Well, turns out with a little digital sleuthing, we can find out exactly what Tog thinks, and he's pretty much thinking the same thing:
"In Part 1, I discussed the ill-effects to the Macintosh of Apple's Flatland aesthetic, a visual simplicity that threatens to bury Apple's users with unnecessary clutter and complexity." and at: http://www.asktog.com/columns/076AppleFlatlandPart2.html iPhone/iPod Touch Home Screen You'll see the now familiar Flatland ethic on the home screen of the iPhone and iPod Touch, where it's impossible to, for example, drag all your games into a folder. Instead, you are offered eight distinct, flat, unlabeled pages that you must spin back and forth through in search of that one elusive program. Apple has thus created eight faithful copies of the Windows ‘95 desktop, where new icons cling to the uppermost, leftmost corner of the screen like helium balloons in a leftward-blowing wind. At least with Windows ‘95, you could also have folders, not just Apps and documents, on the desktop—not where you wanted them, true, but at least they were there. However, the iPhone/iPod Touch desktop doesn’t even allow folders, part and parcel of the endless prairie of Flatland. This flatness mania is damaging Apple developers. When the App Store first opened, I was buying everything. I’ve now stopped buying. I no longer have anything I want to throw away and nowhere to put anything new. I’m an early (and compulsive) adopter, but millions of others will soon reach this same point. The gold rush is going to suddenly be over, and it has nothing to do with people getting bored or the Apps becoming less interesting. (See, "Right Study, Wrong Prediction," below.) It’s just that Apple has failed to give people a means of storing what they might buy. To copy such a poor example of design as the Windows ‘95 desktop, ten-plus years later, is almost unbelievable, and I’m quite confident that, as with George Harrison copying “She’s So Fine” when composing ‘My Sweet Lord,” it was inadvertent. However, it was also naive and misplaced, and it needs to be corrected before Apps sales collapse on their developers. _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
