Despite the heresy of it, I want to consider the question of what part innovation plays in Apple’s recent success(es).

Three things can be credited with returning Apple to glory: Mac OS X (to a lesser extent), iTunes/iPod and finally the iPhone. Mac OS X, rather than being an innovation, is a bit of a throwback (if I may), abandoning Mac OS “Classic” for the tried and tested Unix’ish base of FreeBSD and Mach. Lest you consider that quibbling or even misleading, let me suggest that by the turn of the millennium, the fan base for Apple computers/laptops was growing most significantly not among the graphic designers and hipsters who had previous embraced the brand, but among geeks and übergeeks, the very types who could appreciate and take advantage of a Unix back-end and all that that implies. They don’t make up much of the population; one reason for the low market share of Mac OS X.

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BumpTop is a 3D desktop manager for Windows and Mac with some slick features and fairly well done OS integration. I have been using it for a few days now and it is impressive if not indispensable. The reason for this post however is to comment on something that John Gruber wrote about this app:

And the 3D stuff, with a weird perspective on “walls”, just seems silly.

I can see how he may find it silly, but in my usage I found the walls quite a useful feature, psychologically speaking. Despite the large collection of useful widgets on my Mac OS Dashboard, I rarely bring up the Dashboard to access the information or operation that these widgets provide.

Why not? Apart from the fact that the Dashboard takes forever to update, somehow, bringing up the Dashboard, visually an overlay on my desktop, seems to neither fit into my workflow nor appeal to my instinctive usage patterns.

On the other hand, in the few days I have been using BumpTop (intermittently), the ability to create sticky notes on a wall (admittedly, a particular application, and not a replacement for the Dashboard) has resonated well with my impulses… to look for a note on a wall seems, well, just the right thing to do!

It helps that BumpTop causes no increase in CPU utilisation on a quiescent system or when I working primarily within one application.

I am not sure if I will stop using Qu-S and keep using BumpTop, but it would be interesting to know what those who study UI/UX design think about the ideal way to present informational widgets and tiny apps.

Doseido, makers of Headline have announced that they have something new on the way. Hope is low that it’s a new version of Headline that fixes some of its minor annoyances. Why? Because if you are a Mac app developer, you know which side your bread is buttered these days. (The answer, if you are not an iPhone developer: it’s the iPhone side. When’s the last time Tweetie updated their Mac app?)

So I am just some schlub with a Toucan for a logo, but people with venture funding (and even profits in the case of some) should be able to do better than this screenshot I picked off of PixelPipe (a service whose purpose I shall discover very soon, I am certain):

I left Tumblr and WordPress in to give some relief to your eyes.

From John Gruber today, a quote from MG Siegler on the superiority of the iPhone:

MG Siegler on the Nexus One MG Siegler: Perhaps the single biggest reason that I like Apple products, and their software, in particular, is the attention to detail the company puts in. In my mind, that’s exactly what still separates the iPhone from all the Android phones. It’s the little things. The things that are almost too small for you to even notice, but which make the experience subtly better.

Which is all fine, but it seems to me that history (even Apple’s own) has demonstrated that design, “attention to detail”, and so on have rarely fared well against buzz, FUD, user entrapment, collusion and other tactics (different subsets of which are the advantages enjoyed by Apple’s two primary competitors: Microsoft and Google). The difference in the “smartphone” market is, of course, that Apple for once is the most successful and advanced device, but let us see how this pans out three years from now.

[ link: Daring Fireball Linked List: MG Siegler on the Nexus One ]

If you recently got a Magic Mouse either because it came with your new Mac or because you got excited by the hype and bought one, only to find that the dratted thing is missing the third and fourth buttons which you had so cleverly bound to Expose and Spaces, there is good news. A free application calledMagicPrefs lets you not only add this functionality to the Magic Mouse but lets you define gestures and perform other kinky mods that should be worth a lot more than the millions that Apple paid to acquire Lala.

UPDATE: TUAW has a pointer to another free tool called BetterTouchTool.

Mark Zuckerberg is the founder and CEO of Facebook, the social networking site that is once again facing criticisms for revising its privacy settings which includes new [recommended] defaults that expose more user information to everyone. Along with this change came doublespeak from Facebook that these moves were intended to enhance the privacy of Facebook users. And just in case you weren’t convinced, Zuckerberg has now expanded his own privacy settings, permitting “friends of friends” to view his own details, photographs and so on.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has changed the privacy settings on his personal page to open it up to friends of friends.

[...]

Blogger Kashmir Hill from True/Slant discovered the change to Mr Zuckerberg’s status which means friends of his friends can see about 300 of his previously private photos and see many more of his status updates.

[...]

Initially, Ms Hill believed the change was accidental and Mr Zuckerberg had fallen foul of the complicated rules governing what information is shared and what is public.

But in an update to his personal page Mr Zuckerberg said opening up access was deliberate.

Writing on the page, he said: “For those wondering, I set most of my content on my personal Facebook page to be open so people could see it.”

He added: “I set some of my content to be more private, but I didn’t see a need to limit visibility of pics with my friends, family or my teddy bear :).”

via BBC News – Facebook boss changes privacy settings

That is charitable of Mr. Zuckerberg, but two questions continue to irk:

Why did Zuckerberg not choose the Facebook recommended new default of exposing more information to Everyone?

And if he doesn’t “see a need to limit visibility of pics”, why did his previous settings limit such visibility?

It is difficult not to fall in love (insofar as such emotions have been called love) with Posterous, the fast-growing mini-blogging service, especially in comparison to its bigger competitor Tumblr. In contrast to the insider ethos that Tumblr (ironically, currently the larger service) actively embraces, Posterous eschews the superficially hip for the genuinely productive, when it comes to features.
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When no WMD were found in Iraq the neocons who had been promoting the war on that premise offered as an excuse the claim that nobody knew or predicted that outcome at the time of going to war. When the economy fell apart last year because of the real estate bubble, Chicago school and classical economists employed a similar defence, that this result could not have been, and was not, anticipated. I am not trying to turn political here on this blog, but this excuse is trotted out all too often despite its being entirely unjustified and ill-reasoned.
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This is John Dvorak commenting on the Apple Macintosh in 1984:

The nature of the personal computer is simply not fully understood by companies like Apple (or anyone else for that matter). Apple makes the arrogant assumption of thinking that it knows what you want and need. It, unfortunately, leaves the “why” out of the equation — as in “why would I want this?” The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a ‘mouse’. There is no evidence that people want to use these things. I dont want one of these new fangled devices.

[ via Daring Fireball and  Jan. 1984: How critics reviewed the Mac - Apple 2.0 - Fortune Brainstorm Tech ]