Paolo is wondering why Apple went from orange to blue?
I assume that Paolo (by now) realizes that Apple will take standards and change them - just to be different.
It has happened with cables and connectors, browsers and now XML icons. I wonder what is next?
But we all love Apple - right? They’re doing our R&D for us!
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Among the other news from yesterday’s Apple Developers Conference keynote, it’s interesting to note that apple picked the blue RSS icon and not the orange XML one to represent RSS (and Atom).
Even if I’m a long time orange icon user and fan, I think I can imagine Apple thinking: “why using an icon with the word ‘XML’ to link to something we call ‘RSS’?”. It’s true: users are smart, but why making their life harder?
For some time XML icons were popping up everywhere. They linked RSS feeds but also other kind of XML files such as OPML blogrolls (oops, I have just realized that I still have such an icon here) and I do agree that it might have been confusing for users not living in our loop.
It’s not that by choosing the blue icon Apple has closed all games but they definetly made a significant step in one direction. Soon we will see if users will start switching to the blue icon. Meanwhile I guess I’ll adopt both for my site.
Also, from the demo’s I’ve seen, Safari should solve another issue: users clicking on an RSS icon will not end up watching a page of code anymore but should see a nicely displayed set of posts. Cool.