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Viewing all posts tagged "UI"
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Cocoia Blog » Interview: Mike Matas
Sebastiaan de With interviews Mike Matas, who left Delicious Monster (of Delicious Library fame) a few years ago to work at Apple. He has helped design some significant interfaces for Apple, including Time Machine, Google Maps on iPhone, and the photo “piles” in the iPad. The interview is definitely worth a read if you want a glimpse into the humanity behind Apple’s fantastic software interface design.
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The Zune UI is magnificent. It’s visually exciting without placing style over substance. […] Overall, it’s a tremendously clever way to make a handheld screen seem like it’s just a small window onto a much larger experience.
Even when the Zune is simply playing music, it’s not content to waste the two minutes it has before it turns off the display. It downloads artwork about the band you’re listening to and builds a slick multimedia screen saver which floats the album art and track data through the screen, big and bold. You can read it without picking the device up and scrutinizing menus.
REVIEW: Microsoft’s Zune HD is a nifty media player :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Andy Ihnatko
There are still some huge marks against the Zune, not the least of which is Microsoft’s retarded persistence with a “points” system for currency. But in terms of sheer on-device UI and experience, the new Zune HD UI looks like it blows the iPod/iPhone media experience out of the water. Microsoft’s marketing about the Zune’s discovery features really nailed it: “browse music, not spreadsheets.” Even before Zune 4.0 landed this week, I’ve preferred the desktop Zune software to iTunes for some time now.
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You're doing it wrong, RIM
CNET’s Jessica Dolcourt explores RIM’s new BlackBerry App World portal for desktop browsers. It sounds terrible.
You cannot purchase apps from the portal. Instead, you email yourself a link to the app, then open it on your BlackBerry to visit, purchase, and download the app.
Oh, but this only works if you did not exercise that choice everyone is so fond of by setting an alternative browser as your default. You will use RIM’s built-in browser to access the BlackBerry App World, or you will get nothin’.
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Carsonified » 10 User Interface Design Fundamentals
Good set of bite-sized UI design rules to follow. Every Flash designer stumbling across this should read it twice. Three times, even.
via Randall Bennett
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Tumblr ProTip: Tap the purty pi’tures on iPhone
By now you’ve probably seen the redesigned iPhone Dashboard. What you may not have seen is that you can tap image thumbnails in posts to get a larger version. You don’t lose your place and the page doesn’t refresh—some AJAXy sexiness just redraws a larger version of the pic right in-line in the post. Hot.
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I have to admit, it is interesting use TweetDeck to watch Twitter’s trending topics change so rapidly with events like the Iran protests and today’s release of iPhone OS 3.0.
I still wish it didn’t completely fail at basic computer usability. The utter lack of even a single keyboard shortcut is almost insulting. How can this app be so popular with the New Media Douchebag crowd? Have none of them ever used a keyboard?
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After finally wising up and switching to Safari, poor, poor Marco is heart-broken that his predominantly blue Dock is not nearly as legible as it was when Firefox was on the prowl.
Marco clearly must have missed the Panic Sale. Otherwise, he would have a fine copy of CandyBar 3 with which to bend his Dock to his whim.
Also: blogs without comments are a bummer.
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”The webOS’s much-touted notification system is also a revelation, and it gives you the feeling of being constantly connected without being constantly interrupted.
Ars Reviews the Palm Pre, part 1: the BlackBerry killer - Ars Technica
With all of Apple’s foot-stomping about Push Notifications, I’m still pretty amazed that we didn’t see a revamp of iPhone OS 3.0’s alert system on Monday. Palm nailed this, making Apple look like the Microsoft of UI when it comes to the UI of being alerted of various services and events on the iPhone. After users sign up for alerts from just a handful of services, say ESPN, Twitter, Facebook, and IM—each of which interrupt what you’re doing and demand action before you can so much as end a phone call—it will become immediately apparent how badly Apple needs to fix this iPhone UI train wreck.
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Steven Frank rambles about UI metaphors and usability
Long read, and there is no grand conclusion at the end. But if you are interested in some of the intricacies and debate over current computing and mobile phone UIs, it’s fun:
I find it fascinating that a huge portion of iPhone usability training is done via the TV ads, pre-sale. They’re both marketing and instruction.
