For starters my update unfortunately didn’t go smoothly. It glitches half way through and I had to restore and update. To clarify I didn’t update my phone via WiFi, I went with the cable route. Yes I know since iOS 5 Apple has switched to “delta updates”, for those who don’t know this is when only the changed files are updated rather then the entire system, and I do with minor updates. When it come to major updates I tend to plug it in to be safe. When the glitch happened I was at home not using my phone, it would’ve been a nightmare if it happened at work without a cable to connect it. The process took me about 15min, because of the glitch, and it made my iPhone 4S a lot faster, which on it’s own is already a reason to update, below I listed some of my favourite features even if they aren’t the most popular one.

Maps

I know a lot of reviews out there are poking at Apple left and right for replacing a perfectly reliable product with their infant phase offering. I don’t entirely agree, from what I found a lot of people hate the fact they don’t have StreetView or transportation. Personally i don’t miss StreetView on the iPhone, granted I only used it once or twice but I hate the experience, I like it a lot better on the desktop. One of the best welcomed feature is turn-by-turn navigation integrated with Siri. I used it to navigate to and from work. Yes I know to get to my job without it which is why it’s the perfect test. It gave the most time effective route and when i diverted from it Siri rerouted quite quickly without any input from, which is great if you are driving. The best part about it was it doesn’t bug you like other GPS units. Siri takes into consideration the speed at which you are going at and gives you welcomed prompts when getting near it. It doesn’t bug you constantly, it just sits back while you enjoy your music and the scenery.

Transportation is a missed feature but with Apple allowing third-party developers to build “plugins” for Maps, this void should be filled and maybe even better then Google’s offering, or who knows maybe Apple might just be building a system of their own.

Location Based Reminders

These are highly welcomed, I hated the fact iOS 5 didn’t have this supported for countries outside of the U.S and the fact everybody else has to wait while the service is being rolled out, I’m looking at you Apple with 3D buildings.

Do Not Disturb

I was fortunate enough to find a career in the economy that we are in as a junior designer. A week before I was due to start my power failed on me a few and with it went my alarm clock. I was already thinking of bringing my iPhone to my bedside and let it charge then but with this I decided to purchase an iHome system. It’s a great device and I might review it in another post but I got it a week before iOS 6 came out so every night I would set my phone to vibrate so it wouldn’t bug me. However, with Do Not Disturb it’s great, I have it to set to turn on between certain times and I don’t have to worry about it, peacefully working in the background.

To recap

Maps has it’s nice features and a nice UI to match, once Apple gets it more mature it will be a nice contender to what Google offers, until then however some users will be finding alternatives, specially if you really miss the lost features from Google Maps. iOS 6 is a great update as usual and in my opinion the best one so far, it’s great that Apple kept “delta updates” and seems to be heading forward with that. It makes my phone run smoother and has some more welcomed features that really turns it into a assistant with you need it but doesn’t need to be baby sat when you don’t. It’s not all candy, personally I hate the update to the music app and I’m not found of the blue band across the top of the messages app. However, I do welcome the brighter change to the phone app. The lighter UI really helps see it better and interact better. The contact app was changed and I hate the lost of groups, yes it’s still there but the interaction is worst then it was before. I understand the checklist idea but I think it could’ve been impelled better, I don’t want to keep unchecking what I don’t want to see.

In closing I recommend all iPhone users to get the update, the lost is more then made up for in the gain. If it’s only Maps that’s keeping you away it shouldn’t, I’m sure a lot of companies are going to fill the gap until Apple hammers out the kinks and if they are as serious about it as they seem to be it shouldn’t take as long as people are saying.

