About a year or so ago, I read a thoughtful article on how Apple products were no longer easy to use. I shared it in the news back in September, and the gist of the article was that technology has now reached a point where it's becoming increasingly common to have to work out convoluted solutions to what should be easy-to-solve problems. And this change isn't just happening for people who aren't familiar with how computers work, but even for those who have lived and breathed computers ever since they could live and breathe.
It's no one's fault, per se, but pretty soon, technology will become a victim of its own popularity. There's a lot Apple (and other companies) are doing to address the problem by making the simple things simple and engineering the best user experiences possible, but that doesn't mean something slips through the cracks every now and again. It's why we now have job titles that describe someone as a "UX designer" or why we now have units called human-computer interaction that you can study at the tertiary level. All because this technology business can be a lot more complicated than most people think, and unless you've built software yourself, worked with clients, or experienced the rage when something isn't as intuitive as it should be, you have no idea what it's like. Trust me —*the best iOS and Mac apps have an incredible amount of thought put into them.
I follow one iOS developer on App.Net, and it's been eye-opening to see him explain to users why his app doesn't do certain things one way, or does them another. There's just so many possible use cases, so many different usage scenarios, that it's hard for just one developer of a small-time iOS app to account for every one. I remember one time when I emailed him about an issue I was having where the app wasn't behaving the way I was used to in another app — "gap detection", if you're interested — and his response as to why his app worked differently made complete sense, even though the other app worked a completely different way. Two completely different implementations of the same feature, two completely different ideologies as two how gap detection should work, but both just as valid as each other. And you wonder why there's a proliferation of these so-called UX designers.
Why, even our own Ben Johnston was seen sending a support tweet to Tapbots just this morning about why he couldn't get the iPad version of Tweetbot to sync data via iCloud, even though he'd done the usual reinstall/restart/reset hoop-jumping in order to get it to work, and even though the iPhone and Mac versions worked fine. There's literally nothing more he could have done in order to get it to work, short of trying a new iCloud account — but even that wouldn't have solved the original issue of why it wasn't working in the first place.
And it's not just Ben that's having issues, either. Take a look on the forums and you'll find people asking all kinds of questions that have no real answer besides some wild speculation from users who have experienced the same thing, or no real answer besides a hacky workaround that doesn't answer the original question. Why can't Apple sort out their calendar syncing? Why is Preview so demanding on the system? Are random loud fans on my Retina MacBook Pro normal? Has the sleep behaviour on the 2012 iMac changed? And just recently, does Thunderbolt make life difficult?
This kind of technology, the kind that obfuscates its inner workings in order to make things simpler and easier for end users, is the kind of thing that hinder geeks tinkering with things in order to make them work. The black box of iCloud data syncing. The black box of Apple hardware and software integration. The black box of draggable menu extras. If Panic didn't take a hacksaw to the Lightning Digital AV adapter, we might never have had an answer to "why does the HDMI output from my Lightning device have compression artefacts and is not 1080p?". But now we know why, all because Panic broke open the black box that is the Lightning to Digital AV Adapter and put it on a pedestal for the world to see.
Black boxes might make it easier for users, but at what cost to the rest of us? Granted, these black boxes might very well keep some of us employed, but when we run into them, they're infinitely frustrating. Like butting your head against a wall. I mean, why can't I merge my Apple IDs? And for the love of all things holy, what possible technology prevents my email address from being removed from your mailing list immediately, rather than the 48 hours you say it will take?
So keep asking questions. Keep taking hacksaws to your $59 adapter. Because if that's how we progress technologically, then so be it. Black boxes be damned.
