Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Former Apple TV Engineer Claims New Apple TV Interface Discarded 5 Years Ago [Updatedx2]
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
That's the problem though - the old menu categories were not that great, and it wasn't always clear where to find things. If you'd never used an AppleTV before, why wouldn't "Internet" be where you set your Wi-Fi settings, or sign up for MLB games? How do you know what your AppleTV is capable of, besides scrolling through every menu and memorizing the locations?
I'll be the first to say that I thought the third-gen AppleTV UI looked gaudy and untidy when I first saw the screenshots. But you know what? When you use it in person it's just fine. It looks really nice in 1080p, from a few feet away. All the functionality is displayed for the user. Getting between things is much faster, since you don't have to navigate a "Crossmedia Bar"-type hierarchy.
And let's be honest. Steve Jobs was brilliant - but many bad ideas got through under his watch (G4 Cube, iPod Hi-Fi, MobileMe, Ping) and he also resisted some really good ideas (e.g. CD burners). It's kind of ridiculous to examine every little thing now with a microscope and speculate whether or not Steve Jobs would have approved, or whether Apple's going down the drain.
Consumers don't know the first thing about good design. They will accept whatever you give them.
Steve obviously knew about this iPad. These devices are in test stages years before they are released. Steve probably even saw iPad 4.
I Agree with this, and this also includes shoving iProducts in every movie/tv show. The iPhone is so far from a good design yet it's everywhere.
I wouldn't mind the design so much if I could move the icons around and hide the ones I never use. I assuming this will happen because it is such an obvious feature that we should have.
Plex. The only problems with that stem from a Mac not meant to be a TV-connected device, Plex itself is amazing for videos and television. The old Apple TV interface was lovely and clean, this one is not.
well i really don't have a problem with the interface. i actually like it better than the previous version. but thats the thing about designs: everyone has an opinion.
I think the iPhone 4 had the best design I ever saw on a phone. But these things are subjective and I'm not an industrial designer nor a mechanical engineer. I'm just judging aesthetically.
But product placement is something entirely different. That has much less to do with the design.
If you read Steve Jobs' biography, you'll see that he was far from perfect. He certainly provided the vision for Apple and made the right decisions the majority of the time. Nobody can dispute that. But he also wasted time and money on unimportant aesthetic details. For example, making a perfectly white, futuristic factory that made products nobody wanted. Or making nice clean slot-loading drive that couldn't burn CDs (when that was all the rage). There are also many instances where he blocked ideas from his employees, changed his mind, and took credit for creating it.
I'm not trying to tear the man down. Only pointing out that there are plenty of good ideas at Apple (design included) besides those in Steve Jobs' brain. He also gave the green light to some lemons too. I am completely confident in Apple's design team. Well, except the team that came up with the leather iCal.
My own opinions aside, I actually find it really interesting to see how people respond to this. Does the Apple fanboy (of which I am admittedly one) side with the company as it exists today or Steve Jobs?
HobeSoundDarryl
macrumors G5
Fixed that for you. While some companies exhibit this "consumers know nothing, we know best" mentality, I would be one of the last to share in that philosophy. If you involve your buyers in what you are developing, you have a better chance of developing something they'll want to buy. Ignore them and you have a chance of developing only something that YOU (alone) may want to buy. Sure, the latter can sometimes yield home runs when the individual guesses very right but it also can yield products that bomb. It never hurts to include the input of the buyers (which doesn't mean depend solely on their input).
People, people please... Stop saying there is no one who can ban bad design in Apple. Jonathan Ive is that person now. Steve let him untouchable and he is the one who says No. Remember that.
honestly, this is still "too much" really what would be a great fluid intuitive UI/UX would be if you scrapped all those buttons and made content king. "movies, music, tv shows" and once you clicked on the media type you are then presented with genres or some other categorical listing, and the content is displayed there no matter if its on your netflix or on your homeshared computers or on your iTunes cloud. then have a store button at the top of each list to allow you to go buy/rent new things in that category/genre
Personally, I like the PS3/PSP menu-interface and navigation logic ( http://bit.ly/GOF1HJ ) way more than this.
But it's not too bad, imho.
But it's not too bad, imho.
Agreed. I will never use the sports-related icons and they take up valuable screen space.
This, +100.
While Steve had a very good sense of design, his bio is filled with situations where he was wrong about things. (The upside down Apple on the laptops; the floppy drive supplier for the mac, etc.). The most amazing thing that he did, really, was surround himself with other people who also had a clear sense of design *and* with enough knowledge and confidence to contradict him and convince him that he was wrong and they were right. That's a *lot* harder to do...but it bodes well for Apple because those people are still there and that culture is still there.
While I think that the new Apple TV interface is kind of meh, the old one would probably have been worse with all of the options we now have available. And I'm confident that the next version will be better.
The consensus seems to be that Steve came up with the leather designs. I suppose we should be happy that the Apple TV interface isn't stitched leather.
I don't think Steve would mind people asking what he'd do; I think he'd mind that posthumously, people seem to think he was omniscient.
SJ made plenty of mistakes, and had a load of terrible ideas, too. *shock* he was human. I'm sure he also changed his mind a lot about the same thing.
One obvious example that springs to mind is how he repeatedly refused to release a Windows-compatible iPod. We all know how good it is that people didn't listen to him.
SJ made plenty of mistakes, and had a load of terrible ideas, too. *shock* he was human. I'm sure he also changed his mind a lot about the same thing.
One obvious example that springs to mind is how he repeatedly refused to release a Windows-compatible iPod. We all know how good it is that people didn't listen to him.
Well, companies do know better than consumers, that's not debatable. Their job is to know better. A consumer does not spend thousands of hours developing and testing different designs and implementations. They have basically no idea nor should they have any idea. It's not my job to develop an electronic product.
The rest of your argument is irrelevant. Customers can accept or reject a product for millions of different reasons besides design.
I don't think the input of the buyers should ever be put under heavy observation. Sure sometimes people can come up with good ideas, but most of the time they come up with crappy ones, so time is better spent on other things than listening to customers. One crucial thing to realize is that customers are habitual and unless someone forces them, they won't want to change their habits, which most of the time is bad for them. A company can force them to do that by releasing appropriate products.
I've seen and used the new AppleTV interface. I don't think it's very good at all. But I don't think the previous interface was much better either.
Search needs to be first and foremost and easy. Period. If you can't search, it's useless.
After that, why not a silky smooth fast coverflow for browsing the movie posters?
Search needs to be first and foremost and easy. Period. If you can't search, it's useless.
After that, why not a silky smooth fast coverflow for browsing the movie posters?