the rise of the clones

Let’s start by looking at what phones where like before the iPhone. I know it feels likes it was centuries ago but bear with me. You had various choices between flip phones, slide phones, Qwerty phones, robust phones for those tougher jobs and the blackberry’s of course. Then the iPhone was released and much to the surprise of competitors and critiques the phone was an instant hit. Not only did Apple marry hardware and software so well but they had also given a new form to a phone. They weren’t the first with a touch phone on the market at that time, HTC takes that cake. I had their first touchscreen phone that ran a spliced version of Windows XP, yes on a phone and yes it sucked a lot. The phone had a stylus and every time the angle of the screen changed, by how I was holding it, I had to recalibrate the screen. It was a nightmare to work with and I quickly began to hate the phone and actually one of the main reasons I still won’t buy an HTC phone. Granted I’m sure that issue is fixed since now their phones run on Android, no surprise to me given that Microsoft’s offering at the time was something designed for a desktop and not a phone but they must have know about the issue yet instead of fixing it they released it anyways. However, I had gone with the HTC Touch because at the time it was the only phone with a unibody, by that I mean no stupid keyboard on the bottom that I touch all the keys at once, no sliding panels or flips, etc. The reason I wanted a unibody phone was because of my Nokia 5300 had started to dissemble itself. I figured since it didn’t have any moving parts besides the buttons it was less likely to break and I was right the software just sucked. At that time there was plenty of choice in style, design, and features of a phone you wanted. Data wasn’t an issue at that point since most phones didn’t support it so you didn’t have that extra expense when buying one on a three year contract. Then the iPhone was launched and so did the articles bashing the phone. No one really payed any attention to it until it started producing the sales that Apple, Steve Jobs really, knew it would. At that point any competitor that wanted to compete with Apple only had Microsoft to turn to since only they had a “mobile” operating system until of course Google released their free Android OS. All the major players pretty jumped on this since they could just focus on the hardware side of the side and with the free operating system they could reduce costs while maintaining a higher profit margin. Samsung outrite copied the iPhone design, no matter how you slice it this is obvious in both the design of the phone and how it’s packaged, and so began a wave of iPhone clones with what some users wanted the iPhone to have. As I mentioned before some users like it because it’s an iPhone copy, but not all of them. Some really are dedicated Android fans who believe this verdict changes their experience with their operating system, but if you take a look at the trial Apple wasn’t going after Android but rather Samsung, at least for now. In the cases where the UI was in question it was changes that Samsung had applied to Android, with internal documents revealing how Samsung wanted a phone more like Apple’s offering and Google warning them about it.

the fall

I went with my girlfriend the other day to the mall, she’s looking into getting a new phone, and I we stared at the phones being displayed by the carries I couldn’t find a much difference between them. I found some models that are carrier specific, this was true in the past as well, but it was just really slight tweaks to the specs nothing had been done to the phone’s features. This is both a good and bad thing. Before I hated the fact that another module with better features was available at a competitor carrier only to be waved in front of my like some kind of exotic fruit. I like that features are more or less become standard but I’d like more variety in phones. Samsung seems to develop nothing but bricks with screens in the hopes that better specs out sell the iPhone, even though the App Store still surpasses the Android Market. LG and HTC seem to be running around in circles trying to come up with something and not get caught in the cross-fire between Apple  and Samsung. Motorola was purchased by Google so I’m assuming will be seeing some non-iPhone looking phones from them and RIM is in the corner licking their wounds trying to get back in, which I hope they do we need variety. Samsung’s clones may not be on the market longer if Apple keeps this momentum, although a few days after the verdict both Apple and Samsung lost their case agains’t each other in North Korea where a judge rulled both had infringed on each other patents and he couldn’t award it to either, we may finally see something innovative from Samsung.

the future

No it’s not impossible to build a phone that doesn’t look like the iPhone. Microsoft and Nokia proved that, to my surprise, with Windows Phone 7 and their lumia series. It’s a well designed phone and software. My mom has the Lumia 710 and besides a couple of hic ups at launch along with a feature that still doesn’t really work ,*cough name display cough*, the experience is pretty good and I can see it as a nice alternative to the iPhone. They show that all it really takes is looking at Apple for inspiration rather than idea. Samsung and the rest of the clones have to pull their heads out of their asses and stop asking why they hadn’t thought of it and develop a competitor that brings something else to the table.

As predicted Apple has recently announced the introduction of their new Retina Macbook Pro, which I’m going to assume sometime in the future it will also come to their desktop models and the rest of the macbook line. The response has been both positive and negative with some arguing that Apple is once again paving the way to leading technology just like they did with the iPhone and iPad lines.While others say retina screen computers aren’t solving a problem but rather creating one since there isn’t a demand for such high resolution screens when the web and most apps aren’t ready for it. I don’t think the later argument is valid since the iPod, iPhone, and iPad weren’t in demand either yet Apple created these products and people went straight for them. The Macbook Air is yet another example of this, and if you really look at it almost all Apple products follow this trend, heck it’s what the company is known for so to expect anything else would be naive and out of Apple’s nature. You could really apply this argument to anything that’s innovative and out it’s time but it doesn’t make it valid. People may not realize it but there is a demand for high resolution you can see this with the advent of HDTV’s and Blu-Ray media, it’s even rumored that Microsoft will introduce Blu-Ray into their next Xbox. With this in mind it makes sense to have high resolutions screens.

