I have not used any Apple product until last week. I am known as a Google guy and I can not claim the opposite because I use almost every Google Application. Of course the Apple’s unique design innovation is always charming. But it’s just far away from me.
Smooth Experience
My company decided to deliver mobile products. As a member of software development team, I found myself trying to scroll downwards by doing upwards with multi-fingers on a touchpad. I still can not guess the right gesture direction for scrolling sometimes. As I expected and people told me, the Apple experience is fascinating from start to end. Hardware design‘s quality and feeling is completed with user experience of the OS. It is obvious that the experience is created by depending on one common philosophy. This winning philosophy is best defined by Simon Sinek in a Ted talk named How great leaders inspire action.
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. — Steve Jobs
I have to confess, smooth design is so fun to use. So that’s one of the reasons to write this post. The second reason is another post in Medium. Joel Gascoigne wrote about Fear of Not Shipping. Mostly, I tend not to write and delay to post. After reading Joel’s post, I am trying “ship fast and have feedback” idea. As I said, the design was transformed into functionality for me. Of course “content is the king” and I also needed a starting point.
Surprising Feature Lack
Surprisingly I got my starting point from the lack of a feature in that wonderful Apple experience. My ex-OS, Windows is not innovative as much as Apple. Of course the target market profiles are different. If they both profit as they expected, nothing is wrong. When I start using Windows 7 after my ex-Windows which I don’t remember the version, I loved one feature; I can split the screen down the middle to use two windows or browsers easily by drag&drop. I tried drag&drop but did not work for Mac OS. Without this feature, I had to adjust windows to fit into screen.
I was not alone. I found two related search results and learnt there are applications promising the feature on Mac OS. But there is not a native way to do. I really surprised Windows has this innovative easy screen splitting feature.
One Guess
Who knows, maybe this is an idea of an ex-Apple employer started to work at Microsoft. Because I believe that innovation can only be created from a solid philosophy. That splitting screen feature really looked like an Apple-way design. Sorry Microsoft, if I am wrong.
