Apple design - page 5

Why couldn’t you type the F-word on the iPhone? Why did Steve Jobs make weird eye movements during demos? What kind of manager was Scott Forstall?

These and other questions are answered in a new book by Ken Kocienda, a former iPhone programmer who spent 15 years at Apple helping to develop the first iPhone, iPad and Safari web browser.

Published this week, Creative Selection, Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs, is a fascinating account of Kocienda’s career that focuses on how Apple makes great software. (read our review here)

Here are some of the most interesting things we learned from the book.

In just a few weeks, Apple looks set to unveil the biggest upgrade yet to its popular wearable.
While the external appearance of Apple Watch has not changed much since its launch, recent leaks suggest we can expect a new form factor with a larger screen when Apple Watch Series 4 lands.

In the Photoshop mockup above, I’ve shown how Apple’s next watch might look if it slimmed down and added a larger screen (as the rumormongers predict). That would be pretty cool, but there are plenty of other potential upgrades I’m excited about.

Here’s my top 10 wish list for Apple Watch Series 4 new features.

Do you know your Sage from your Grape? How about your Bondi Blue from your Graphite? And who in their right mind could forget Flower Power or Blue Dalmatian? A new iMac museum exhibit will help you sort that all out.

If you know your Apple trivia, you’ll recognize all of those as “flavors” of the iconic iMac G3, which launched 20 years ago today. To celebrate the occasion, the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation in Dearborn, Michigan, is showing off all 13 colors of the iconic “computer that saved Apple.”

If you do any work with fonts on the Mac whatsoever, you will have run up against the font picker. It’s a piece of design that dates back to when the Mac only came with a black-and-white screen, and yet it’s still the only way to select a font on an Apple computer. That wouldn’t be so bad if it was a good design, but it’s not. The macOS font picker is little more than a drop-down menu. Worse, it’s a drop-down menu that changes every time you use it.

You can use the Mac’s font panel in some apps, but even then you’re faced with long and confusing lists.

Sam William Smith, a designer from Glasgow, Scotland, decided to do something about this. He completely redesigned the Mac font menu, and it’s great.

The YouTuber who sounded the alarm over serious thermal throttling on the new Core i9 MacBook Pro confirms that Apple corrected the performance-killing problem.

Following the macOS High Sierra update Apple issued yesterday, YouTube tech reviewer Dave Lee uploaded a new video showing that the patch did its job. After the upgrade, his new MacBook Pro is running faster!

This post is presented by Kase.

One of the main reasons to get an iPhone is the sleek, minimalist design. But plenty of the other necessaries — protective cases, replacement charging cables, etc. — look like afterthoughts or add-ons. Apple puts plenty of time and care into creating devices that prove pleasing to the eyes and hands, and we all pay plenty of money to enjoy them.

Anyone looking for Apple-worthy design and durability can dig this line of cases and cables from Kase.

When the first iMac debuted 20 years ago, it shook the tech world with its completely unorthodox appearance. The blobby, curvaceous and colorful computer looked, in Steve Jobs’ words, good enough to lick.

It was a statement computer, both for those who owned it and for those who made it.

However, with the iMac not having had a substantial redesign since 2012, Apple’s all-in-one desktop is getting a bit long in the tooth. It’s time for Apple to give it an overhaul with a new iMac design that would get the world excited about Macs again — and prove Apple remains committed to innovative computing.

In the three short years since Apple Watch debuted, Cupertino has massively improved its smartwatch. Remember the early days, when Glances took ages to load, only to show out-of-date information? When the Fitness app refused to stay in the foreground during a workout? Or when the side button launched a doodling app?

Since the launch, Apple has rolled out big upgrades to watchOS every year at its Worldwide Developers Conference. But there is still loads more that could be done to really unleash Apple Watch’s full potential.

With this year’s WWDC confirmed for June, here’s my wish list of the all the new watchOS stuff I’m hoping will be announced in San Jose, California. It’s a pretty long list, so I’ve broken it down into three separate posts, starting with usability. In followup posts, I’ll focus on fitness, apps and setup.

When the entire mobile phone industry heads to Barcelona next week for Mobile World Congress 2018, there will be one notable absence: Apple.

Cupertino doesn’t do trade shows. Not even really big ones like MWC. Yet, despite its absence from the massive Spanish trade show, Apple’s influence will loom large over Barcelona’s beautiful horizons.

Here are five things Apple fans should look out for at MWC next week.

Apple just gave us a sneak preview of its first store in Austria, and it’s pretty stunning! Apple Kärntner Straße, which will open this Saturday in Vienna, is designed with “the original heritage building in mind,” Apple says.

The totally Apple-y redesign of the building, which sits on a famous shopping street between St. Stephen’s Cathedral and the Vienna State Opera, combines exposed columns outside with large window openings.

iFixit’s HomePod teardown reveals a veritable tank of a smart speaker that’s incredibly durable but virtually impossible to get inside. Unless you fancy using a heat gun and saw to open up your brand new Apple speaker, that is!

As one of Apple’s more elusive executives (when was the last time he spoke live at a keynote event?), it’s not every day that you get to hear chief design officer Jony Ive talk about what he does best.

If you live in Washington, D.C., however, you’ll get the chance later this month. Ive is speaking about the “future of design” at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum.

Best of all? The tickets are free.

