dons abestos fire suit
I’ll be honest: I used to be a die-hard android user. did not want an iphone, did not see the point in paying the Apple tax for one. Even with working buying the handset for me, I stuck with androids. (first a moto X, then a samsung S3 and finally an S5)
Then the day came that my work phone decided that it didn’t want to take phone calls (or get voicemail notifications) for whatever reason. (coverage, software lockup, whatever.) it took a couple calls to the carrier to get it straightened out. when I came due for a handset refresh, I went to an iPhone, because for the basic feature of making and taking phone calls and voicemail, It. Just. Works. which, at 2 am and the SAN has taken a giant steaming dump at work, is all I care about. Plus, even though it’s a business phone, we end up with the consumer handsets, which have a trainload of crap pre-installed on them that I’mm never use, never wanted, and often times caused more problems or got in my way of Getting Stuff Done.
Seriously. It’s a cell phone- that’s #1 on the feature list: ‘Can it make or take phone calls? Can it display a notification if you have a voicemail?’ It if can’t do that, then I don’t want it. Everything else is just ‘nice to have’ at the end of the day.
I was going to point out that any device more complex than a hammer needs a manual until the user internalizes the usage. But then I recalled how often I’ve seen people misuse hammers.
It simply isn’t true that people didn’t need a manual/cheat-sheet when Macs first appeared. Most people had no idea how to use a mouse- I know, I was teaching Smalltalk programming in the early 80s and it was often the first time the students (universally fairly experienced) had seen such a thing.
He asked that the PCB for the original Mac to be redesigned because it didn’t look nice, costing $5000 dollars in 1981 money. It didn’t work correctly so Apple had to use the original design (as predicted by Burrell Smith).
That’s the kind of thing why I immediately got rid of a Windows phone. There was no way to get a repeating alert for a message of any kind. You know, the kind of beep every few minutes like phone machines did since the beginning of time. What irked me the most was the responses along the lines of “what you don’t look at your phone every few minutes?”
That said I’ve never had a problem like you described with my Moto phones.
It has always “just worked”. It is a Nokia Windows phone. It alerts me to incoming texts, emails and phone calls by vibrating. The GPS based mapping app works fine.
I don’t want or need a cell phone so I haven’t learned very much about them, but I do know UX/UI, and it appears to me in my ignorance that they all have purposely opaque and counter-intuitive user interfaces.
While I appreciate the addition of the “go back” indicator in the status bar starting in iOS 9, the OS-level back button in Android and WinPhone is UX garbage. It does 4 different things depending on context, and the contexts can often overlap in non-obvious ways:
go up 1 level in a drill-down-style app
go back one page in the browser
go back to another app entirely
go back to the home screen
If you want to know how well everyday people with little tech experience deal with the back button, consider: I had to build a bunch of additional POST re-submission prevention into a mobile banking web application, because people would repeatedly hit the back button to go back to their phone’s home screen, ignoring all warnings about re-submitting forms and causing any transfers they created to process twice, because that’s how they had learned to “back out of a program”.
The moto actually worked well enough, until it decided it wanted to explore the bottom of my diving pool. Unfortunately, it also suffered from the giant pile of bloat and crap that the carrier foisted on it. (I do not need or want and NFL game on my business only phone!)
The iPhone 6s I’m currently using as my work phone does what I need it to do; I’ll probably keep it until Apple decided to stop supporting it or $work pulls a “turn in your phone, here is your new one which you will like, scrub” on me.
iTunes version somewhere around 3.x was the best music library management software ever. Every single update since then has gotten worse, and now I find it almost unusable- But the current version is the only one which will work with the phone=>studio pipeline that is my only reason for owning Apple products in the first place.
For the audio/video stuff I do, Apple is hands-down, the best system I’ve ever used. Every update, though, keeps improving some admittedly cool stuff, but at the cost of fucking up my workflow.
I buy unlocked phones retail, and they come with no bloatware. I also have a $10/mo prepay plan with 500mb data that I’m perfectly happy with. I’m a simple person.
With apologies to Bill Withers, “Ain’t no Jobbsie when Steve’s gone…”
The Dieter Rams sensibilities are no longer being enforced. Cook is busy being corporate and stashing profits on islands that aren’t Caribbean. Ive seems to have either gotten lazy or sheltered. The hardware team is still busting their apple-shaped balls, but that seems to be about it.
I don’t know whether or not Steve would be ok with it or not, but I’m reasonably sure it’s not the direction he would have personally gone. We’ll never know…
It would be fine if an in-app back button were always in the same place and preferably looked the same. The one-clicky-no-thinky iPhone owners I had to support at the help desk I used to run didn’t do well with differences in app UX.
Ctrl-click is functionally the same as eight clicking for that sort of thing. I don’t see the big deal about having two mouse buttons, but the scrolling mechanism is much more important. Those scroll balls on the Mac micr always died about a year in.
Unfortunately, it also suffered from the giant pile of bloat and crap that the carrier foisted on it. (I do not need or want and NFL game on my business only phone!)