screenshot) instead of being vertically linear. The message’s time stamp shows the day of the week. It indexes All Mail and Sent, so message threads not only contain all messages in a folder that are related to each other, but also include earlier messages that you’ve filed away and your replies. It integrates with Facebook, putting icons next to each person’s email in the “From:” and “To:” displays instead of showing the (often-blank) Address Book icon for just the message sender. Instead of drilling into a thread from a folder, and then to a message, you go straight to the message instead, and the “x of y” label at the top of a threaded message is tappable, and shows the whole message thread.