Smartphones are changing, and every manufacturer possesses its own take on what the future should look like. Apple’s vision is the iPhone X, which arrives 10 years after the original with big changes and an even bigger price tag. In this iPhone X review, we’ll take a look at everything that makes this groundbreaking device Apple’s finest smartphone ever.

For iPhone X, Apple did away with aluminum unibodies, chunky bezels, Touch ID and the beloved Home button. In their place, iPhone X sports polished stainless steel and smooth glass, an edge-to-edge Super Retina HD display, and Face ID.

The result proves stunning. Apple just made the iPhone exciting again. But is iPhone X worth $999?

Apple took a lot of heat for ditching the headphone jack with iPhone 7. Many labeled the omission a huge mistake, and some even went as far as to say it would leave sales in the gutter. But just over a year on, other big names are following suit.

It seems Cupertino was right again.

The latest rumors about the next-generation Apple Watch indicate it might come with LTE cellular data in a slick new design. But Apple Watch already offers data connectivity via iPhone, and Cupertino’s marketing tends to focus on benefits, not features. So how will Apple craft a new product story around built-in cellular?

My guess is it will all be about replacing the need for a very old technology: pockets. Apple Watch Series 3 will move all the contents of our pockets into the cloud.

Apple Park is a physical manifestation of Steve Jobs’ undying hubris, a monument to fussy perfectionism that’s as crazy as his NeXT Computer, the not-entirely-successful computer he launched after being booted from Apple in 1985.

That’s the premise of a new Bloomberg op-ed, which draws parallels between the new Apple campus and one of Jobs’ most notorious tech launches. It’s interesting, but ultimately wrong. Here’s why.

It’s hard to put into words the iPhone’s massive impact on society over the past decade. But we tried! In this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine, we’ve rounded up our best coverage (including stories from our collaboration with Wired UK) of the iPhone’s 10th anniversary.

We’ve got insider stories about the development of breakthrough iPhone features, ultra-rare iPhone prototypes and much more for your reading pleasure. Get your free subscription to Cult of Mac Magazine from iTunes. Or read on for this week’s top stories.

This week on The CultCast: You’d never know it from Steve Jobs’ effortless keynote introduction, but the original iPhone was plagued with huge design and production issues that almost made Apple call it quits — right up until the day it was released! To commemorate the iPhone’s 10th anniversary, we’ll recount some of the incredible stories behind iPhone’s beleaguered early days, and celebrate how Apple pulled off one of the greatest device launches in history.

Our thanks to Shutterstock for supporting this episode. Kickstart your next interactive project with video clips or music tracks from their collection, and save 20 percent for a limited time at shutterstock.com/cultcast.

Apple is famous for its iconic designs, but is the company slowly losing its way?

Products like the Apple Pencil and Smart Battery Case suggest that Apple’s design team might be missing a certain spark. Even the iPhone, once the prettiest smartphone by a long shot, is now being outshone by rivals from the likes of Samsung and LG.

Join us in this week’s Friday Night Fight as we battle it out over whether Apple design has become lazy and boring. And be sure to have your say!

One day in early 2005, interface designer Bas Ording was sitting in a secret, windowless lab at Apple HQ when the phone rang. It was Steve Jobs.

The first thing Jobs says is that the conversation is super-secret, and must not be repeated to anyone. Ording promises not to.

“He’s like, ‘Yeah, Bas, we’re going to do a phone,'” Ording told Cult of Mac, recalling that momentous call from long ago. “‘It’s not going to have any buttons and things on it, it’s just a screen. Can you build a demo that you can scroll through a list of names, so you could choose someone to call?’ That was the assignment I got, like pretty much directly from Steve.”

The world had never seen anything like the iPhone when Apple launched the device on June 29, 2007. But the touchscreen device that blew everyone’s minds immediately didn’t come about so easily.

The iPhone was the result of years of arduous work by Apple’s industrial designers. They labored over a long string of prototypes and CAD designs in their quest to produce the ultimate smartphone.

This excerpt from my book Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products offers an inside account of the iPhone’s birth.

The iPhone packed a lot into its first astonishing decade. Not only has the device itself evolved significantly since its promising-but-by-no-means-perfect beginnings, but it’s transformed Apple’s business — and many of our very lives — in the process.

All this week, Cult of Mac’s “iPhone Turns 10” series will look at the innovative device’s massive impact on worldwide culture. The iPhone, which launched on June 29, 2007, truly changed the world.

What iPhone milestones have passed since Steve Jobs introduced this stunning hybrid device, which combined a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device? Check out our handy guide to 10 years of iPhone history.

Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines have been the core of the company’s design philosophy ever since the Macintosh in 1978. Apple design evangelist Mike Stern gave an overview of the ever-evolving guidelines during a Wednesday session at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference.

The session, entitled “Essential Design Principles,” is one of my favorites, in large part because I’m a designer myself. I’ve distilled the essential Apple design principles he talked about in the sketchnotes above.

Apple Music subscribers on Android got some much-needed love from Apple today in the form of an update that brings a fresh UI to the streaming app.

It’s been nearly a year since Apple unveiled its Apple Music redesign as part of iOS 10 at WWDC 2016, but Android users are just now getting a taste of the interface’s bold, streamlined look.

Apple’s rumored plans to launch three different-size iPads this spring has fans a bit confused as to why creating a new 10.5-inch model is a good idea. But according to Dan Provost, the co-founder of Studio Neat, it actually wouldn’t be crazy for Apple to change the screen size when you look at the 12.9-inch iPad Pro.