July 2012
30 posts
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Good design is invisible: an interview with iA's... →
”[…] with the new Retina displays we had to optimize the typeface so it looks like it used to look on the iPad 2. To do this we had to grade the typeface, producing subtly different versions for each class of display so they have the same visual weight. To the user the type looks exactly the same on the retina display as on the iPad 2. This required a lot of tweaking from our side (to...
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The designer's survival guide →
Reminds me of a little book I have lying around here: ‘Never use white type on a black background and 50 other ridiculous design rules.’
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Subscribe to Feed Safari extension →
From red-sweater.com:
“My beta-quality, more-or-less unsupported Subscribe to Feed extension adds a handy button to the toolbar that, when a page offers RSS or Atom feeds, can be clicked to easily open the feed:// link, which should automatically open your favorite news reader.”
Already installed it.
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The Mac App Store's future →
“But here’s something to consider: however iOS-y the Mac becomes, it is not iOS. It is already not the first choice for casual users. The Mac is not a platform of portable, extremely affordable lifestyle-devices. And it’s not going to get there, either; if anything, iOS will become more compatible with the needs of professional computer users.”
I agree. I’m not too fond of OS X...
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The Marco.org review of John Siracusa’s review of... →
“This is not a quick read, so it’s a good opportunity to try a read-later method such as Safari’s Reading List, which Apple invented completely on their own.”
Burn! (I still prefer Instapaper.)
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It's not just the geeks like us →
“First of all, geeks are a very large and influential market. As one big example, if not for geeks, Firefox would never have started to catch on in 2004 and broken Internet Explorer’s reign. We installed Firefox on every non-geek’s computer we could find. And while we were there, we set everyone’s search engine to Google instead of Yahoo or MSN, and we made fun of their AOL email addresses...
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OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: the Ars Technica review →
Finally finished reading John Siracusa’s review (24 pages) of Mountain Lion. It took me three days to get through it. Here’s what I found most interesting.
The system
“It’s as if your Mac OS X 10.6.0 installation disc gradually morphed into a 10.6.1 installer, then a 10.6.2 installer, and so on. This eliminates the tedious two-step process of installing an operating system...
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homescreen.me →
My iOS homescreens.
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WatchThis one has been in my Instapaper for a while (towards the end you will notice the New iPad hadn’t even been released yet), but it was worth saving. Craig Mod speaks about the past, present and future of paper books and digital books. His thoughts about how to design for digital books ― by respecting edges and boundaries ― are very interesting.
“Can you give me a free sample from your portfolio, but make it custom for use on...”
– Original.
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Defining Tetris: how courts judge gaming clones →
“While game designers usually have a pretty easy time telling when their game design has been ripped off by a clone, proving actual copyright infringement in court is usually an uphill battle. That’s because copyright law doesn’t actually protect the basic idea and underlying rules of a game, which need a duly filed and approved patent to be locked down. The copyright on a game...
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Apple’s icon ecosystem or: carrying the quality... →
It’s nice to see how sophisticated OS X icons get redesigned to simplified versions for iOS, and how those iOS icons get redesigned to new simplified OS X icons.
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The future of Apple’s dock connector →
“The problem with USB is that it was designed as a protocol to standardize PC peripherals: keyboards, mice, digital cameras, printers, disk drives, that sort of thing. In other words, USB expects that you’ll be using a traditional desktop computer to load drivers to access an accessory. And that’s the problem. Your iPhone, iPad, and iPod […] doesn’t load drivers. In conventional...
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“The problem gets worse ― I can’t design for 1x on my Retina Macbook Pro. It’s...”
– Marco quoted Wells Riley.
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Malware affecting Macs running older versions of... →
“OS X, being the polite operating system that it is, warns you that the applet is from a root certificate that is not trusted. If you still decide to go ahead and install this applet, your device will be infected.”
Meaning: if you don’t read what the pop-up says, you’re an idiot.
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The phone stack →
“It works like this: as you arrive, each person places their phone facedown in the center of the table (if you’re feeling theatrical, you can go for a stack, but it’s not required). As the meal goes on, you’ll hear various texts and emails arriving… and you’ll do absolutely nothing. You’ll face temptation — maybe even a few involuntary reaches toward the middle of the table — but...
