What makes the iPhone so successful
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To me it's responsiveness. I've been playing with one for a couple of days and I've been trying to nail down exactly what it is that makes it so easy to use. High on the list is the personality of the UI. It's friendly. It's familiar. A compass looks like a compass, the time looks like an old-fashioned timer and is designed to be spun using your fingers. This is huge. Then I started comparing my touch-screen notebook with the iPhone. Scrolling through a browser page is very jerky. Resizing a page shows jerks and flashes. The laptop is a tablet, so spinning the screen 90 degrees makes the whole screen go dark then redraw, window by painful window. The iPhone scrolls perfectly smoothly. When you change orientation it morphs beautifully from landscape to portrait. When I need to zoom there absolutely zero lag in redrawing. Compared to my Blackberry, or a Windows Mobile device the contrast is night and day. I think we as software developers, and Microsoft and RIM as the authors of OSs, need to go into the room of mirrors and have a good, long look at ourselves.
cheers, Chris Maunder The Code Project Co-founder Microsoft C++ MVP
I don't have the iPhone, but I do have a 2nd gen 16 gb iPod Touch (the bastard child of the iPhone -- I don't think it gets invited to the same parties, poor thing). It's replaced my Dell Axim x50v as my primary PDA. It's also replaced my iPod Classic 80 gb as my primary music player. I don't have a lot of apps for it, mostly freebies (I'm a cheapskate, heh) like Stanza and a couple of games. I paid for the OS upgrade mostly because one of my apps needed it (Mobile-Blu). The only thing from my Dell I haven't found a replacement for yet is ListPro, but I bought the desktop version when I picked it up for the Axim. I used to do development for Windows Mobile (just my own stuff, nothing professional). I'd love to get into development for the iPhone/iPod Touch, but can't really afford to buy a Mac for it right now. I'd love to get a Mac Mini eventually as it would be pretty easy to hook it up to my existing KVM switch. I'd rather they just port the development tools to Windows, but I doubt that will happen anytime soon. I'm used to C#, so Object C shouldn't be too difficult to pick up. I think the only thing I miss from my Axim is the ability to use handwriting to input information. I find that easier than using the soft keyboard on the iPod Touch. Otherwise, like you said. It's much easier to use and easily more responsive than the WinMo and Blackberries I've used in the past. I haven't picked up an iPhone yet as I use a pay as you go phone and haven't found any provider that can beat the (on average) $20 (US) per month we spend for minutes on my and Mrs. Flynn's phones. :) Flynn
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The iPhone, as a device, is neither here nor there for me. It's a chunk of circuit board wrapped in a pretentious skin and sold at way too high a price. The touchscreen works perfectly, I will give it that, but it gets warm when you make it do anything, it's battery life sucks, and it uses that aweful propriatary iPod connector. It's the concept of designing a PDA that works with you, instead of works it's own way and expects you to learn, that grabs me. Beyond that, and something I completely forgot to mention, was the ecosystem that surrounds it. The iPhone automatically syncs with my computer (via iTunes) and I can use it as a remote for my AppleTV. I make a change in one place (movie, photo, MP3) and everything has it. The blackberry is brilliant with its Exchange integration, but can anyone name RIM's multimedia management application? Me neither, and I've used a blackberry for years. As well, the AppStore has, I think, taken many people by surprise. There have been apps for Windows Mobile for years and years, but is there a market? Same with RIM. But within an hour of having the iPhone I was downloading games and gadgets that were a) fun, and b) amazingly creative and useful. And then there's the core UI of the iPhone OS itself. It just works. It doesn't multitask, which would cause problems for me because I'm forever flipping between email and my calendar, or I'll listen to music then pop onto the (crappy) blackberry browser to check the site. That is not going to happen with an iPhobe, but what does happen is you open an app, use it, close it and switch to another, close it and switch back and everything is so quick and smooth that, unless you actually want to have two things running at once, you don't even notice. I'm not actually expecting too much more from Apple. They've had a long time to innovate MacOS X and frankly it's nothing magical. The iPhone is revolutionary because it changed the way we think about Mobile apps. I think someone else will now come along and take the ball and run.
cheers, Chris Maunder The Code Project Co-founder Microsoft C++ MVP
Chris Maunder wrote:
It doesn't multitask, which would cause problems for me because I'm forever flipping between email and my calendar, or I'll listen to music then pop onto the (crappy) blackberry browser to check the site. That is not going to happen with an iPhobe, but what does happen is you open an app, use it, close it and switch to another, close it and switch back and everything is so quick and smooth that, unless you actually want to have two things running at once, you don't even notice.
