Apple Archives - Sky's Blog

Forget iPhone 4, just make my 3G iPhone work again!

30 July, 2010 by sky 2 Comments

I made the mistake of letting my 3G iPhone go ahead and automatically upgrade to IOS 4 (the new version of the iPhone operating system) the day it was released.

What a mistake that was! But how could I have known in advance? I always upgrade my iPhone right away, hoping that it will do more and funner things.

More and funner I’m up for, but slower I was not expecting!

Now when the phone rings (if it rings at all), and I go to slide the green button on the screen to answer the call, it’s rare that the button even responds to my touch, let alone react fast enough to actually answer the call. The phone has turned into one little spinning beachball of death^[1] with this software upgrade. [The suggested fix is in the last paragraphs of this article, in case you want to jump ahead.]

This video was so close to my own experience I howled with laughter:

[youtube Pdk2cJpSXLg]

Making products obsolete used to be a matter of adding new features to new physical products until you just felt you had to upgrade to the newest phone or computer, but now… [Read more…]

Can’t keep my hands off that laptop’s screen!

3 June, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

I am finding myself increasingly tempted to swipe my fingers across the screen of my new Macbook Pro!^[1]

I already use a touch screen iPhone all day long, so I’m used to swiping and tapping a lot.

And the touchpad “gestures” on the Macbook Pro^[2] allow me to work essentially the same way I work on the iPhone (tap instead of click; and two-finger tap instead of “right click”; and two-finger drag to scroll things in a window; and so forth). In fact, I have almost entirely stopped using the mouse (with scrollwheel) that I used to use on my previous computer in favor of gestures on the touchpad of the Macbook.

I couldn’t believe how intuitive they were. Each gesture totally makes sense in terms of what it does, finger positions, and direction of swipe. Kudos to Apple on this. It almost makes it worth the entire price of the upgrade just to get this one feature.

Punchline: But when I run my greasy fingers across the glossy Macbook screen it sure smudges things up. LOL Can’t wait for a full-size “tablet Macintosh” to come along!

[1] I haven’t blogged about this new computer (which is only 2 weeks old) but my five-year-old Mac Powerbook just got too slow to be usable, given the load of software that I run on it, so having a computer that is roughly 5x faster is a real joy. I was beefing up the old Powerbook over and over again (doubled the RAM, tripled the disk size, got a new keyboard, and so forth) but it still couldn’t run fast enough most of the time and the CPU was clocking 100% useage at all times when I had my hands on it. So it eventually had to be replaced.

[2] And the other thing I like about the new Macbook Pro is the unibody aluminum construction. My old Powerbook flexes considerably when I carry it in one hand, and this new single-piece-of-aluminum construction does not flex at all, making it very much more solid! This is different from any other laptop computer I’ve ever owned.

Google ruled by engineers, Apple ruled by designers

27 March, 2009 by sky 2 Comments

Fundamentally different approaches to problem-solving, nope design, nope creating products, nope life!

Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. — Doug Bowman, Goodbye Google

I love this farewell post by Google’s visual design lead because it confirms a theory I’ve long held: that Google is a company where engineers are the ruling class, while at Apple it’s designers. – Buzz Andersen, Sci-fi Hi-fi

This just blew me away because of my experiences with people from both Apple and Google.

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