Tag: design

November 21, 2011

The Hit List sync

It’s no secret that I love The Hit List. The app serves as my carefully organized digital brain. Sometimes it’s the really little things that make an app fantastic.

This morning I opened it up for the first time since Friday. I had already left my apartment so I was out of WiFi range. To pull data, many other apps, including Mail and Tweetbot, prompt if you’d like to connect to WiFi.

This is a pain because it makes syncing my data a two-step process. The Hit List does it right. It recognizes that I’m on 3G with data and just syncs. No prompting. Let me figure out WiFi later.

I love this because it shows that the developer considered the fastest way to let people get their data synced and get working. When I open an app it’s because I want to do something. The sooner you let me do that the happier I’ll be with your software.

November 14, 2011

Nailed it.

https://twitter.com/#!/dcurtis/status/135989266105905153

https://twitter.com/#!/dcurtis/status/135990954099343360

https://twitter.com/#!/dcurtis/status/135991249416093696

November 12, 2011

Where Are All the Ed-Ex Designers?

In the past I’ve written and lectured about the idea that we’re leaving an era where design operates in the narrative mode, in which its fundamental purpose is to create canonical, highly controlled visual stories. We’re now in an era — the digital era — where the new paradigm is designing for behavior: creating stateful systems that are responsive to user inputs and environmental inputs, where presentation is not just separated from content, but where presentation is volatile and continually changing by nature.

These two modes of thinking are so different and even so in conflict with one another that to find a nexus between them is very difficult. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function,” and that, more or less, is what’s required to be a great editorial experience designer. You must understand users and their expectations, and you must also understand authors and their expectations, and somehow, by hook or by crook, you must reconcile these wildly divergent worldviews into a single, coherent whole that looks and feels effortless.

Khoi Vinh – Where Are All the Ed-Ex Designers?.

November 10, 2011

Status

Just when I think I’ve wrapped up the changes to my site I realize that there’s a half dozen CSS and content changes still left. It’s a process.

October 31, 2011

The New Value of Text

Text lasts. It’s not platform-dependant, you don’t just get it from one source, read it in one place, understand it in one way. It is not dependent on technology: it is what we make technology out of. Code is text, it is the fundamental nature of technology. We’ve been trying for decades, since the advent of hypertext fiction, of media-rich CD-ROMs, to enhance the experience of literature with multimedia. And it has failed, every time.

Yet we are terrified that in the digital age, people are constantly distracted. That they’re shallower, lazier, more dazzled. If they are, then the text is not speaking clearly enough. We are not speaking clearly enough. Like over-stuffed attendees at a dull banquet, the mind wanders. We are terrified that people are dumbing down, and so we provide them with ever dumber entertainment. We sell them ever greater distractions, hoping to dazzle them further.

James Bridle – The New Value of Text.

October 28, 2011

Annual subscriptions are now available for The Manual. This was a Kickstarter project that I funded when it was live. The first issue was fantastic in every way. The design, writing, and feeling of the essays was well worth it.

October 18, 2011

A lesson in how not to design a content site

Boy, large news sites really don’t get it. This is Lewis DVorkin, a Forbes employee, in the comments thread of their Dropbox article today. Props to Nick Bergus for the pointer.

We do have a business to run, and page views help generate the revenue needed to provide our audience with great content and great products. In the last year we’ve totally re-architected our site, which has resulted in many, many priorities. We have received very few comments asking for single-page view options, perhaps because consumers experience pagination on nearly every other major news and information site. That said, we know it’s important and we are certainly moving to provide the experience that you and others would like.

Translation, reading on any major news site is a terrible experience. We know this but are doing nothing to distinguish ourselves because we’re quite happy with the revenue our ads bring in from artificially inflated pageviews created by a design that places our users’ reading experience somewhere between last and not even on the radar. In the meantime, can you please purchase the print magazine so that we can stay in business?

A single page view should be the default for any site building a business off content. If it’s not, don’t be surprised when people start reading elsewhere.

October 12, 2011

Responsive Design Testing. Cool site that allows you to test a URL in various widths and device sizes. Really handy for testing a responsive design you’re working on.

October 12, 2011

Apple’s fourth interface

Steve said that each of the three user interfaces made possible a revolutionary new type of product. The mouse enabled the Macintosh. The click wheel enabled the iPod. Multi-touch enabled the iPhone. What will Siri enable?

Shawn Blanc – Apple’s Fourth Interface

September 19, 2011

One Platform to Rule Them All

What I think his vision actually points out, though, is Windows 8′s central problem: it takes no position, it has no central theme or integrity. This isn’t a vision so much as a refusal to choose between fundamentally different user interfaces. Rather, Microsoft decided to combine the PC’s mouse and keyboard-based user interface with the iPad’s touch-based interface and have the best of both worlds.

Kyle Baxter – One Platform to Rule Them All.