The only thing that does multitask on the iPod Touch/iPhone is the music. It will continue to play in the background if you hit the Home button. I listen to music and read in Stanza all the time. The only annoying thing is if you want to do anything with the music (pause, skip tracks, etc.) you have to exit the app you're in and re-launch the Music/iPod app. Still, it's pretty quick and responsive, so you don't notice it too much. :) Flynn
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To me it's responsiveness. I've been playing with one for a couple of days and I've been trying to nail down exactly what it is that makes it so easy to use. High on the list is the personality of the UI. It's friendly. It's familiar. A compass looks like a compass, the time looks like an old-fashioned timer and is designed to be spun using your fingers. This is huge. Then I started comparing my touch-screen notebook with the iPhone. Scrolling through a browser page is very jerky. Resizing a page shows jerks and flashes. The laptop is a tablet, so spinning the screen 90 degrees makes the whole screen go dark then redraw, window by painful window. The iPhone scrolls perfectly smoothly. When you change orientation it morphs beautifully from landscape to portrait. When I need to zoom there absolutely zero lag in redrawing. Compared to my Blackberry, or a Windows Mobile device the contrast is night and day. I think we as software developers, and Microsoft and RIM as the authors of OSs, need to go into the room of mirrors and have a good, long look at ourselves.
cheers, Chris Maunder The Code Project Co-founder Microsoft C++ MVP
I've been using Windows mobile since version 5, it was rough... At the same time if you look at some of the work companies like SPB mobile and Resco have done I think it shows the flexibility of windows mobile as a powerful and customizable os... Microsoft didn’t give it a great UI out of the box but left the possibilities open to basically whatever you want the UI to be. I think it’s good and bad on one had it lets manufactures like HTC customize the UI to their brand, TouchFlo...On the other hand it leaves Microsoft vulnerable to bad PR when a manufacturer does a bad job of customizing the OS… Recently I have been running windows mobile 6.5.3 on my phone and Microsoft has made great strides in providing a freindly out of the box UI but in the end it comes down to people’s perceptions of MS products,marketing and the simple fact that Apple had the advantage over Windows mobile, and palm to learn from. I saw an ad from apple about how the IPhone now has copy and paste... Windows mobile (touch version) has been able to copy and paste for many years now. Let’s hope for WPF development on windows mobile 7…
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The iPhone, as a device, is neither here nor there for me. It's a chunk of circuit board wrapped in a pretentious skin and sold at way too high a price. The touchscreen works perfectly, I will give it that, but it gets warm when you make it do anything, it's battery life sucks, and it uses that aweful propriatary iPod connector. It's the concept of designing a PDA that works with you, instead of works it's own way and expects you to learn, that grabs me. Beyond that, and something I completely forgot to mention, was the ecosystem that surrounds it. The iPhone automatically syncs with my computer (via iTunes) and I can use it as a remote for my AppleTV. I make a change in one place (movie, photo, MP3) and everything has it. The blackberry is brilliant with its Exchange integration, but can anyone name RIM's multimedia management application? Me neither, and I've used a blackberry for years. As well, the AppStore has, I think, taken many people by surprise. There have been apps for Windows Mobile for years and years, but is there a market? Same with RIM. But within an hour of having the iPhone I was downloading games and gadgets that were a) fun, and b) amazingly creative and useful. And then there's the core UI of the iPhone OS itself. It just works. It doesn't multitask, which would cause problems for me because I'm forever flipping between email and my calendar, or I'll listen to music then pop onto the (crappy) blackberry browser to check the site. That is not going to happen with an iPhobe, but what does happen is you open an app, use it, close it and switch to another, close it and switch back and everything is so quick and smooth that, unless you actually want to have two things running at once, you don't even notice. I'm not actually expecting too much more from Apple. They've had a long time to innovate MacOS X and frankly it's nothing magical. The iPhone is revolutionary because it changed the way we think about Mobile apps. I think someone else will now come along and take the ball and run.
