Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms
Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms
After yet another Campfire outage this week (albeit a brief one), I went looking for an alternative group chat solution for our distributed team at BankSimple. Griping on Twitter led to a number of suggestions, and we gave the most frequently occurring suggestion a try.
Read more on Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms…
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.
iPhone 4 GUI PSD (Retina Display)
Thanks for you patience on this one. It took a good deal longer to complete given the sheer size and level of detail the retina display has. It wasn’t a simple scale-up from the last file. It was clear as we created it that Apple has spent a lot of time considering how each element should be translated to such a dense resolution. What were single pixel elements are now two or three pixels thick and effects are exaggerated to become visible. For anyone designing for the retina display (640×960) it really is quite a different experience. When you work at 100% everything seems absolutely huge but small details get lost when viewing it on the device. You really need to be mindful of how it looks on the phone since your monitor displays things so differently.
Finger Tools
In my spare time, I sketch (and sometimes build) user interface concepts, to see if they actually work in real life. Most of them exist only as private tools for my own use, but I created one recently that I’d like to show you.
MGSplitViewController for iPad
MGSplitViewController is an open source replacement for UISplitViewController, with various useful enhancements.
Here’s a demonstration video hosted on YouTube. It’s better if you watch it in full HD.
Donations
I wrote MGSplitViewController for my own use, but I’m making it available (as usual) for the benefit of the iOS developer community, because I care about this community and about the platform.
iPhone GUI PSD Version 4 – Now accurate, still free
Now in its fourth iteration, this version of the template has been completely redesigned from the ground up. Based on iOS4, it includes all the elements you need to design proof-of-concepts or production ready assets. Previous versions of this file we’re riddled with issues like blurry edged buttons and incorrect “bevels”. These issues have been addressed as best they can using Photoshop’s shape layers and layer styles. If you’re modifying any of the vector elements be sure the shapes are sitting on full pixels or your assets will begin to look blurry.
Read more on iPhone GUI PSD Version 4 – Now accurate, still free…