Apple is not perfect, and I know it. I’m not trying to be a Fanboy, even if some people have a hard time distinguishing between Fanboys and and people who like things that are well-designed. No real ordering for my criticism:

Podcasts

Apple supports these, and the built-in support in the iPhone is better than any other app in the AppStore out there as far as I can tell. But I’d still like it to be better. I want to be able to subscribe to podcasts and have them download in the background when there’s WiFi. This feature is clearly missing (and please don’t tell me to 24/7 run my computer for this). Why do I have to do that manually?

 photo credit: eriwst

iCloud lock-in

Steve Jobs said that iCloud’s purpose is to lock people into Apple’s ecosystem. This is not the best for the consumer, unless to turn the argument around and say it’s better for the customers to go with Apple’s products only. Apple, open up an API for external software.

Windows compatibility

Another lock-in argument is that other times, the compatibility with computers running Windows is not great. For example, if I connect to the computer of my girlfriend, copying files is kinda slow and using her printer doesn’t work instantly (which differs to using some networked printer).

Window Borders in Lion

Yay, we can now drag windows on every side to with the mouse pointer to make them bigger or smaller! Sadly, most of the OSX windows were not programmed with this in mind and have zero pixels of borders. This means while I drag the pointer over the border a very short time the icon changes and I can grab the border, but often times I don’t hit this time-window. Apple, how about adding 1px of border on the outside of the window when I hover in it’s direct surrounding, so I at least have a change of grabbing it?

AppStore

The AppStore is your only hope to make money on Apples platforms as a developer. So, if you don’t get featured, you’re most likely lost. This is a lot of power on Apples side, and it should be more obvious how to get featured in the app store other than to make great apps that Apple’s employees like. You should also get more statistical data about the usage of the AppStore, so you don’t have your marketing guys spam keywords all over the place.

AppStore Search

It would also nice, if the Appstore would rank abandon-ware and very poor software lower in searches if was was a) seldomly downloaded b) poorly rated or c) not updated for a very long time. Maybe it should even forget thing that are too bad.

Network connections in Hotels or Academic Networks

Oftentimes, I connect to Hotel networks, free WiFi networks or networks in academic institutions and it just works. About 50% of the time, it doesn’t work and there’s a lot of fiddling with network specific settings involved before I get it to run. How about making this better, as usually Windows is king here.

Next generation programming language

Apple sticks with its old programming language Objective-C without having a contender for the next decade. For example, C# with .NET 4.0 is such an advanced language, that I barely have the heart to compare them. Please don’t comment this. I know you know better than me, but Apple has no solution for stronger machines other than making the devices more competitive by making them smaller.

Contracts

The iOS ecosystem is pretty locked down, with apps having only hacks to communicate to each other. How about stealing contracts from Windows Phone and Windows 8?

Sandboxing

That being said, Sandboxing is pretty bad for app developers if you forgot some entitlements that are necessary to run the software.

Preview

Preview doesn’t always work very good if the PDF is very big. Why, Apple?

Ergonomics vs. Looks

When there’s a design decision between the looks and the ergonomics of an Apple product, the looks win out (explained by John Siracusa on Hypercritical). Apple, please give us bigger arrow keys and better mice! (And Samsung, please don’t copy the questionable design-decisions from Apple!)

iChat / Messages / Twitter

Why is Twitter not integrated into Messages? Why is iChat not integrated with the iOS messages?

Conclusion

Apple is not perfect, and this is what I criticize. I’ll try to fill this list with more that I don’t like about Apple stuff, and remove things that get better. If you have comments, please leave out the price debate, as copying companies like Samsung show that the hardware in Apple-quality cannot be done cheaper.

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I think that the OfficeLabs tried to make up some science fiction, about how the world could be one day. Science Fiction is not something that is very realistic in short term, but sci-fi usually tries to be realistic enough, given some time and scientific breakthroughs. To get my point, try to think of some science fiction you know.

Sci-Fi

One example that comes to my mind because it’s the last sci-fi book I read is “The Forever War”. Here in a not too far away future, humankind has gained the ability to use new found “singularities” in outer space to effectively teleport themselves to another point in the galaxy, making long-range space travel possible. The great thing about good science fiction is, that the author usually thinks of all the implications of the world he’s imagining. For example, if Microsoft Labs would have made up this dream, the whole galaxy would be colonized in a few years and everything would be awesome.

