Whither iWork?

There's lots of talk about the fact that iWork has lost a significant amount of features on the Mac. Many people attribute it to Apple being blind to the needs of pro users. I think the reason is far less condescending.

The phrase "the same file format for both Mac and iOS" is used on the pages for all three products. It was highlighted in Apple's keynote. It's important.

Without all versions of iWork using the same data format, true interoperability is impossible. In the previous versions of iWork you would lose some formatting & data when moving from Mac to iOS.

When you create multiple apps that use the same data format, it is difficult, if not impossible, to prevent data loss when editing files unless you have feature parity between versions. To make up a fictional example, imagine that Pages on the Mac could include images in a document while the iOS version could not. What happens to the complex text wrapping around an image when you edit the document on the iPad? What happens to page layout, and links, and your table of contents, if large chunks of content are missing? You'd end up with serious formatting errors at best, or data loss at worse.

The fact that iWork on the Mac has lost functionality isn't because Apple is blind to power users. It's because they're willing to make a short-term sacrifice in functionality so that they can create a foundation that is equal across the Mac, iOS, and web versions. It will take time to bring these new versions of iWork up to parity with what the Mac used to have. In the meantime all platforms have to live with the lowest common denominator.

Whether this tradeoff is the right call is up for debate. As someone who uses iWork a decent amount, it's frustrating that the first update major new release in over 4 years is a regression in functionality. But if iWork is a key piece of Apple's software platform going forward, it's easy to see that interoperability across versions is an important baseline requirement for them. I just hope that they continue heavy development of the software and iterate quickly.

Caveat: this is all hypothesis based on my experience designing cross-platform software. I could be wrong.

Update: It was pointed out to me that the new iWork for Mac is not the first update to the software in over 4 years. There were many updates to iWork 09 over the years. The first "major new release" is more accurate.

Forever Young

Some iOS 7 commentators have brought up the idea that we don't need visual cues like buttons, bevels, textures, and shadows to tell us what we can tap. Watts Martin asks, "Do we really still need buttons?" Matt Gemmell says,

[…] we’ve grown up. We don’t require hand-holding to tell us what to click or tap. Interactivity is a matter of invitation, and physical cues are only one specific type. iOS 7 is an iOS for a more mature consumer, who understands that digital surfaces are interactive, and who doesn’t want anything getting in the way of their content.

I appreciate some of their other insights, but I call bullshit on this specific point. Who, exactly, has grown up? In the past 30 years of traditional desktop GUIs, no one questioned the need for basic visual cues to demonstrate interactivity. When it comes to smartphones specifically, billions of people around the world have never used one. To take an example of a particularly smartphone-happy country, almost half the population in the U.S. has yet to buy one.1

Visual affordance is one of the fundamental keys to usability, and veering away from it is a sure way of creating something that is difficult for non-techies to understand. "We've grown up" is logic I've seen used many times to justify pretty designs that suffer from basic usability flaws.

This isn't meant as a criticism of the visual overhaul in iOS 7.2 It's an argument against the notion that usability should be traded for beauty. There is a lot of hubris involved in the assumption that the "we" in "we've grown up" applies to anyone outside of a tiny number of developers and designers. It's a big world out there. Let's continue creating tools that are usable for as many people as possible.

  1. According to numbers cited by Horace Dediu, U.S. smartphone penetration crossed the 50% threshold only at the end of last year. ↩
  2. Michael Heilemann already shared some great comments on the designs of the lock screen and music app in beta 1. I'll refrain from anything further as the new design is clearly a massive job and still a work in progress. ↩

Sweat the Details – Android Power Off

When you lock a Google Nexus phone, there is a short animation where the screen shuts off using an effect reminiscent of switching off an old CRT TV. If flat panel displays have robbed your memory of this visual, picture the HBO outro clip that plays after a show ends.

This animation was added to Android a couple of years ago but I haven’t seen it mentioned. It’s the perfect type of whimsical: it’s over in a split second, the timing ensures it never blocks you from interacting with the UI, and the only purpose it serves is fun.[1]

  1. It’s also a nice example of good skeuomorphic design.  ↩