Last night I was watching Steve Jobs’ keynote at Apple Special Event August 2007, where he announced and demoed the new iMac, iLife ‘08 and iWork ‘08. Some random thoughts:
Longer cycle means bigger change
Since its debut in 2003, Apple had maintained a iLife release every year, adding a few new features to the existing applications, or occasionally adding a whole new application. However with the suite’s short release cycle, there were just not enough changes to justify a yearly purchase. Also if your Mac is more than older than a year or two, chances are it won’t run the new software very well anyway. I just use the version on hand until the Mac retires; and when I buy a new Mac, it comes with the new, latest version of iLife. So I myself, and I believe many people like me, end up just never buy iLife!
2007 is the first year that Apple did not release a new version of iLife in January. Possibly because they are busy with the iPhone and the upcoming version of Mac OS X “Leopard”, and/or they want to make bigger change to the suite. During the cycle, they managed to make quite a number of enhancements to iPhoto, and at the same time replace iMovie with a complete new software (which is still called iMovie), and also added a new and impressive .Mac Web Gallery.
Had they insisted in releasing it in January 2007, this may not have been possible. Sometimes you just need a bigger change. Perhaps because you see you need to support a new paradigm of doing the business (iPhoto), or perhaps you found the whole direction you were going no longer work and you need to re-do it from scratch (iMovie). Whatever the reason, when the need is present you need to fulfill it; and you say “I need a longer release cycle”.
How to make a Really Useful Thing
Continuing on the tales of iLIfe, the major new features of iPhoto and iMovie were enhanced usability. In the case of iPhoto, someone at Apple figured that having to search or just scrolling through more than thousands of photos is not exactly what they call “user-friendly”, so they came up with the idea of “events”. The concept of “event” is actually pretty simple: when you import photos into iPhoto, the photos are grouped into “events” by the day they are taken. Then you can merge or split the events as you see fit, for example when you had more than one event during a day or you had an event than spanned more than one day. Though I haven’t got the chance to get my hands on the new iPhoto ‘08, I believe this would be a very useful feature in making my collection more manageable: because I am already using the “film roll” feature to organize my photos. This new feature could only make my life even easier.
The story told by Jobs about the new iMovie goes like this: once-upon a time there was a happy Apple engineer. He shot some footage and planned to edit a 5-minute video using the good old iMovie, in 30 minutes. He couldn’t do it. He then tried doing it in Final Cut Pro, the professional video editing software also by Apple. He couldn’t do it. Then he freaked out and slapped together a new video-editing software to solve his problem. The made it and Apple liked it. The software then become the new iMovie, and the engineer then lived happily with his new software thereafter.
Go see the demos of the new iPhoto and iMovie. They look really impressive. “Impressive” in the sense that you would genuinely feel that they can solve your pressing problem, rather than just gimmicks and flashes used to impress the shallow masses. This is just the way technology should be: solve real problems and make life easier. This is the core of the business. The golden rule. Find the problem. Focus on the problem. Solve the problem with your new product. Never deviate from these points if you want to make a Really Useful Thing.
If you take a close look at the new apps and if you know a little GUI (graphical user interface) programming, you can see that there are many custom, non-standard controls. For example the iPhoto search box. There is a little icon at the left that let you choose what kind of criteria you want to enter. In the case of rating, there is five little dots which you can click to set how many “stars” (the rating) the photos you want to see must have. This custom controls requires extra development effort but they make the software more usable. Sometimes when you really need to produce the Really Useful Thing, you need to pay extra. Just like you are buying luxury products for the extra qualities like a better look or a better material or things like that. That’s just the way life is.
Direct manipulation
There is an idea of “direct manipulation” in the filed of human-computer interaction (HCI). The HCI folks found that if you make the users have a perception of directly manipulating something, they usually find it easier to use. The little file icons on your desktop, and the drag-and-drop gesture that you use to move the files around, these are examples of direct manipulation. Look at iPhoto, iMovie and .Mac Web Gallery. They use this idea to design the user interface very heavily.