Joe Haldeman, the author of the book, tries to keep everything as scientific and real as possible even with the assumption that these singularities can do the teleportation of a spaceship. For example, people have to travel to these singularities in very high speed, which takes months and and puts a nearly unbearable gravitational force on the passengers during the first half of the flight, when the ship is constantly accellerating as well as during the second half, when it’s constantly decellerating. Then humankind meets another spacedriving species, which they don’t understand and cannot communicate to, which leads though unfortunate events to an interstellar war. The story of a soldier in this war is depicted, who comes back after his one-to-three-year-long missions while 30+ years passed on earth after each mission due to the effects of relativity. Every time he comes back, society has changed, the people the soldier has known are dead, and wars have occurred because of the lack of resources on earth.

This is not Sci-Fi

Microsoft doesn’t put bad things, or even new things in it’s visions. It imagines that electronics can work without physical circuits and the energy sources are weightless and/or invisible. Not even Star Trek puts things in such a utopian light. This is not science fiction, it’s more a fantasy movie, and I don’t see magic becoming real in the next 100 years. Also, why don’t they think of something new? Everything in this clip is just an extreme unrealistic version of things we already have today.

For example, I don’t understand why they didn’t think that in all the time this magic energy source will need to be developed, there won’t be a brain-machine-interface that will make the shiny UI and the speech input they dream of completely irrelevant? For example, why should I need all those low-power holo-emitters that seem to come to everyone in the wold at no cost, if all the info can be known directly, though your brain connecting to a network?

It’s also not thought through. If we have holograms, and computer-recognized speech input, then what are these glass-iPhones for? Why isn’t all the UI that flys around on the glass thingy in some no-power-smart-clothes computer? Then why all these gestures? Since minority report, many studies have found that working with gestures with hands and arms is extremely tiresome and will never become reality. And Usability? How are people going to know that they need to move their hands together from up and down to narrow the graphics in one of the holograms around them? Okay, I guess you could also say “Computer, narrow down the profit predictions from x to y”,

All that Microsoft depicts is that they think that there will be no problems anymore in the future. I believe every kind of science fiction should try to be as realistic as possible, even if the author picks some kind of science that has advanced beyond the today’s. The other What Microsoft’s OfficeLab produced is not science-fiction, it’s fantasy.

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The word gravity has two different meanings that both suit the needs of my proposed meme “Inbox Gravity Zero“. Both are bad, and both need to be reduced. Yeah, even if the phrase isn’t that catchy.

 photo credit: Hammonton Photography

Grave-ity

First there’s the meaning “grave”-ity, as in “How bad is it? Grave consequences!” This means, that an email that you get could cause stress because it might mean that you’re required to act upon it. When such an email arrives and your email client goes ‘ping!’, it might cause stress, because you feel you need to look for it.

To reduce this sort of gravity, you absolutely must use multiple e-mail adresses. In my opinion, you’ll need one work e-mail, and that’s the most grave-ity laden one. One trusted private personal e-mail is needed, where you just have a bit of grave-ity, as you give it only to friends and family and your most trusted webservices like your own blog and as you actually might want to see the mail. At last, one spammy e-mail that you can use for everything else is needed, which you can use as your open ID and to register and login in all the webservices that you use. This email has no grave-ity, as it will mostly be something spammy like or facebook notifications and the like.

 photo credit: mugley

Generally, you shouldn’t catch work-emails on your smartphone unless you get paid for reacting anytime. You should also not set your smartphone to collect the spammy email adress, as otherwise you become someone whose phone pings all the time and who can’t put that thing away.

Your home computer should get all of your email in my opinion, but I would set the catch rate to once an hour or deactivate the sound when an email arrives, so that you don’t go nuts.

Physical Gravity

Secondly, there’s the physical meaning of gravity, which means that an object draws in other objects. The higher the gravity of your inbox, the more mails will be drawn into it, causing work, stress and a sawtooth effect that effectively hinders your productivity. Reducing this sort of gravity can be done with the following ways:

- The separation of emails as just described will help, because the email clients on your systems usually only attract emails you want to see when you’re around the systems. What could help here too is using IMAP in all the systems, as this marks mails as read that you have read on another device so you won’t get pinged multiple times.

 photo credit: underminingme

- Secure your spammy email adress. Be sure that there’s some kind of spamfilter that sorts out spam, as when you’re putting that email adress everywhere on the web, it’s only a matter of time until the spambots find it and add it to their catalog of adresses to send spam to. My spammy adress is at http://www.gmx.net, who are not very good per sé, but who have a very good spam filter built in.

