I would love Apple to stop using the word "Magic" to describe everything and use Pizazz. I can see it now, OS X 10.9 - 70% more Pizazz than Mountain Lion!
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Job Postings and Patent Acquisitions Hint at Potential Overhaul of iLife and iWork
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I would love Apple to stop using the word "Magic" to describe everything and use Pizazz. I can see it now, OS X 10.9 - 70% more Pizazz than Mountain Lion!
What in the heck does Apple do ? Hire people on the fly every time they want to upgrade software ? Why can't they already have a team doing this stuff.
Turnover at 1 Infinite Loop must be horrible.
Turnover at 1 Infinite Loop must be horrible.
Seem to remember they said the same about 7" tablets not that long ago... until of course they changed their mind. Smoke and mirrors.
I would LOVE new features added to Keynote. I'm a presentation designer and have had to use PowerPoint for many features that Keynote is missing
I use Keynote many times per week. I give dozens of presentations per year. What features of PP do you miss from Keynote?
Some things I'd like to see in Keynote:
Layering (or some equivalent) to make it possible to work on more complex animations and builds.
A "light table" of sorts that could easily be pulled down. This would store my frequently used slides or slide decks. This would really be helpful in building a new presentation as there are lots of short runs of slides that are common to many presentations. (Introduction to the technology, corporate boilerplate, product overview)
A timeline similar to the one in Garageband. This would make it possible to expand into new areas of automated presentations.
Support for QuickTime VR. I know Apple seems to be letting this go. Too bad. It is really useful for some things.
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In iOS I'd like to see iWorks brought up to parity with iWorks in OS X. Pages desperately needs to support the layout mode that is present in OS X. Layout mode is fantastic. I write lots of reports that are heavy in pictures, charts and tables and layout mode is a great tool for this purpose.
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@Peace:
"What in the heck does Apple do ? Hire people on the fly every time they want to upgrade software ? Why can't they already have a team doing this stuff.
Turnover at 1 Infinite Loop must be horrible."
I wonder that too sometimes. I guess they have lots of other people working on things but post adds when they go in a new direction or want to add a new emphasis.
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Hopefully not as MS overhauled PP with the stupid Ribbons etc... (BTW I am a Keynote fanatic but sometimes have to use PP). And a better integration with iOS Keynote where half of the graphs are not showing when imported...
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If I hear Pizazz coming out of Apple's marketing I will stop using Mac products forever.
I would LOVE new features added to Keynote. I'm a presentation designer and have had to use PowerPoint for many features that Keynote is missing
I have to agree with you, Powerpoint definitely has features not found in Keynote such as "Lack of Intuitive UI", "Lack of beautiful templates", "Lack of graphics animation for presentations" and lack of ease of use.
Seriously, even the most fanboyish of MS Office users can't deny that Keynote is the best in class and Powerpoint is nowhere close. That being said, still doesn't mean that the entire iWork suite doesn't need an upgrade because it definitely does.
Muscle memory is real, but it's not the entire usability picture. And it applies in a pretty limited sense to the Finder sidebar, since your muscles are moving a pointer FROM an arbitrary starting point TO a target that isn't always in the same place.
And the monochrome look is also bas usability for learning the habits in the first place--or even remembering what options exist for you. Like that green Downloads arrow in the Go menu. That's a handy reminder for non-techie types who haven't memorized every corner of OS X.
Agreed....but if they are looking to fill jobs now, it will be a long wait before we see any substantial updates.
3 months to Hire appropriate headcount
3 months for new hire(s) to settle in
6-12 months for development
3-6 months to test
That was Steve Jobs. And the mini is 7.9" and not 16:9 so one could argue its really nothing like the other 7" tablets on the market.
Finally someone who gets it.
However I still believe that the amounts of skeuomorphism can be scaled back a whole lot in some applications.
But yeah, overall I agree with everything you said.
Glassed Silver:mac
More to the point, the Inspector is a fundamental design paradigm for ObjC Cocoa APIs since NeXTStep 0.1.
Apple needs to get serious about iWorks and stop pussyfooting around Microsoft whose contract is up with requiring a release on OS X. OS X provides Microsoft with several billion in revenue, per year, boost to their bottom line.
Give them competition by adding some powerful extensions api that can interface seamlessly with the likes of TeXLive for Publishing, Octave/MatLab/R for Computing needs and PostegreSQL/Oracle/MySQL/NoSQL/SQLite, for the need of extending your data calculations to large data sets, all via SERVICES--the reason we developed Services at NeXT in the first place.
Create the ability to separate Desktop Publishing from XeTeX TeXLive consistent Publishing for Technical Publications by providing a separation between document wide publishing settings that LaTeX/TeX is clearly superior at doing and complex image/text objects that allow Postscript quality flowing text curves that LaTeX/TeX cannot do and was never designed to do, all within the same Document by creating Project Management controls that oversee the separate areas of control and have a quality Inspector view to do so.
UI improvements are well and good, but what about all the missing features (especially Numbers)?
Perhaps they've spent the last four years working on them, and now need to hire UI engineers to fit them all in in a less hated way than Microsoft's ribbon?
Perhaps they've spent the last four years working on them, and now need to hire UI engineers to fit them all in in a less hated way than Microsoft's ribbon?
Apple dropped"computers" from it's name and now sells iPhones. They seem to have left the pro-apps market to Adobe, Sony and others. I'd be happy to see the iPhone fade fade away and Apple go back to building computers for professionals again.
Agreed....but if they are looking to fill jobs now, it will be a long wait before we see any substantial updates.
3 months to Hire appropriate headcount
3 months for new hire(s) to settle in
6-12 months for development
3-6 months to test
I'm hoping that the new guy isn't going to have to write everything.
I would think that the first job of new programmers is the testing phase. At least that is what I am hoping. They did just update it a little in December too.
Aren't there like 3,000 people working at the Cupertino campus?
Just curious what the majority of job titles are at Apple if they're not heavily focused on engineers and designers.
You know, people talk about iPhoto and iTunes and Pages and GarageBand and Safari needing overhauls to be made snappier... But you know what really is the buggiest Apple app there is that really, REALLY needs a sprinkling of snappy-sprinkles? FONT BOOK. Apple. Get. That. *****. Fixed.
About frikkin time.
Pages is nice and certainly a very capable word processor. But I would forgive Apple if they were to sacrifice a little bit of simplicity for the sake of bolstering Pages to be more "feature rich" application.... thus closing the gap with MS Word.
Accomplishing this (closing the gap with MS Word) would actually give many people a reason to stop looking back at Microsoft Word any more, and this would include many PC-to-Mac 'Switchers' I know of.
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There are tons of employees at Apple in software development positions. What is unclear with these "job postings" is whether they were posted to the open public, or if these were internal postings so that existing Apple employees could transfer/apply to the job openings laterally.
Pages is nice and certainly a very capable word processor. But I would forgive Apple if they were to sacrifice a little bit of simplicity for the sake of bolstering Pages to be more "feature rich" application.... thus closing the gap with MS Word.
Accomplishing this (closing the gap with MS Word) would actually give many people a reason to stop looking back at Microsoft Word any more, and this would include many PC-to-Mac 'Switchers' I know of.
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There are tons of employees at Apple in software development positions. What is unclear with these "job postings" is whether they were posted to the open public, or if these were internal postings so that existing Apple employees could transfer/apply to the job openings laterally.