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The “Tabs in the Title Bar” browser trend creates a unique new problem for website usability.
This new style of tabs is used in Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari 4 browsers, and it all but obliterates website names when just a few tabs are open. I have six tabs in this screenshot, and I can barely read more than two words of each site’s title even in the active tab (previously, and in most other browsers, the entire title bar is used to display the name of a site). Granted, my window is set to an arguably slim 900 pixels wide to leave room for concurrently using other apps, but things don’t get much better if I go full screen. Imagine how much worse this is with more tabs, and don’t forget that I am running Glims, a plug-in that, among other features, brings favicons to Safari’s tabs.
From a screen real estate perspective, I love the new title bar tabs because they leave more room for displaying a page’s content. But from a usability perspective, these tabs make it more difficult to quickly figure out the full title of a website, article, or blog post.
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My wife went to bed early tonight because she isn’t feeling well, so I took the opportunity to finally get around to playing Bioshock. It’s been out for over two years and Bioshock 2 is coming, so I wanted to be ready.
This is the first thing I saw after I started Bioshock on Windows Vista SP1 (running via Boot Camp) with all the latest updates. I don’t know if this is Steam’s fault, Bioshock’s developer’s fault, or Microsoft’s fault, but this is ridiculous. Granted the state of gaming is not nearly as great on the Mac, but you never see horse shit like this when starting a game. You double click, and it works. You don’t get prompted with a Visual C++ library license agreement that leads to the installation of what seems like worthless cruft.
Fuck, guys. It’s 2009. Figure it out.
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Reason #11 I love using MacJournal to write all my Ars posts: tabs. I can quickly create a few entries with a keyboard shortcut, title them for each of the stories I want to write for the day, then keep my motivation front and center.
Also: the Taco button rules.
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Facebook’s application experience is broken.
I get periodic requests from friends who want to add some sort of birthday calendar or notification service to their profile via an app called MyCalendar. Months ago when I noticed the first one, I clicked the app’s name to find out what it was. This brought me not to an app landing page with an explanation or information about the developer, but an “Allow Access?” page that prompts me to install MyCalendar with a warning that it will be able to access “your profile information, photos, your friends’ info, and other content that it requires to work.”
Setting aside questions about why on earth MyCalendar would ever need things like my friends’ photos or any profile information other than my birthday, I clicked on the name of the application in this warning box hoping to actually get to some kind of aforementioned app landing page.
What I saw months ago is what is still there now: no description of what the hell MyCalendar does, what information it pulls from my profile, or even who made it. Just a list of my other friends who have it installed, MyCalendar’s total number of users, and total fans.
Clicking the “Go to Application” button simply takes me back to the installation screen that got me into this mess.
I have no idea whether all these people have been duped or spammed into using this app, and the “Contact Developer” link at the bottom produces a Facebook-hosted e-mail form with absolutely no information on who or what I am contacting. No developer name, no company name—just a form pre-filled with my personal e-mail address and a notice that my message will be delivered to “the creator of MyCalendar,” whoever the hell that is.
Facebook’s application experience is utterly and depressingly broken.
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Disregarding aforelinked Orkut security silliness, I think the service is actually pretty cool. Orkut exhibits a level of pleasant design that most Google products have lacked in the past, so I decided to check in this afternoon to see how things have progressed recently.
What you see above is a “chat ad” that popped up immediately upon login. The messages arrived a few seconds apart, as if someone was actually chatting at me to let me know about Orkut’s ability to use Google Chat on the site, much like Facebook Chat and MySpace Chat.
I commend this for its creativity, but it almost felt like a popup ad. The fact that it felt like a real person chatting at me added a layer of unsettling creepiness to the experience. Ick.
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Facebook Faced of the Day: Clever boy.
[lamebook.]
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Now testing: Direct video uploads
Over the next few hours, we’ll be rolling out crazy simple...
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This little script is dangerous. It will destroy every Tumblr post in a given blog.
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Photo of the Day: Conan O’Brien fan Justin Montgomery Bretter ran into Jay Leno last night, and...
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