I bought an iPhone a year and a half ago. This made me really want to develop an iPhone app — something I’ve not yet done, but which I intend to start very soon. [1].
Now, the thing about the iPhone’s UI, which I don’t think you can fully grasp until you’ve actually used one, is that nearly everything — at every scale — works as it should. There is not a single sharp corner left in the product; everything has been rounded for your pleasure. The first place you see this is when you scroll to the end of a long list. When you hit the end, the iPhone doesn’t jarringly stop there. Instead, it bounces you, as though you just ran into a rubber wall on the way to catch a fly ball in the outfield.
It turns out that there is *nothing* jarring in the iPhone. If you’re rocking out to some tunes and a call comes in, the iPhone doesn’t just turn off your music and start ringing. Instead it gradually fades out the music, then starts ringing. When you’re done with the call, it gradually fades the music back in. Nothing about the product will ever put you ill at ease. That’s why I say you have to use it to understand this: in principle, written out like that, it seems like most products should and do behave like that, right? But they don’t. Getting all the details right — every detail, at every scale — is apparently so difficult that virtually no one does it. You really don’t notice how rare it is until you find yourself absolutely pleased with the iPhone, in a way that you’ve never been pleased with a piece of consumer technology before.
Having decided to do iPhone development, my terrific employer very graciously offered to buy me a MacBook Pro. The first couple days were a little difficult for me: I do a lot of command-line stuff, so I needed to get MacPorts or Fink going. And I had to get used to all the Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts.
With that out of the way, I fell into the same feeling of comfort with OS X that I have with the iPhone. The first step was realizing that every piece of the Mac UI is exactly as it should be. The second step, having gained such confidence in Apple’s UI design, was to ponder how I would do something in OS X, then ask, “If everything worked as it should, how would I perform this task?” It turns out, uniformly, that OS X’s UI always behaves the way it should. This gives you the confidence, as a friend pointed out to me last night, to go forth and try new things, and to really engage with the product in a way that you wouldn’t with some (forgive me) Microsoft piece of shit.
The first time this really took hold for me was when I asked whether I could plug my iPhone headset into my MacBook Pro and use it there the way I use it on my iPhone. For those who don’t know, the iPhone headset has a little clicky piece that performs two functions: it’s the microphone through which you carry out phone conversations, and it’s a control device for iTunes on the phone. Click the microphone once to pause the music you’re listening to or hang up the phone call you’re on; click it twice to advance to the next track. (It probably does other things as well.) If Apple designed its products the way you should expect (but which you’ve come *not* to expect from any consumer-electronics company), you should be able to pause iTunes on the laptop, advance to the next track and so forth using the iPhone headset. It turns out that you can do exactly that. And I’m not even using an Apple-manufactured headset: I’m using an incredible pair of Sennheiser MM 50 earbuds. It must just be that Apple requires single clicks to issue a certain signal and double-clicks to issue another, which both the iPhone and the MacBook Pro are programmed to respond to in the same way (namely firing off an event in iTunes). I don’t trust any other company to manage this amount of integration.
Stephanie and I discovered yesterday that there’s an app called Keynote Remote that lets you control Apple’s presentation software from your iPhone via WiFi. This is integration that everyone can use, and of course it helps Apple: the more Apple products you buy, the more value you get out of any one of them.
I’m probably going to buy a Time Capsule, which (so I gather) is so thoroughly integrated with OS X that you never even have to think about backing up; it just does it automatically. I gather that you could use other remote-backup devices in place of a Time Capsule (I believe the Time Machine software works with any number of devices), but — again — experience shows that Apple has integrated its devices spectacularly well; why would I want to use anyone else’s? Yes, I know that this is Kool-Aid drinking, but it’s Kool-Aid drinking based on a lot of positive experiences.
The final step in Apple fanboydom is to proselytize, which I unashamedly do now. But it’s proselytizing to those who could actually get a lot out of the product. Take my girlfriend, for instance (not literally; I enjoy dating her). She needed to make a movie on her ThinkPad, running Vista, so she used the built-in Microsoft Movie Maker. She spent a large fraction of a day trying to convert from the QuickTime-formatted movie that nearly every point-and-shoot camera generates to something that Movie Maker could process. Having never used iMovie, I nonetheless knew its reputation as the product you use when you want to make movies. So I brought the MacBook Pro up to New Hampshire one night, we plugged her camera into the USB port, and within a minute she was editing video. 24 hours later, she had bought a MacBook Pro of her own. People want to get shit done; they don’t care that Microsoft lacks QuickTime support because it wants to screw one of its competitors.
As a friend pointed out: Apple knows that you want to look cool. Even if Microsoft had made it easy to import .MOV files into Movie Maker, you know that it would have botched the execution after that; you would not look cool when it was done. It would offer you “wizards,” which would lead to very boring videos resembling animated PowerPoint. And those wizards would somehow, miraculously, not make your life any easier. They’d be a needless abstraction piled on top of a crummy user experience. Apple would fix the user experience so you wouldn’t *need* the wizard.
A coworker was giving me some good-natured ribbing the other day about using a Mac. He, like me, grew up during the Mac-versus-Windows wars of the early 90s. News flash: those wars are over, and the Mac has unquestionably won. I would be shocked if anyone who’s considered the matter actually believed that Windows was more usable, or more technically well-assembled, than OS X. (Though I’m fairly certain that Windows is easier to manage for enterprise installations than either OS X or Linux. But that’s not the realm that my coworker was arguing in.)
If there is still an OS battle going on, it is Linux-versus-Mac. But that battle has nothing to do with UI; again, no one could seriously assert that Linux’s UI is better than Apple’s. If there’s a Linux-Mac battle, it’s a battle over the open Linux model versus the closed OS X model. Windows is not seriously in competition with OS X for its end-user experience; it succeeds because it has succeeded. Windows is the Martha Coakley of operating systems: you hold your nose and use it because you have to, not because you want to.
[1] — One thing I’ve realized about my work style, and maybe about work styles more generally, is that I need to get something utterly trivial but functional done ASAP, and can move from there to getting something real working. As of now, I know nothing about iPhone development, so the field seems vast and intimidating. The point is to kill that feeling of intimidation as fast as I can. The way to kill it is to just get something, anything, done in the platform so that it no longer seems beyond my grasp. Had I used this technique in college, I think I would be a far better mathematician than I am.
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