My colleague William Lam of Virtually Ghetto has been busily talking to more system administrators who have virtualized OS X in a production environment. The most recent two are:
This has been an awesome series of blog posts. I’ve learned a lot! Want to share your story of using VMware and OS X in production? Contact William.
Brianna Wu, head of development at Giant Spacekat (who have just released their first iOS game, Revolution 60) wrote a great piece titled “Eve wasn’t invited: Integrating women into the Apple community” for Macworld. The conclusion is fantastic:
When I was a teenager in the 90s, I had few female role models to look up to in computer science; it’s simply not acceptable for this to still be the case in 2014. Next year at WWDC, I want to see at least one woman in a public speaking role during the WWDC keynote. There are many bright, smart, well-spoken female Apple engineers; let’s put them on stage and be role models for their peers and our daughters. Or Apple’s Angela Ahrendts, who may not be a developer, but her business savvy and presentation skills seem like they would be well-utilized at next year’s keynote. And I want to see more women and minorities at WWDC next year. We’re a small crowd, but we do exist, and having more of us at the conference will emphasize this.
Go check out the whole article!
My colleague William Lam at Virtually Ghetto has been collecting community stories of VMware and OS X in production. So far, he’s published two stories:
If you’re running vSphere or ESXi in a production environment and want to share details, reach out to William.
Just a quick post to boost the signal for William Lam’s post “Quick Update – ESXi support for Apple Mac Pro 6,1”:
I know many of you have been asking about ESXi support for the latest Mac Pro 6,1 that was released from Apple late last year and I just wanted to give a quick update. VMware Engineering has been hard at work on getting this new platform certified and supported with ESXi, however, there were some unforeseen challenges that is currently preventing the current version of ESXi to run on the new Mac Pro.
VMware is working closely with Apple’s hardware team to resolve these issues and we expect to have a Mac Pro 6,1 supported with ESXi 5.5 in the future. In the meantime, if you wish to evaluate ESXi on the new Mac Pro (though not officially supported), you can sign up for the new vSphere Beta and run a Beta version of ESXi on the new Mac Pro.
I gave a talk at AltConf a few weeks ago entitled “user research for awesome products”. In it, I used quotes from the launch of the iPhone to illustrate the central tenets of user research and how it contributes to making a fantastic product. During the talk, I reminded my audience that the most popular phone in 2007 was the Motorola Razr flip phone. I discussed some of the shortcomings of flip phones of the era, such as texting and taking pictures. I also talked about how we didn’t didn’t perceive them as shortcomings because they were as good as or better than any alternative we had. I discussed other ways the iPhone understood our needs and used the technology to support the goals of real live people.
When I read a recent Gizmodo piece about someone who gave up their iPhone for a month in exchange for a Razr, it all felt quite familiar. In retrospect, the Razr feels weird and clunky and useless. At the time, the Razr was awesome. Smartphones have changed how we communicate with others, navigate our world, and spend our spare time. Her article is a great companion piece to my talk, full of examples of how much our expectations have changed as a result of the iPhone.
The question of why one would virtualize OS X came up on the Mac Enterprise mailing list this week. I got asked that question elsewhere this week too, so it seems like it’s time for a blog post on the topic.
Given that the OS X EULA requires that you virtualize OS X on Apple hardware, and given that the only Apple hardware that is fully supported by VMware isn’t the most current Mac Pro1, what are the benefits of virtualizing OS X?
Virtually Ghetto has full instructions for installing the beta of Yosemite on both the Fusion 2014 Tech Preview and vSphere 5.5.
Mark Kawano, who spent 7 years as a designer and designer evangelist at Apple, was interviewed by Co.Design about Apple’s design culture1. “4 Myths About Apple Design, From An Ex-Apple Designer” is a great article about how Apple delivers great products. I think that this is a great point:
It’s actually the engineering culture, and the way the organization is structured to appreciate and support design. Everybody there is thinking about UX and design, not just the designers. And that’s what makes everything about the product so much better . . . much more than any individual designer or design team.
If your UX team are the only people who care about the user experience, you’re not going to deliver a product with an awesome user experience.
I was invited to give a talk at AltConf. Here’s my current title and description.
User research the Apple Way
Steve Jobs told us many times that you cannot design by focus group because people don’t know what they want. He is right: the way to deliver the right user experience is to develop a deep understanding of what is important to your users. We will discuss how Apple has developed this deep understanding and maintained their focus to enable them to deliver amazing products.
What do you think? Is this a talk that you’d attend?
I got great news today. I’ll be speaking at AltConf. I haven’t yet decided on how I’m going to approach this one. Rest assured that you will walk away with a better understanding of how you can create a deep understanding of users to make your application a better one.
I have a request of you, dear audience. One of the ideas that I have kicking around is using quotes that seem pretty set against user research from Steve Jobs and other Apple execs. Jobs referenced the apocryphal Henry Ford horses quote quite a lot. I know that there are others, though. What other Apple anti-research quotes do you know of?
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