If you ask any of the Apple “fanboys” why they are so devoted to Apple, at least one of the reasons you will hear is that Apple “sweats the small stuff,” which really proves its dedication to user experience and attention to detail.

Here’s a few of my favorites that demonstrate Apple’s attention, not just to its hardware and software, but to even the product packaging. See how many you may have noticed before, and feel free to add any that I might have missed in the comments below.

Serial Numbers

In the world of computers, serial numbers are important for a variety of reasons, including verifying warranty status and determining the correct specifications, to name a few. Many Apple products feature, in addition to their standard serial number, a barcode that makes reading this serial number much easier for Geniuses or other technicians.

Though some newer models have forgone barcodes, such as the 2009 model MacBook Pros and MacBook Air, barcodes can still be found on many other Apple products. In addition to serial numbers represented as barcodes, some Macs, like the Mac Pro, also include a barcode for the system’s MAC address. Though it changes from model to model, Apple has often put these barcodes and serial numbers in easily accessible places.

On the Power Mac G5, the serial number was located on the inside of the tower, behind the aluminum side panel. On iMac G4s and eMacs, the serial number was located on the inside of the optical drive cover. This really made it easy to quickly locate a serial number if you couldn’t access it through the OS.

Fiat Lux a la Mac

As many people leave their Macs running non-stop throughout the day, they have likely stumbled upon the infamous sleep light. Much like a heartbeat (or “snoring”), the little light pulses while your Mac sleeps. When the iMac G5 originally shipped, its sleep light indicator was bright! It didn’t bother people during the day, but for those who kept their iMac in an office or bedroom, it could light up the whole room at night. Apple issued a firmware update that reduced the sleep light’s brightness during evening hours, giving a much more relaxing pulse than before.

Beyond sleep lights, other indicators on newer Macs are typically hidden until needed. Take for instance the iSight indicator light, built into displays, which is seemingly non-existent until the camera is activated. Similar to the sleep light on the unibody MacBook Pros, the power light on the new aluminum Apple Wireless Keyboard blends in seamlessly until its activated. The thin aluminum that has been perforated with tiny holes for the light to shine through, but when there is no light, the keyboard looks seamless.

Indicator lights on power adapters are also worthy of mention. With once quick glance, you can easily see what is going on. If the light is amber, the battery is charging. If the light is green, the battery is fully charged and ready to go.

Another interesting use of light is the Apple logo on the rear of the portables. The light that illuminates this logo is simply excess ambient light from your display. Go ahead and take a look. Lower the brightness on your display and watch the apple dim.

Product Shots

The next time you see a promotional shot for an Apple product, take notice of the time. For many years, whenever a Mac has been shown displaying the OS X desktop, the clock indicates the system version that the Mac ships pre-installed. This trend even carries forth to Apple’s retail stores, where display signage and wall banners that showcase Leopard prominently feature the system clock at 10:50. Due to only having 60 minutes in an hour, showing a clock at 10:60 for Snow Leopard would not make much sense. Pre-release screenshots from Apple still display 10:50, so this trend will likely end soon.

In the iPhone arena, all of the promotional images of the iPhone and iPod touch all display 9:42 (except one preliminary image,which displayed 9:41). What’s the significance of this? Some think it may relate to the time the iPhone was originally introduced; others see it as a somewhat disjointed homage to Douglas Adam’s “Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.” Most of my research seems to confirm that 9:42 was the actual time of the iPhone announcement during Steve’s keynote in 2007.

Hidden OS X Easter Eggs

Apple’s attention to detail moves beyond the hardware and into its software as well. Take for example the Clock widget in the Dashboard. Look closely at the second hand and notice how it vibrates much like a real clock does.

For those that use Mail, as you drag the divider between the date column to expand or make the column smaller, the formatting of the date dynamically adjusts to fit. If there’s room to display the time, it shows up. As you make the column smaller, the formatting reduces to fit. Most email applications would just truncate whatever did not fit in the column.

This is just a small list of a huge number of little details found on a lot of Apple products that really make them a joy to use. The tipping point, so to speak, is that Apple doesn’t market any of these as “features,” it’s just the fact that they took the time to integrate them subtly into the Apple experience that makes it all worthwhile.

If you’ve found other examples of Apple’s attention to detail, let us know in the comments!

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Chased through a trap-laden forest by an axe-wielding murderer, Hysteria Project is a step in a much darker direction for the iPhone.

Reviewing Asteroids-esque shooter The Void last week, I mentioned that some iPhone games are ditching the cute and getting darker. With their first release, the BulkyPix team have taken the anti-cute movement further: chopping up any semblance of cuteness with a rusty axe, putting the bits into garbage bags and burying the bags in a creepy forest.