cheers, Chris Maunder The Code Project Co-founder Microsoft C++ MVP
So this really has nothing to do with why the IPhone is successful I just wanted to point out MS has created an app store for windows mobile. It works great you buy you apps and press install that’s it... You can do it from an app on your phone or on your computer. To be fair I suppose Apple came up with that first but either way it’s a nice tool...
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Damn right, performance matters. I notice when my browser takes more than 60ms to open a new tab. I notice when launching an application doesn't provide me with at least some sort of feedback. And I damn well notice when opening an email doesn't immediately open that email. I've said this before, but MS dropped the ball with recommended UI practices, built Win32 to encourage a fundamentally flawed design, and we've all been paying for it since then: the primary job of any interactive application is to provide feedback for any and all user actions as quickly as possible, even if the action itself takes longer to complete. Just because you can let events pile up without responding to them doesn't mean you should ever do this intentionally...
I would argue Microsoft left the hardware open so people could get affordable phones. Most of the phones out there are under powered or at the minimum requirements which are far lower than the IPhone’s hardware. I might also add that my Touch Pro is as responsive as my friends IPhone and I have half the processor running touchflo from HTC...
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Pete O'Hanlon wrote:
Windows 7 is streets ahead of Vista, give it a try.
I will, I am intending on buying a Weven notebook next time I am in the US ( b.c it's half the price of buying it here ).
Pete O'Hanlon wrote:
I suspect that company's are scared that they might violate a patent or two.
You're claiming that Apple invented the only possible way to have a user friendly system ? I don't mean that things have to look exactly like the iPhone, although I do think it's worth asking why Apple were the ones who were able to design something so usable. I mean, why can't Microsoft take the time to design something that's easy to use ?
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Read my blog to find out how I've worked around bugs in Microsoft tools and frameworks.
It would seem that Microsoft has become as stoic and bloated as IBM was in the 70’s and 80’s. “You will work our way or no way”. Apple is still a smaller company working their way up to the top. So, customer friendliness is a must (if they want to make revenue). Microsoft has enough money to do what they want and enough market clout (in other areas) to try to force consumers to bend to their will. Is Microsoft getting too big? Should they separate into smaller companies like HP and Agilent did? That is one for the business speculators to toil with.
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To me it's responsiveness. I've been playing with one for a couple of days and I've been trying to nail down exactly what it is that makes it so easy to use. High on the list is the personality of the UI. It's friendly. It's familiar. A compass looks like a compass, the time looks like an old-fashioned timer and is designed to be spun using your fingers. This is huge. Then I started comparing my touch-screen notebook with the iPhone. Scrolling through a browser page is very jerky. Resizing a page shows jerks and flashes. The laptop is a tablet, so spinning the screen 90 degrees makes the whole screen go dark then redraw, window by painful window. The iPhone scrolls perfectly smoothly. When you change orientation it morphs beautifully from landscape to portrait. When I need to zoom there absolutely zero lag in redrawing. Compared to my Blackberry, or a Windows Mobile device the contrast is night and day. I think we as software developers, and Microsoft and RIM as the authors of OSs, need to go into the room of mirrors and have a good, long look at ourselves.
cheers, Chris Maunder The Code Project Co-founder Microsoft C++ MVP
But what amazes me is, this is coming from the same people who could not understand the usefulness of the right click nor scroll wheel...
Rocky <>< Recent Blog Post: Coca-Cola In Israel..
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But what amazes me is, this is coming from the same people who could not understand the usefulness of the right click nor scroll wheel...
Rocky <>< Recent Blog Post: Coca-Cola In Israel..
