Apple wants to make devices simple. Making something simple often means using indicators, little lights that illuminate to tell you something. If you’re using an Apple keyboard right now, look at the Caps Lock key. See that little dot that lights up when you’ve activated caps-lock? That’s an indicator. So is the light that turns on when your iSight is active, and the power light that pulses on your Mac.

Aesthetics are important for indicators, too. Your car dashboard probably has a Low Fuel light, but you don’t see it unless you’re running low on gas. Out of sight, out of mind—and less for you to think about until you need to. Good indicators should be invisible until you need them. After all, that little dot on your Caps Lock key? Why should you have to see it when caps-lock isn’t active?

Apple also wants to make devices small. But making devices smaller leaves less room for indicators. It’s easy enough to show an indicator on a display, but really small devices like the iPod shuffle don’t even have displays.

So Apple invented a way to create invisible indicators in hardware.
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Leopard’s new Alex voice is quite good. If the words “talking computer” make you think of electronic bleeps and drones in a bad 1950s science fiction movie, you might want to listen to this:

Apple has included voices in the Mac OS for as long as there have been Macs and Steve Jobs even used the original MacinTalk voice to introduce the first Mac, but it wasn’t until Mac OS X and especially recent versions of Mac OS X that the voices included with your Mac have sounded natural.

Here’s a sample of Alex and some of the other voices included with Mac OS X, as well as voices commercially available from Cepstral and AT&T Natural Voices. As you’ll hear, the competition’s not so bad, either.

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Delivering good software is hard. In addition to the obvious challenges of engineering and design, good software requires effective management and marketing, clear writing, and a host of other skills. When you develop an application by yourself or with a friend, that means you have to be the engineer, the designer, and all those other people.

Apple eases this burden by telling developers, do what we do. For engineering, this means building upon the powerful libraries in OS X whenever possible, which reduces work and encourages consistency. Similarly, for design this means imitating the metaphors and terminology Apple has already introduced to solve design problems within its OS and applications.

Combined, these templates of engineering and design offer enormous benefits which often increase the more they’re used. Need a list? Use Cocoa’s NSTableView. But throw in Core Data and you’ll save even more work.

You can see this powerful borrowing at work in Macnification, a new scientific application positioned to be for microscopic images what Apple’s Aperture is for digital photographs. Macnification borrows from Apple’s design proudly with its smart folders, stacks, light tables, iTunes-like sidebar, overlay windows, and live filtering.

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The Wall Street Journal on Apple’s methodical pursuit of a nontraditional trademark for iPod’s three-dimensional shape, which was finally granted in January:

1. Apply for a traditional trademark on the name: “iPod”.
2. Use patents to protect against early competitors.
3. Create ads associating the unique iPod wheel with Apple.
4. Apply for additional traditional trademarks to leverage the product and strengthen the association.
5. Apply for the nontraditional trademark for iPod’s three-dimensional shape.

Apple is already following the same strategy with iPhone.