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Let’s try to think this iPad Mini thing all the... →
“Ends up a 7.85-inch iPad display would be about as tall, physically, as the current 9.7-inch iPad display is wide. Here’s the math: 1024 pixels divided by 163 pixels per inch = 6.28 inches for the purported iPad Mini height; 768 pixels divided by 132 pixels per inch = 5.8 inches for the current iPad width. Not exact but close — the rumored iPad Mini would actually be half an inch taller...
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We’re getting wildly differing assessments →
“The announcement of the Supreme Court’s decision largely upholding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act on Thursday, June 28 precipitated a genuine media drama. Millions tuned in to get the result in real time, and were rewarded with the spectacle of two major news networks reporting the story incorrectly. Indeed, the President himself was in limbo while his staff raced to find...
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Mobile is where the growth is →
“In the past fifteen years, we have seen Microsoft go from being an unstoppable force to being a non-factor in many important new markets, we have seen Google go from being an unstoppable force to being a non-factor in many important new markets, and I suspect we are going to see Facebook struggle with the same thing. RIM is dying quickly now. Yahoo! is a question mark.”
Shawn Blanc...
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The guy who invented the mouse must be loaded,... →
“Douglas Engelbart invented the mouse in 1963, submitting the patent for it in 1967. However, Engelbart was way ahead of his time, and his patent expired before the personal computer came complete with a mouse, thus making it a necessity, even to this day.”
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The Nifty MiniDrive →
From theverge.com:
”[…] a new Kickstarter project called the Nifty MiniDrive seeks to turn the integrated SD card slot offered on certain Apple laptops into a cheap, semi-permanent backup drive. The design utilizes a small plastic adapter to house a microSD card, which can be inserted into any full-size SD port on a MacBook Pro or MacBook Air. While a standard SD card would jut out...
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Apple's fix for corrupt binaries →
”[…] fixed binaries will show up as updates in the App Store app and iTunes. The latter is a big deal. Without that, the only easy way for customers to force their phones to download a working version was to delete the broken app and redownload it from the Store.”
“For Instapaper, that was just an inconvenience, since almost everything is stored on and synced from the...
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Target the forward fringe →
“Why? Because HiDPI customers may be a fringe group, but they are a forward-facing fringe. They represent the users of the future, and the more we cater to them now, the more deeply embedded our products and designs will be in their culture. The future culture.”
Marco quoted Daniel Jalkut.
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Stop not linking →
“The most ethically and professionally sound practice when you have little value to add to the source story is the linked-list approach. Give a teaser quote and a prominent link. Make it clear that you didn’t write the target article, there’s more to be read there, and here’s how to get to it. Don’t replace it. Send your readers there.”
“If you’re truly providing value, you...
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How satnav maps are made →
“The company’s hybrid approach to mapping does have advantages, particularly in Europe, where its satnavs have ruled the roost for some time. According to TomTom’s estimates, there are around 60 million TomTom devices on the road across the world, all capable of sending data back to HQ, and TomTom has based a large part of its mapping effort on processing and verifying that data to keep its...
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Someone is coming to eat you →
“The reason you’ll see new iPhone hardware in the fall and yet another iPad come spring is because Steve Jobs knew that he didn’t just need to out-design his competition, he needed to out-execute them. Apple is an ambidextrous organization that is equally adept at designing products as they are at making sure millions of them are ready the moment you want them.”
And that’s why...
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On the lack of user-choosable default apps →
Conrad MacIntyre has a point. And then Gruber has one.
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“We should understand that iOS doesn’t power geek devices made easy enough for...”
– Stephen Hackett quoted Rene Ritchie.
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“Major programs like Adobe’s Creative Suite and others like Twitter...”
– A few lines by Dante D’Orazio over at The Verge.
That’s the problem of the retina MacBook Pro. And as long as there’s just one retina model, it won’t be interesting enough for developers to spend time creating goodlooking retina versions of their apps. 