When you have reduced your inbox gravity the best way possible, you won’t scream “INBOX ZERO” at Twitter anymore, but that’s because of the fact that it won’t be such a pain to do email anymore. Comments?

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Tips and Hints

- Link: How does hacking work?

- Each clinic has two praxis kits for sale for 5000 credits each. When you know where a weapons dealer is, it’s not really hard to get the money by taking single guns from your opponents to the dealer. Always make sure you buy them.

- Overall you will get all useful augmentations in the game, if you explore a lot. Exploring a lot gives you not only what you find, but a lot of XP bonuses too.

- Not killing enemies gives you more XP and is more silent, so use an appropriate weapon and knock people out instead of killing them. Hide them, as when they get found they can wake up again.

- Have a rocket launcher with you and save rockets for situations you can’t solve otherwise. The rocket launcher can solve every hard situation.

Good Augmentations

- Hacking power, and the augmentation to lower the chance of getting found while hacking. Important to get a lot of XP early on and also later in the game. Later in the game, hacking turrets is nice. I also bought the hack robot thingy, but there was no chance to use it so far.

- Raise carrying strength (there’s always more stuff you want, and the place in your inventory is very small – helps getting stuff to weapon’s dealers and helps having the rocket launcher with you when you approach boss fights)

- Raise lifting strength (with crates you can often get to higher places, use big crates to block line of sight or push away big things that stand in front of passages needed for stealthy actions)

- Social Optimizer (you get more XP if you persuade people and at least one level can be done without fighting just because of the optimizer). When you have it, just look for the weakest area of the person can choose the appropriate way of persuasion.

- Break though walls (at least 2 praxis kits and a lot of stuff are hidden behind breakable walls and some stealthy approaches are benefitted highly by this).

- Augmented reflexes (in many places two guards talk to each other and can be knocked unconscious simultaneously)

- The skin armor is the only really good augmentation when it comes to fighting.

Mediocre augmentations

- The Taifun looks cool, but I only used it once in a boss fight. Maybe I should just play this in hard mode. Again multiple enemies it’s hard to use, as they will have you killed before you get in the middle of them. Maybe good with a lot of battery and the cloaking augmentation, but there are rarely so many enemies in one place, and for those you also have the rocket launcher or grenades.

- The cloaking augmentation. If you hide well you should need this very rarely, though there are some few scenes where I just couldn’t fulfill all side-quests silently (police station) and it might have helped.

- Therefore the battery stuff might be useful if you use the Taifun and the cloaking, but I don’t like that battery only reloads to one battery automatically and everything else needs recharging by power items.

- The shooting thing is maybe good for players using a mouse, I played this game on a playstation and didn’t use and aggressive play-through. I didn’t use it.

- The jumping augmentation is okay, but not really necessary when you have lifting power and crates. But later in the game you will want to buy it anyways.

Worthless augmentations

- All stealth augmentations. Crouching towards enemies and keeping out of line-of-sight is always enough.

- All vision enhancements, maybe besides the look through walls thingy, that’s just handy from time to time, but not really necessary as you can always look around corners and have your basic radar.

- I bought the augmentation to fall down slower, but it seldom actives in the game, and I so far didn’t find even one chance to use the aggressive mode of this thing. Looks cool though.

- Breathing gas. Bought this in a situation where I didn’t see the thing that could close the gas vent behind a breakable wall. Did need it once, when an enemy threw a gas grenade at me, and once where it was easier to save a worker who was about to die from gas, but I don’t think you really need this.

- The vision timer and flash immunity… flash immunity is rarely worth it and the vision timer doesn’t shorten the time needed till enemies will become less hostile.

- Running speed and duration. What for? To play the game in 5 minutes less overall?

Buy augmentations in this order

- Hacking 3

- Silent hacking 2

- Lifting strength

- Social optimizer

- Break though walls

- Silent Hacking 3

- Reflexes

- Carrying strength

- Hacking 5

- Skin armor 3

- The stuff you want but don’t really need.

