Design

Steven Levy, Backchannel:

As the campus came into shape, Muffly — who was granted full-time status as Apple’s senior arborist in 2011 — had to actually get the trees. This task was even harder because the arborist and his small team (he calls them his “elves”) needed more trees than originally estimated. When Jobs presented his plan to the Cupertino City Council in June 2011, he said that Apple would add to the 3,700 existing trees for a total of 6,000. But when Muffly began his work, he realized that nearly all the (non-indigenous) existing trees would have to go.

“It was all junk trees and parking lots here,” he says. “So it was a long process.

There’s a lot to enjoy in this story. There’s the background on Steve Jobs and his history with trees, coupled with the process of selecting trees for Apple Park, with an emphasis on saving and planting native trees. Native trees are built to consume the rainfall for a specific area, grow well in the native soil without supplement. Steve Jobs knew this and hired an arborist who shared his vision.

[VIDEO] Matthew Roberts latest footage is gorgeous (click through to the main Loop post to watch it).

One question: About two minutes in, we see a shot of an outbuilding that looks like a barn, sitting off center on what appears to be a concrete pad. Anyone know what that is? If so, please tweet at me.

I do find it fascinating to watch an architectural vision come to full fruition. This is a beautiful design, incredibly detailed, massive in scope.

UPDATE: Yup, it’s a barn. According to this Mercury News article:

Underscoring that Apple Campus 2 is at once one of Silicon Valley’s wildest sketches of the future and a portal to its past, the company has set aside a place on its state-of-the-art campus for the Glendenning Barn, named for a pioneer family whose land became a magnet for tech companies after the blooms faded from their orchards. Constructed in 1916 with planks of redwood, the barn was built to last, though its founders couldn’t have foreseen all that it would withstand: the decline of local agriculture, the rise of big tech and several changes of the guard in Silicon Valley, not to mention Apple’s earth movers.

Thanks for all the response. Love this bit of preserved history.

Brad Ellis, Medium:

The UINavigationBar, navbar for short, has been around since the original iPhone. Historically, navbars have been convenient and clear, easy to understand and easy to build.

The navbar is the strip at the top of your phone that lets you move in and back out of views. As an example, in the Messages app,the nav bar has an Edit button on the left side, the title Messages in the middle, and a create new message icon on the right. If you tap on a message thread, the nav bar will change to a “<” on the left. Tap that “<” and you’ll navigate back to the main view.

Back to Brad’s post:

Then phones ballooned, enough that the iPhone 7 Plus supplanted sales of the iPad mini. Now, if you own a modern iPhone, navbars can feel unwieldy — literally out of touch.

Burgeoning screens mean the distance between the navbar and our thumbs has grown. The screen on a 7 Plus is so tall it would take a thumb-length increase of 150 percent to reach those pesky buttons with one hand. Just another knuckle or two. Nothing weird.

He does have a point. I use a Plus, and when I need to work the navbar, I either have to use my other hand to reach the top of the screen, or do a weird slidey move to work the phone down so I can reach the navbar with my thumb.

iOS does feature that double-touch the home button gesture to bring the top of the phone halfway down, but I find that takes too long, given that I have to also do the double-touch to restore to full screen. The double-touch is my least favorite solution. [UPDATE: Yup, you can tap to dismiss this. Still don’t like it.]

Read the post for thoughts on how Apple is already addressing this issue and steering away from the venerable navbar. Terrific.

I love the artwork here, glad they are still expanding the set to be ever more representational. As this set expands, we’re going to need better search tools. Scrolling through pages and pages of emoji is reaching a breaking point.

Text substitution is one solution. Keeping a page of recently used emoji (as iOS does now) is also helpful, though perhaps Apple could add in a pane of configurable favorites?

Note this, in bold letters on the Emojipedia page:

This update is not final and is subject to change.

Just something to keep in mind. And where’s that rimshot emoji?

Jason Snell, Macworld:

Tap-tapping your earbud and asking your phone out loud to turn the volume up doesn’t seem simple—but would a complex series of gestures really help?

As Jason points out in the quote above, how do you raise and lower the volume in a device with no dedicated volume buttons? A bit of a conundrum. And as the AirPods evolve as a product line, as they become capable of more complex behavior, will Siri be the solution?

Interesting post on the quest for balance between simplicity and complexity.

Jordan Novet, VentureBeat:

When I picked up a pair of Apple’s wireless AirPods a few weeks ago, I thought the included charging case was a clever touch.

But the case wound up being so useful that it spoiled me for Apple’s other wireless earbuds, the BeatsX. After two weeks of testing a pair of BeatsX headphones, I’ve found they also fall short of the AirPods in one make-or-break area: battery life.

And there are other drawbacks, too, The AirPods case, with its satisfying clasp, is an instant Apple design classic, whereas the included BeatsX silicone case doesn’t always completely protect your headphones — sometimes parts of the cable end up sticking out. And it gathers lint. Just look at it.

If you are trying to decide between BeatsX and AirPods, this take is worth reading. The difference between the two carrying cases is just one small piece of a larger puzzle, just a taste of each respective product’s approach to design, but in my opinion, a telling taste.

If nothing else, take a look at the image of the BeatsX case in the linked post, then imagine wrestling a rubbery, springy, coiled BeatsX headset into that case. Compare to the plop, plop of dropping your AirPods into their case. Then add in the take on battery life.

If that matters to you, you’re likely an AirPods customer.

Ian Bogost wrote an article for The Atlantic with the provocative title The Myth of Apple’s Great Design.

Here’s a quote:

Apple has great design is the biggest myth in technology today. The latest victim of this ideology comes in the form a remarkable report on the late Steve Jobs’s final project, still in production: a new, $5 billion Cupertino headquarters for Apple Inc.

And:

But if Apple designs at its best when attending closely to details like those revealed in the construction of its spaceship headquarters, then presumably the details of its products would stand out as worthy precedents. Yet, when this premise is tested, it comes up wanting. In truth, Apple’s products hide a shambles of bad design under the perfection of sleek exteriors.

There’s a lot more of this. Luckily, I will not have to take this article apart, point by point. Nick Heer, keeper of the blog Pixel Envy, does this job nicely, in a post titled Sufficiently Great.

Read ’em both.

Reuters:

But what was most striking to those who worked on the project was Apple managers’ insistence on treating the construction of the vast complex the same way they approach the design of pocket-sized electronics.

Apple’s in-house construction team enforced many rules: No vents or pipes could be reflected in the glass. Guidelines for the special wood used frequently throughout the building ran to some 30 pages.

Tolerances, the distance materials may deviate from desired measurements, were a particular focus. On many projects, the standard is 1/8 of an inch at best; Apple often demanded far less, even for hidden surfaces.

And:

Apple’s novel approach to the building took many forms. Architect German de la Torre, who worked on the project, found many of the proportions – such as the curve of a rounded corner – came from Apple’s products. The elevator buttons struck some workers as resembling the iPhone’s home button; one former manager even likened the toilet’s sleek design to the device.

But de la Torre ultimately saw that Apple executives were not trying to evoke the iPhone per se, but rather following something akin to the Platonic ideal of form and dimension.

Fascinating read. Skip the video.