Corvus Consulting

My first Apple experience was a 3rd generation iPod. I rolled my eyes when I read Designed by Apple in California, and blinked when the other flap of the box said Enjoy. It was different. Usually product packaging congratulated me on my purchase. Or slyly implored me to register, suggesting I wouldn’t have a warranty if I didn’t. Or spilled out a Quick Start booklet that, again, congratulated me on my purchase. This was different.

It worked better than any piece of digital tech I’d owned since a calculator. It was almost as simple to use. But there was more to it, I’d find myself running my thumb along the wheel and wondered at just how smoothly it seemed to exist. Everything had been thought out well. Like many, I get irked when things don’t seem to work right, and that was normal. But here was something that didn’t irk me. Instead, I kept trying to dig into the decisions behind the design; it was teaching me. A few months later I had switched.

Since then, it’s been lesson after lesson in both big picture and tiny detail thinking, in integration, in synthesis, in incremental improvement and patience, in creative destruction and finding so much irritation in the status quo. So often Jobs would reveal something new, woven from seemingly disparate or even irreconcilable threads. And with that virtuosity he could put a human frame around technology by making business, design, quality and service dance to the same tune. Looking back, even his final weeks seemed planned with a graceful exit from Apple and enough time to make his goodbyes. The news even came on a Wednesday – mid week, not near the chaos of Monday or the peace of the weekend. On my iPhone, first an email then Twitter. But even before Twitter loaded, I kind of knew.

There’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t work in the world, but Jobs moved multiple industries to a better place through vision and will and a brilliant light. He made that dent in our universe that he set out to, and left behind a legacy that will inspire and teach for generations to come. Lesson one: the things that don’t work in the world can be changed. Goodbye, Steve Jobs.

I’ve taken a shine to a couple of blogs that focus on small touches that make software experiences smoother, and might often otherwise go unnoticed (as good design, by its nature, often does). Little Big Details was the first of this breed, and sets a standard for an observant eye and the ability to dive into the details of how small touches make big differences.

It was on a second blog, though, that I found something worth noting about the overall evolution of Mac OS. On the Finer Things in Mac blog, Dave Chartier notes that in OS X Lion,

When clicking a Quick Look window’s new “Open with Preview” button in its top toolbar, that window morphs into the new Preview window that opens. Classy! The same happens with RTF files and, it seems, just about any files Preview supports.

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Whenever Apple releases something, there’s a column of comment-thread critics pointing out that Apple didn’t invent the technologies behind the new product. Invention is rarely part of the value proposition that Apple makes in its products, preferring to pull together ideas in novel and refined ways.

While they clearly built on what was learned in building the iOS store, Apple was not the first to have an app store for their own platform. Well over a year ago, Bodega had launched just that. While innovative, their concept never really caught on and I didn’t hear much about Bodega after that.

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Fans of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy are familiar with the Infinite Improbability Drive, a spacecraft engine fuelled by the energy of highly improbably events.

Fans of this blog (both of them) will be keen to learn about the Corvus Irony Timing Chain, which prevents me from writing year-in-review posts until a few days after New Years. The Chain makes space for the news that would have contradicted, enhanced or otherwise changed what I was going write. This exclusive innovation lets me write without having to look back on a post less than a week old and feel like a dupe.

Safely a few short steps into 2011, we can look back on 2010 for what it was: an exciting year that delivered a number of inflection points.

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It didn’t take long to do the math as Steve Jobs unveiled Ping, the social music recommendation engine baked into iTunes 10. In one deft move, Apple brought itself into the social networking market with a near-instant enrollment of up to 160 million. And did you catch that they also have credit cards and a history of trusted purchasing with those members?

You could almost hear the gasp in Palo Alto.

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Meetings of any size suffer the moment a laptop comes out; the open screen creates no end of distractions pulling participant attention between shared and private contexts. For that reason alone, I’m a paper notebook guy at meetings. But the iPad seems a way to have the benefits of a digital device without the weird social barrier that laptops create, so I’ve been on the hunt for a note-taking app that could replace the Moleskin.

It’s like like panning for gold: lots of junk with only a couple nuggets that are, well, noteworthy. SimpleNote, which I fell in love with on the iPhone, dominates my text-only note-taking with its superb synching between iPhone, iPad and desktop (using JustNotes as the front-end). But for creative work I need something beyond plain text and with features that get into the iPad’s tablet groove.

After the jump you’ll find short and merciless reviews of seven apps, with the best ones saved for the end.

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Joe Clark has a near-perfect short post that rejects the grandiose wailing of bloggers falling apart over the iPad. I’m tempted to quote the whole thing, but this is where he hits the bulls-eye:

…one’s inability to hack an iPad means precisely nothing. Nobody needs to program an iPad to enjoy using it, except those who have no capacity for enjoyment other than programming and complaining about same.
This was the weekend those of us with high standards lost their remaining residue of patience for ideologues who hyperbolize about open systems without actually creating something people want to use.

Amen. That treat was all the more enjoyable after finding it especially hard to read Cory Doctorow’s over the top rant against the iPad…

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