Hysteria Project is a choose-your-own-adventure for the iPhone. Blending atmospheric film sequences with quick-fire decision-making to create an intense horror experience.

A Beautiful Place Out In the Country

The game opens with you waking, bleary-eyed, in what seems to be deserted cabin. Viewed from a first-person perspective, your eyes are still adjusting themselves to the dingy gloom. After discovering your hands and feet are bound with tape — trademark crazy serial killer move — the first decision is to how you’ll go about freeing yourself.

After freeing yourself of the killer’s makeshift bindings, bursting out of the cabin, you’re on foot, limping through a foggy forest. Occasional flashbacks and visions, like twisted treats, fill in the back story. A hooded axe-man took you here and is now on the hunt as you make a desperate bid to flee the forest.

With the action kicking in immediately — a constant blurred chase-scene, stalked by a madman — the game’s unrelenting pace holds up throughout. From the handheld first-person camera, to the blurry shadow monster and the creepy killer, it’s clear that the creators have cherry-picked from a selection of horror classics. As such, the game has a distinctly Blair-Witch-meets-Texas-Chainsaw vibe (with a sprinkling of Lost for good measure).

Getting Ahead

The gameplay itself takes its cue from choose-your-own-adventure books, updating the old-school concept with a modern(ish) twist using live action sequences. The game ends up playing out a little like the old FMV games like Sega’s Night Trap and Cinematronics classic Dragons Lair.

Every minute or so you’re given a choice, such as freeing your legs or finding a sharp implement to help you. Most of the time however, these are not branching choices — one of the options will result in the game advancing while the other will lead to death at the hands of the axe man.

There are also infrequent touchscreen interactions, such as tapping different highlighted areas to push branches away as you search for a hiding place in the forest. It’s fun at first, but feels incomplete — there’s a sense of disconnect between the action and the interaction during these quick-draw sequences.

Sticking the Knife In

This sense of disconnect from the world of Hysteria Project doesn’t end there, however. The low level of actual interactivity is due largely to the constraining nature of video. Although there’s a poor illusion of choice, you’re pretty much on a one-track path to the end of the game.

Furthermore, because most choices end in death or success, the game ends up playing out like a freaky trial-and-error process, replaying chases and choice sequences as all the intensity drains out of them.

When a choice does arise, the game drops out of the first-person video view to provide a video game-style description scene. Paired with the waiting time as the choice (or video) loads, this text-based screen feels completely at odds with the intensity and immediacy of the video sequences.

Summing Up

Based on the story-arc in Hysteria Project, I’m under the impression that this is the first episode in a series. And perhaps it’s best to look at Hysteria Project as more like an interactive TV series than a straight-up survival horror game.

There’s not enough interaction to really classify this as a proper game; furthermore, there’s not enough real choice, either. It’s more an intense, shocking and exciting interactive experience than a playable adventure.

While Hysteria Project isn’t as groundbreaking or genre-defying as its creators would have us believe, it’s certainly an accomplishment to have realized such a twisted vision. Fans of horror movies and players should check out Hysteria Project; though it’s not perfect, it’s certainly a unique iPhone experience.

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Maybe it is because I am a recent switcher that I notice details long-time Mac owners may take for granted, details that are so minute yet so useful and so quintessentially ‘human’. The level of attention painstakingly paid to the many small details found on every Apple product is a testament to Apple’s design philosophy, and is what sets the experience of using an Apple product a head above its competitors. Here are some thoughts I have about The Apple Experience.

Apple’s One-Two Punch

To take at face value alone Apple’s own statement, that it is first and foremost a software company, is to be merely skimming the surface. The Apple experience, be it with a Mac, iPod or iPhone, has no equal only because of the way Apple marries software seamlessly to the hardware that serves it. In an Apple product, software and hardware are inseparable: the success of that product weighs equally heavy on the shoulders of both its software and hardware components.

Take, for example, the iPod. The two main factors that make the iPod the success story it is are the Wheel (hardware) and the user interface (software). Would the iPod have reigned if it had sported a four-way D-pad instead, as was the norm for devices of that era, with the UI probably taking an entirely different direction as a result? Probably not. Would the Wheel have worked if it served an alternate user interface? Again, probably not. Another software factor that can be considered as equally important is iTunes and its ease of use.

On the Mac side of things, a good example is the keyboard backlight on the MacBook Pro. You may not have noticed this, but when you fire up your MacBook Pro in a dimly-lit environment, the keyboard lights up when OS X boots into the login screen.

Now, this is not some technical feat. But, clearly, in the process of designing the MacBook Pro, Apple designers thought far enough to consider the various scenarios a user might be in and included this nice little engineering touch. Maybe the idea began in the development of OS X. Maybe it was added to OS X at the request of the hardware folks. Regardless, the result is elegant, understated and unobstrusive, the way good design should be. This is what absolute control over both software and hardware gets you. The iPhone is another showcase of this combination.