Sure these screens will be a problem for users while they wait for applications and the web to catch up, but if your app is being supported by good developers you shouldn’t have to wait long. For example, Sparrow (Mac email client) has already launched an update to support retina screens and Mountain Lion, Tweetbot has done the same and so on. Sure there are a few that haven’t so yet like the official Twitter client (same on you guys for letting a competitor beat you to the punch) and Adobe. I can already hear it now but what about the web. Again this depends on the developers and what your target market is. My site isn’t entirely retina supported I’m bringing it in as I go along but my logo has been since first launch. How and Why? Simple I designed my site to be responsive and since my main user base would be on iPhone’s and iPad’s I didn’t want my logo to look like crap on them. I used SVG (scalable vector graphic) to accomplish this task. Sure you can’t use SVG for your entire site but with the development of CSS3 and HTML5 a lot of site are image independent and run mainly on code. We haven’t realized it yet but we’ve been moving to this.

There’s always going to be critiques about anything new and innovative, but just like the iPod, iPhone, and iPad before it I think high resolution screen will become more and more popular and become the norm. You just have to remember that at one point screen didn’t go past 800px X 600px and didn’t have a lot of colours I’m sure you are thankful that they changed that.

You can read this great article by Joshua Johnson on what it’s like for a designer to work on the Retina Macbook Pro.

I’d been reading “Responsive Web Design” by Ethan Marcotte, “HTML 5 & CSS3 for Web Designers” by Jeremy Keith and Dan Cederholm, “Designing for Emotion” by Aarron Walter and “Mobile First” by Luke Wroblewski. (Which if you haven’t checked this books out already you should head over to A Book Apart ) Designing for Emotion got me thinking about what I wanted my website to be and about the problem I faced with it, the rest got me thinking on technology and how I wanted my site to function. I knew from the beginning I wanted a responsive website but I hadn’t settle on HTML or WordPress, I decided on WordPress in the end because it would be easier to add and remove content, not to mention it would bring down the need for maintenance.

I started out sketching ideas for how I was going to layout my content and that’s when I realized my sites structure was very much the same to what most people where doing. I wanted to avoid this so I started to ask questions as to why I had what I had. I found the homepage to be useless for my site and I decided to remove it and make my portfolio page my homepage.. The main function of my site is to showcase my work and having a page with a short introduction and maybe a few teasers, I found to be redundant. Secondly, my bounce rate for that page would be huge since most people upon arriving would probably be clicking on portfolio anyways. Once I did that I found myself with my Portfolio/Homepage, an About Page, and a Contact Page.

With the site being responsive in mind I decided on a modular grid structure that could rearrange it’s self and resize according to screen size. I also designed the header and footer for my site and what the contact page would look like. I choose a neutral colour scheme because I wanted my work to be the focus and not the site and colour was the thing that came to mind to achieve that. Also it matched my printed portfolio which I didn’t want to disconnect from. Once I had the sketches on how it would look like on a mobile device I sketched out how it would look on a desktop just to make sure the concept worked.

I didn’t do any photoshop mockups for this site mainly because a responsive layout is difficult to illustrate, if not impossible, in a program where the objects are solid. Instead I went with rapid prototyping. I came across a great little program, VirtualHostX, that allowed me to locally develop my website with a custom local-level domain name, in this case it was marciomorgado.dev. This way it would be simple to move it to a live server and I could work on it on the way to school.

When I began development I came across a premium WordPress theme that had a similar foundation to mine. Upon looking at the theme I found if I bought it and customized it, like adding a footer to it, recreating the menu, some UX tweaks and css customization, I could use that as a starting point and bring my focus back to my portfolio pieces and finding an internship. I bought the theme and began to customize it with the entire process taking about three days to complete with random work sessions. I now had a website and began adding my projects and decided to add a slider that supported touch interfaces. This would allow it to be easily viewed on any device without hindering the experience of the site.

After about a week and a half I now had my site with most of my projects. Unfortunately, it would take almost another month for me to add all the projects found in my printed portfolio book. To balance my printed and online portfolios I’ve kept some information out of the online edition so it wouldn’t be me repeating everything in an interview to someone who looked at my website first and some projects where kept out of the printed version for other reasons.

It was a great experience developing my portfolio site taking into account the image and experience I wanted to project. I don’t think this will be my final version, I’m sure later on I will update it again after all this is the fifth installation of my online portfolio but when I do I’m looking forward to what I learn then.