I'm gonna use this as an example of an app that honors their platform OS way of doing things, please don’t reinvent the wheels every time you make an app from scratch, it’s hard to design, prone to mistakes, stupid ones, overlooked edge cases, and so many things can go horribly wrong.

And most of all, your customers can and will be confused when they use your app, so you added a long and complex “onboarding” run to mitigate your earlier design choices, so yeah, messy and ugly. In business everyone loses when the customers loses.

The Apple Music Android app itself is still buggy though.

Bono on Jonathan Ive:

What the competitors don’t seem to understand is you cannot get people this smart to work this hard just for money. Jony is Obi-Wan. His team are Jedi whose nobility depends on the pursuit of greatness over profit, believing the latter will always follow the former, stubbornly passing up near-term good opportunities to pursue great ones in the distance.

(Via Daring Fireball)

parislemon:

newsweek:

This was once an ad in Newsweek. So. cool.

One person, one computer.

Over at The Telegraph, along the line of the aforelinked, here’s Dieter Rams’ regards on Apple:

I have always regarded Apple products – and the kind words Jony Ive has said about me and my work – as a compliment. Without doubt there are few companies in the world that genuinely understand and practise the power of good design in their products and their businesses.

I have always observed that good design can normally only emerge if there is a strong relationship between an entrepreneur and the head of design. At Apple this situation exists - between Steve Jobs and Jony Ive.

Apple has managed to achieve what I never achieved: using the power of their products to persuade people to queue to buy them.

I am troubled by the devaluing of the word “design”. I find myself now being somewhat embarrassed to be called a designer. In fact I prefer the German term, Gestalt-Ingenieur. Apple and Vitsoe are relatively lone voices treating the discipline of design seriously in all corners of their businesses. They understand that design is not simply an adjective to place in front of a product’s name to somehow artificially enhance its value. Ever fewer people appear to understand that design is a serious profession; and for our future welfare we need more companies to take that profession seriously.

bigweek:

Apple’s welcome letter.

Found this link when reading this post from Intercom. Serendipity.

Something tells me you won’t be surprised when I tell you it’s about Steve Jobs and Apple. But this book is different. Really.

That’s because (a) I had a unique vantage point to some pivotal events in Apple history, and (b) this book focuses on one thing alone — the core value that has driven Apple since the beginning.

Insanely Simple is about Apple’s obsession with Simplicity.

Looking forward to this one. Ken Segall, in short, he’s the guy that handle Apple’s “Think Different” advertising campaign and also the “i” naming convention, starting with iMac and… you know the rest of them.

This is a perennial question. The truth, of course, is that Apple is neither. Apple is an experience company. That they create both hardware and software is part of creating the entire product experience.

This second paragraph is all it takes to hook me to read the rest of this yet another great post from John Gruber.

imjustcreative:

(via Post by Mike Elgan)

The whole basis of the class I’ve taught at UVM for 21 years is … integrated product development, which means concurrently looking at all of these things: the aesthetics, the engineering, the marketing … which is what we were doing at Apple. Not necessarily purposefully, but everybody was just thrown together… I would walk through the software place and look around and see what people were doing … walk through the marketing area. I had my drawings all on the walls, so anybody could come up. There was a red pencil hanging there. I’d say, “If you see something you don’t like, or is a problem — I don’t care whether it’s a janitor or Steve — write the correction, circle it, put your phone there and I’ll call you and we’ll talk about it.”