People feel much better if you can give them a physical metaphor that they can directly manipulate. Even if the thing itself is an abstract idea like an event, try to make it a concrete object. An object that users can directly manipulate.
(Oh I’m writing so much more than I originally planned to…)
Reputation
One of the features of “Pages” (the word-processor in the iWork productivity suite) is a hundred and something “Apple-designed templates”. For a Apple user I immediately know the template would be great-looking and practical. If you change the company name to some other ones, it’s hard to trigger the same feeling. This is reputation that Apple has been actively building for years. It’s like when you talk about Nintendo hardware, long-time gamers know that they are as durable as baby toy. Or when you talk about IBM notebooks (before the Lenovo purchase), people would think tanks.
Produce things that you can be proud of, sign them, keep it up. Boom! Reputation.
“Wonder of the universe”
iLife and iWork each costs USD$79. Which is a extremely low price. Steve called it “another wonder of the universe” when he announced the price of iWork ‘08. And I must agree. The development of each of the application must have been very high, considering the level of polish. How does that work? Do they actually sell enough copies to cover that cost? Or are they sold at a loss? Developed to drive Mac sales? Being able to buy software of such quality at such a low price is indeed a wonder of the universe.
On the other hand. Is this a real wonder or a perceived wonder? Is the polish given to the products raising the perceived value?
Steve Jobs must hate YouTube
Watching any videos on apple.com is always a joy. Download is extremely fast (thanks to Akamai), the videos are in high resolution and encoded in high quality. On the other hand, although YouTube has possibly the largest and the most active video library and community, the download speed and video quality just can’t compare with that of apple.com. As a “perfectionist” who pay a lot of attention to even the smallest details, Steve Jobs must no feel very satisfied with the quality of service provided by YouTube. He must personally hate YouTube has much as he hate Microsoft, which are both ugly, dominant players that you just NEED to deal with.
Steve’s voice
Steve is 52 now (born in 1955). You can hear that his voice sound like an old man. I just hope he was just not in the best condition rather than getting old enough to change voice. Best wishes.
This begs the question again: what would Apple and the world be like without Steve Jobs?
Finally I’m done! Go see it before it’s gone! Watching his keynote is always a joy!
“Watch Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveil the all-new, redesigned iMac and demo new features in iLife ‘08, iWork ‘08, and .Mac. See the video-on-demand event right here, exclusively in QuickTime and MPEG-4.”
Back in May 2006, EditGrid was so young, unpolished and innocent. Bare-bone visual design. They even had the guts to include a screenshot captured under Windows XP’s blue theme of blindness (well, at least they used Firefox).
Then a year later in August 2007, they were much more inline with the other 2.0 kids. Bright colors and a bolder visual design, public spreadsheets and templates at the front page, random charts, tag cloud, trackback and more. Putting public spreadsheets at the index page was a very important move. That allowed first-time visitors to try the service extremely easily. When I first visited them at the time, at least I tried to load a spreadsheet to see what they’d got.
And now, probably under the influence of the investment…!??!!?!?!?!? Web 1.0 visual design, boring paragraph-long information that no one reads, and no public spreadsheets on the index page. WTF? WTF?!?!?!? WTF?!?!?!!?!?!?!?!?!?!!?!?!?!?!?!? THEY REMOVED PUBLIC SPREADSHEETS ON THE INDEX PAGE! I tried to locate one on the linked pages, but I couldn’t. Now I can’t even tell whether they have improved their AJAX responsiveness (which used to be quite bad a few months ago). I don’t know whether there are any real people using it. I don’t know what are the possibilities of a online spreadsheet.
. This is just my first post here in Radica W.C. This is Stanley from tech side. What? Stanley! That crazy little monkey talking about tech stuff from time to time?? Relax my friend, I am not going to write anything about tech or development that make you scratch your head to death. Today, I would like to talk about something you are familiar with – comments on posts.
