Macaw

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

There’s change in the air for those of us who design interfaces for a living. Where once we could choose only between designing in code or designing in Photoshop, we’re now seeing at least one or two promising if still nascent alternatives. Last month I wrote about Bohemian Coding’s Sketch, which I now use more frequently than Photoshop. (.Net Magazine also did a short interview with me about Sketch.)

Having one viable replacement is almost more than any of us could have hoped for five or ten years ago, but here comes Macaw, still in previews but propitious all the same. It bills itself as a “code-savvy web design tool” and like Sketch it brings a refreshingly relevant approach to designing interfaces. A few of its many slick new features jumped out at me as I watched its longish sneak peek video: built-in lorem ipsum generation; grid-based nudging of elements; and oh yeah generating real code as you’re designing. If they work as advertised, all three look like genius.

I’m really happy these contenders are emerging today, but why did it take so long for this to happen? Technologically, there seems little about either Sketch or Macaw that couldn’t have happened five years — if not a decade — ago. The answer, I think, is simple: the Mac App Store, which has leveled the playing field for independent developers — if not completely, then significantly. It might have been possible to build Macaw or Sketch before, but the Mac App Store gives these new players a visibility and distribution channel that’s invaluable when indie developers go up against entrenched players.

You can watch the Macaw preview here.

Jump to this link

+

Six Years with Todoist

There was a time that I thought I’d be on the search for the perfect to-do management software forever. That’s what I wrote in this blog post back in 2007, when I first mentioned Todoist, a Web based to-do list application that was then fairly new to me.

But six years later, I find myself still using Todoist, which is kind of amazing to me. I’ve poured thousands and thousands of to-do items into it, and have been faithfully ticking them off and moving them around every single work day. In that time, Todoist has gone from a side project run by its founder, Amir Salihefendic, to a real, profitable company called Doist, with a staff scattered all over the world.

What’s even more amazing to me is that at its core, Todoist is still fundamentally the same; it remains a ridiculously simple bit of software that takes just moments to learn, and it’s still extremely effective. In spite of the many years it’s been in the market, and the many users who have sent in feature wish lists, and the many talented people who have signed on to Amir’s team, it hasn’t become encrusted with complex features geared towards specialized use cases. In the world of software, keeping your feature set essentially unchanged while also keeping it relevant is a real feat. It may not be glamorous, but it’s incredibly hard.

Actually, Todoist has changed in one important way: it’s become more readily available on every platform. Whether you use Chrome or Safari, Android or iOS, Mac or Windows, Todoist is available and fully functional. In fact, today the company just released a brand new version of Todoist for iOS, a fully-fledged, native, beautiful overhaul of its iPhone experience. (At one time, Todoist for iPhone was just a native wrapper around a Web view, and it was exactly as flaky as that sounds. It’s come a long way.). Even better, this new version is optimized for the iPad, too. I fully expect to be using Todoist for the next six years, at least.

Continue Reading …

+

Rain Room

Rain Room

Laura and Thuy at Random International’s “Rain Room” installation at MoMA.

We waited forty-five minutes just to view the installation from the far side of the space; the queue to actually walk through it was at least seven hours long when we showed up. “Rain Room” makes for dramatic photos like this one, but I can’t say it was worth even the forty-five minutes. It was less a work of art than a really boring water park ride.

Worse was MoMA’s approach to handling the show’s crowds. On WNYC, Art critic Deborah Solomon criticized the museum’s line management; they could have issued scheduled tickets but preferred to force visitors to wait in line in the mid-summer heat (the “room” is just West of the museum itself), probably for to generate the PR spectacle of long, snaking lines.

There were similar lines when I went to see Christian Marclay’s “The Clock” earlier this year too, though at least the queue was indoors then. Like “Rain Room,” Marclay’s installation could have easily used scheduled tickets. More to the point though, it was a piece that need’t have been constrained to an on-site viewing room; it could have easily been exhibited online, available globally and instantly, without painful queues.

In general, I am a big fan of the work that MoMA does, but I wish they would reconsider their tendency to generate publicity at the expense of their visitors. Scheduled tickets would be an improvement, but commissioning works that acknowledge that MoMA is a big stage — and that it demands greater visitor capacity designs — would be even better.