Hope this helps you a bit with your decisions. Have fun playing the best game I’ve played in my whole life. If you disagree or have any more hints to share, post a comment.

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 photo credit: Andrea Costa Photography

The Future

But Apple won’t stop here. If you’re looking at Safari’s new way of moving back in the history by moving the active page to the right (effectively scrolling to the left further than possible) so that the last page in the navigation history appears below the active page  shows where this could lead. If you try this left and right-scrolling in iCal and do it really slowly, you get an effect like in iBooks where a new calendar page slowly flips over. This kinda semantic way of moving things is also followed with mission control, where you push everything away from you (four-finger-swipe up) to get an overview of everything running and do the opposite to get back close to the windows. I believe this kind of semantic movement of windows and content will sooner or later work in a lot of menus, the finder, the AppStore and anywhere else where “back” usually would be a button.

Criticism

If this is the course of the OS, I wonder why Apple didn’t go further with this. In the new iCal, you can move forward and backwards with this new side-scrolling. So, if you move the content (for example the month August on a sheet of ‘paper’) to the left, on the right side ‘September’ slides in. In my opinion, this is exactly the natural way it should work. Why then, if you use three fingers and make the same gesture (three finger swipe to the left) it moves the other way round, back to July? Because three finger swipe left is defined as ‘back’. Putting the ‘back’-command on three-finger-swipe right sounds silly, but I think this is the way it should work as you’re always moving the content to the right when you’re going backwards, and vice versa. This would also give a sign to third party applications like Twitter, where in a conversation the same confusing three-finger-swipe to the left actually moves the content to the right side to return to the stream.

What I would like additionally is a three-finger-down gesture for minimizing or closing a window, or better some way to define gestures as triggers for actions in programs, as possible in BetterTouchTool (with that you can remap and define new gestures for touchpads and magic mouses).

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Huddles for the Webapp

Additionally, Huddles for the mobile app are extremely handy for shorthand-group chats has you’ll get a push-notification for each message, but for each of such communications it should be possible to silence the push-notifications or just send one on the first new message instead of one for everytime someone writes a message.

Hangouts for the mobile apps

Hangouts are about the same as Huddles, you just can talk live and chat and watch Youtube while you’re in the room. Why shouldn’t you be able to talk with the other people while you’re using your mobile phone? Especially if you’re in a WiFi network? Or at least see the chat? If Google treats group-posts, messages, group-chats in GTalk, Hangouts, Huddles, mail and just everything differently, how should users know which one to use?

Fix the mobile app’s bugs

The Android and iOS apps are buggy. Sometimes they crash without any reason, and oftentimes the notification count is not what I should be. This needs to be fixed.

Improve Circle’s posting

Cicles are a huge win, and everyone knows it. What I miss from here is operations you can do with there circles.

For example, it would be nice to define that “Friends” and “Coworkers” are automatically in “Contacts”, so you have lesser clicking if you know the implications of adding a coworker for example. Inheritance would be a nice feature, although not everyone might use it.

Being able to do set operations would be another huge advantage. My use case is to have cicles of people understanding English, and people understanding German. If I do a german post, I would like to make sure only people of the targeted circle (for example “contacts”) that are also in the circle “german” can read it, the intersection of those circles. In theory, this is a very simple operation, and I would love this. If you think adhead, having other set operations could be nice too. If you for example make a joke about how stupid programmers are, you might want to post if to all your contacts minus those that you’ve also added to “programmers”.

Make Spaks useful

Spraks seem to be an aggregation of Google news. I would love to be able to set the “metatags” of a certain Google+ post. For example, if you find out a nice feature about the new Macbook Air that just came out, you should be able to tag it with the appropriate words, so it appears in everyone’s sparks for “Macbook Air” for example.

Open up the API

Facebook and Twitter weren’t extremely useful without clients, and Google+ isn’t too. There’re unofficial APIs out there (and Abelssoft has already released a Windows client for Google+ here), but these unofficial APIs rely on HTML parsing and therefore are not very convenient to use, are not too fast and also don’t open up all the functionality that Google+ offers.

That’s what I think. Am I missing something?

photo credit: vernhart

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