That's all about refusing to admit you're wrong, nothing to do with seeing the usefulness.
cheers, Chris Maunder The Code Project Co-founder Microsoft C++ MVP
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I soooo agree with the marketing! How many new phones come out with new ads every few days? Who can remember the last generation of LG phone or its color? You hear "iPhone" and people think of it as one phone, no matter how many upgrades.
Back in the blog beatch! http://CraptasticNation.blogspot.com/[^]
leckey wrote:
You hear "iPhone" and people think of it as one phone, no matter how many upgrades.
:thumbsup:
-muneeb A thing of beauty is the joy forever.
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New Year's resolution is it there Chris? Is next year going to be the age of touchy-scrolly-feely-designy Code Project, where articles look like articles, posts look like like posts and small green aliens called bob look like small green aliens called bob? CP Apps - you publish an API and people write Apps for That! (actually, you should do an iPhone app, and since it was my idea I want a 20% cut). Yeah, Apple do design well. Graphic Design, though, is a completely different discipline, skill set and talent than software design that not everyone can do, and not that many of those that can do it well. Which, of course, means those resources have to be brought in and that costs money. Money that could be better spent on making sure the software actually works as it's supposed to rather than adding "visual clues" all over the place. On the other hand, I'm all for a nice combination of both.
martin_hughes wrote:
Yeah, Apple do design well. Graphic Design, though, is a completely different discipline, skill set and talent than software design that not everyone can do, and not that many of those that can do it well. Which, of course, means those resources have to be brought in and that costs money. Money that could be better spent on making sure the software actually works as it's supposed to rather than adding "visual clues" all over the place. On the other hand, I'm all for a nice combination of both.
One common misconception about user interface design is that it's basically a form of graphic design. Good user interface design has as much to do with good graphic design as with good programming. Both are instrumental to the implementation, but the real expertise in UI design is making realistic assessments of what the user wants to accomplish (based on real-world user tests), and devising clever ways to enable him to do it as easily as possible. Just because Apple products tend to be beautifully designed doesn't mean that design (or "eye candy" depending on your personal preferences) is all there is to it. The reason why iPhone and other Apple products are successful is because they reward user expectations: if you expect it to work in a certain way, it almost always does.
Mark C Hagers New Media Ventures Amersfoort, the Netherlands
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Chris Maunder wrote:
It doesn't multitask, which would cause problems for me because I'm forever flipping between email and my calendar, or I'll listen to music then pop onto the (crappy) blackberry browser to check the site. That is not going to happen with an iPhobe, but what does happen is you open an app, use it, close it and switch to another, close it and switch back and everything is so quick and smooth that, unless you actually want to have two things running at once, you don't even notice.
The only thing that does multitask on the iPod Touch/iPhone is the music. It will continue to play in the background if you hit the Home button. I listen to music and read in Stanza all the time. The only annoying thing is if you want to do anything with the music (pause, skip tracks, etc.) you have to exit the app you're in and re-launch the Music/iPod app. Still, it's pretty quick and responsive, so you don't notice it too much. :) Flynn
Flynn Arrowstarr wrote:
The only annoying thing is if you want to do anything with the music (pause, skip tracks, etc.) you have to exit the app you're in and re-launch the Music/iPod app.
My son showed me that you double-tap the home key to access the iPod app without exiting whatever other app your are running.
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Christian Graus wrote:
I mean, why can't Microsoft take the time to design something that's easy to use ?
Notepad. Touche. I win.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Chris Maunder wrote:
To me it's responsiveness.
While I don't have one, I've seen people use them, and that is exactly what I am impressed with as well. It just flows, rather than what "the rest" seem to do, which is "klunk." Marc
I'm not overthinking the problem, I just felt like I needed a small, unimportant, uninteresting rant! - Martin Hart Turner
Its also the fact that its a consistent platform, so developers can write apps for the one platform. Its the same reason for success as DOS had in the PC world over the hundreds of other computers around at the time. Its the Apps that make the phone useful and by forcing people to sell apps cheaply on the app store Apple made a platform and developed a market. Google should follow suit.