When You’re Not In Control…

In stark contrast, the Windows-PC software/hardware relationship, where the hardware is often nothing more that a shell for the software, makes it difficult for Microsoft and its partners to achieve the seamlessness and elegance of Apple’s software/hardware implementations.

I suspect life must be difficult for the PC designer who has great ideas to enhance user experience but is hampered simply because the OS was never designed to support those ideas. Sony, Fujitsu and Lenovo are, in my opinion, the three manufacturers who consistently produce remarkable design, whose industrial design I admire as much as that of Apple’s. Yet, the only way they can enhance software/hardware user experience is through the custom applications that serve their respective hardware.

Sony, for example, has a complete suite of custom applications from media management to custom control panels to complement its hardware features. While these applications add value to what a user can get out of the computer, and succeed in adding to what the OS lacks, the fact that these applications have a custom user interface so different to that of Windows is where the irony lies. A few snatches of brilliance ultimately defeated by the very thing they strive to enhance…parts that do not add up to the final sum.

This trend is apparent not only in PCs; HTC, Sony Ericsson, HP, Nokia and Samsung are doing the same with smartphones powered by Windows Mobile, Palm OS or UIQ. But how much can front-end applications mask the shortcomings of an underlying host OS that already has its own user interface? The first manufacturer who has an answer to that question will change the landscape forever.

Some manufacturers — Google, HP, Gigabyte and ASUS, to name a few — are thinking exactly that: Google already has an alternative smartphone OS in place, HP is toying with the idea of developing its own Linux-based OS, and ASUS is developing its own front-end to Windows Mobile, close on the heels of HTC and Samsung, both of whom have touchscreen front-ends for their Windows Mobile smartphones.

The Apple Way

Short of reading the minds of the powers-that-be at the helms of Apple, and not mentioning how Mac clones in the ’90s were eating away at Apple’s own sales, I suspect the lack of unity mentioned above is, to some extent, why Steve Jobs will never license OS X to other manufacturers. Sure, it would increase marketshare and sales. But Apple products were never meant to be mere commodity items, at least not under Job’s stewardship.

The Apple experience is a combination of form, function and intangible user emotional responses earned from its masterful blend of software and hardware (though not necessarily in that order; Apple does get naughty once in a while). This positive user experience further leads to strong emotional branding. The risk of disparities arising from the separation of software and hardware, with user experience as the casualty, is a risk neither he nor any one else at Apple will take, now and in the foreseeable future.

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iTunes has been around for quite some time (if my calculations are correct it’s about 6 years). It’s been my favorite music/video organizer I’ve ever used (both Mac and PC) and the launch of the iTunes Store in 2003 quickly made it the go-to place for purchasing music as opposed to actual CDs.

So while I really do love the iTunes Store, there are a few features that I’m honestly quite surprised have yet to make their way in to the software. In the 4 years of the store’s existence the main “shell” of the store really has changed very little. A few of these features I believe would make the shopping experience significantly better.

Tabbed Browsing

At the heart of it all, the iTunes Store is just a browser. It could just as well be a website accessible directly from Safari. So why doesn’t Apple provide some of the core features of a modern browser? Specifically, why aren’t there tabs in the iTunes Store interface?

I rarely go to iTunes just looking to buy specific albums I have in mind. I make frequent use of the “Listeners Also Bought” section on album pages and it can get pretty complicated trying to remember what artists I saw in those sections. Ideally I could just open each of those artists up in a new tab and then go through the tabs checking each artist out. Instead I’m limited to a simple set of forward and back buttons.

Favorites

Another browser-like feature request here. Sometimes I’d like to check out bands/albums/songs but don’t necessarily have the time right then to do so. It’d be great to quickly hit a “save for later” type of button where I can amass a nice collection of music to check out when I do have some time on my hands to peruse a bit more.

Customizable (or at least “smart”) Interface

I have neither an iPod that can play games nor an iPhone to use the ringtones, so why am I shown anything about iPod games or given the option to purchase or see anything in relation to ringtones? I’m fully aware that certain subtle things can have an effect on what your purchase…ie. me seeing that iPod Games ad in the store could make me go and purchase a new iPod capable of playing those games, but at the same time, I really have no desire for that to clutter up the interface. Yes yes, I’m aware that it isn’t exactly a significant amount of space, but I find the store a bit cluttered regardless. The library side of iTunes lets you disable Podcasts, Radio, etc so it seems like they should give you more control over what you see in the store as well.

What are some features you’d like to see (or have removed) from the store?

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