“If you want your app to feel at home in a new operating system, you have to embrace and implement the user-interface paradigms that the OS describes. This is probably the most fundamental step towards providing users with a consistent experience instead of a hodgepodge of half-baked ideas—and one step that, as a developer, you skip at your own risk.”
Marco Tabini, Universal Save for iOS Apps – The Accidental Businessman
Marco Tabini makes a couple of points about iOS, Lion, 1Password, and good ol’ fashioned Everyday Users to disagree with Ted Landau’s argument for a “Universal Save” storage area for iOS.
I’m in Marco’s camp. Power users aren’t often forced to deal with major shifts in usability and habits, so Apple’s radical changes in iOS and now Lion are making a handful of power users and developers really uncomfortable.
But this is how Apple rolls: it hones a vision for a solution to modern problems of technology and experience, then works steadily, and slowly if need be, toward achieving it. Just look at Apple’s recent progress. It’s added bits of flexibility where needed (Document Sharing in iOS), but also made the tough decision to introduce sandboxing in Lion to remove flexibility where it caused a ton of problems and, in many ways, never made much sense in the first place.
Transitions like iOS and Lion can be tough for nerds. But the fact is that Apple now focuses on, and designs for, the common user more than ever. Nerds aren’t getting left behind, but they aren’t first in line anymore. Haven’t been for a long time.
