Managing Facebook Like. Or not.
I’M ON FACEBOOK. I want to see everything I supposedly “like” and prune the list of things I don’t. There should be a page where I can do this—that’s UX Design 101—but instead there’s just a sidebar box on my profile page showing a rotating, random sampling of liked items. The box is fine as an outward-facing device: on my profile page, it gives visitors a teasing hint of some of the cool stuff a deep guy like me digs. But inward-facing-wise, as a tool for me to manage my likes, it’s useless.
Is Realistic UI Design Realistic?
We’ve all heard the sound — that tinny shutter clicking sound point-and-shoot cameras make when you take a photo.
There’s no complex mechanical mirror assembly swinging upward when the shutter opens. No matter, though. The cigarette box sized camera burps out a faux ka-click anyway. The mechanism producing this noise was quite necessary for its predecessor, the SLR/DSLR camera, but now functionally irrelevant in the newer point-and-shoots. This design cue (audible in this case) inherited from an ancestor is referred to as a skeuomorph, and they can be found everywhere in our daily lives — air intakes on the electric Chevy Volt, window shutters that don’t shut, copper cladding on zinc pennies, nonwinding watch winders. Even the brown cork-pattern on cigarette tips is a holdover from the days when cork was used as a filter.
iPad Multi-Touch
A friend of mine recently asked how many simultaneous touch events the iPad supported; I wasn’t sure, so I promised to write some code to conduct an experiment and find the answer. I got around to doing so, and the answer is: eleven.
iPad Application Design
I held a 6-hour workshop at NSConference in both the UK and USA recently, focusing on software design and user experience. Predictably, an extremely popular topic was the iPad, and how to approach the design of iPad applications. I gave a 90-minute presentation on the subject to start each workshop, and I want to share some of my observations here.
iPad GUI PSD
Now that Apple has officially released the iPad we want to start designing for it. While Apple’s interface builder is great, it doesn’t really allow us to create custom UI elements on the fly. We decided to take a page from our iPhone GUI PSD and create one for the iPad.
The Case Against Vertical Navigation
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In a recent article about unusable and superficial beer and alcohol websites, I made the claim that using left-hand vertical navigation is an out-of-date method in modern web design. In the comments, a few people wondered why I said this. I was surprised that it got any attention at all, because it was a brief comment in the article, and didn’t constitute a substantial part of the argument I had put forth. Nonetheless, I decided to write an article describing what I feel is a solid case against using vertical navigation in modern web design.
iPhone Needs a New Home
I’d have loved for this post to be the introduction of our latest iPhone application. An application that introduces a new default optional home screen. A screen that doesn’t require you to scan for red dots with numbers inside of them. Instead it would display information and notifications of things that are new and relevant to you. We’ll all have to keep dreaming for the time being. Unless you’re willing to jailbreak your phone it simply isn’t possible to develop and implement this type of hostile UI takeover using the iPhone SDK.
iPhone GUI PSD 3.0
Along with Apple’s official release of the new iPhone 3.0 software came a number of new graphic elements. We’ve been holding off updating the Photoshop file until we could properly implement the additions. We built it using vectors, so it’s all still fully editable. Apple’s SDK is amazing, but when we need to mock up something quickly for a pitch we turn to this.
Experimental Game: Shadow Physics
really cool game engine / development. you’re a shadow and you interact with 3d object’s shadows like a 2d platformer. moving objects and/or the light source change your 2d level. you can push objects shadows to move the actual object too. everything together looks like it’ll make one sexy game for sure.