+

IFTTT’s Animated Onboarding

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

IFTTT released their first iPhone app today, and it comes with an extremely elegant onboarding sequence, a series of four screens that walk new users through the core “if this, then that” concept that is the foundation of the service. A bit of parallax animation reveals itself to the user as she swipes from screen to screen, and the effect is delightful.

Of course, this kind of micro-interaction is not particularly novel if you think about how popular parallax scrolling has become on the desktop Web, but it’s also surprisingly rare in the native app environment, which is theoretically even more conducive to clever animations. IFTTT’s onboarding is well done, but to me it’s a kind of baseline — there should be lots more animations that are even more inventive than this. That doesn’t necessarily mean heavier, more complex work, either; a little bit can go a long way.

You can see an animated GIF of these screens here, but personally I think it’s better when you can see a real user interact with the screens, so I shot this ad hoc video too.

Jump to this link

+

Bob Mankoff Explains New Yorker Cartoons

Ratings

4 of 5 stars
What’s this?

In this TED video, the cartoon editor for The New Yorker takes apart what makes their so-called “idea drawings” work. Mankoff is a cartoonist himself (he claims to have been rejected countless times by the magazine he now works for before eventually breaking into the business) and understands humor at an anatomical level. He’s also a pretty funny presenter. Watch it here.

Addendum: In conjunction with this talk, Mankoff also selected his eleven favorite New Yorker cartoons ever.

Jump to this link

+

J-Cord Headphones

A few years ago I accidentally bought a pair of earbud-style headphones with what I later came to learn was a “J-cord” design — one side was longer than the other, so that you could wrap the longer side around the back of your neck and let the earbuds hang off your shoulders when they weren’t in your ears. They were a little awkward to manage at first, but when I eventually mastered them I also became a huge fan of the asymmetrical design. It’s incredibly convenient if you pop your earbuds in and out regularly.

Apparently, J-cords have fallen out of fashion now, as it’s become almost impossible to find a manufacturer that still makes them. Several weeks ago I asked Twitter for recommendations on finding new models, but got back almost nothing — there were plenty of suggestions for good earbud headphones, but almost all of them were the more traditional, symmetrical Y-cord style.

I did get one useful suggestion though: @joranovski recommended RHA’s MA450i earbuds, which sound excellent and are reasonably priced. They have a traditional Y-cord style design, but the cord is long enough that you can wrap it around the back of your neck before splitting the two cables, giving you much of the benefit of a J-cord. It’s not quite as elegant because I find myself sometimes losing track of which way I’ve wound the cord, and unwrapping it can be somewhat comical. The cording is also made of a braided fabric material which is quite pleasing to the touch, though it will pick up ambient sound on a blustery day, echoing a bit like a faint, howling wind. On a busy New York street, though, it’s hardly noticeable.

Anyway, there’s no big moral to this story other than J-cords are great. Someone should bring them back. In the meantime, though, the RHA MA450i’s are a decent substitute.

Continue Reading …

+

Vesper and DB5

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

I’ve been remiss in not mentioning John Gruber, Brent Simmons and Dave Wiskus’s little gem of a notetaker, Vesper before now. It’s a smart, crystal clear piece of software that defines a very specific problem — quick, frictionless capture of ideas — and polishes the heck out of it. Maybe even more interesting is the way that the product was shaped: developer Brent Simmons created a CSS-like method of manipulating the display variables — color, spacing, fonts — that his colleagues could edit independent of the main code. This is the next step for native app development; abstracting the display layer so that designers can have direct access. Simmons calls his system “DB5” and you can read more about it here. You can also learn more about Vesper.

Jump to this link

+

Saying Goodbye to Google Reader

Barring a miraculous, last-minute reprieve from its corporate parents, Google Reader will shut down in just a few days. I’ve been trying out a few alternatives: Feedly, Feedbin and Digg Reader (in beta for the Web but just out today for iOS), among others. They each have their strengths and weaknesses, but I’m struck by how much they all look like Google Reader — a list of feeds and folders occupying the left third of the screen and a stream of articles in the right two-thirds.

When Google Reader’s demise was announced, in my head I pictured a slew of new products vying to take its place by reinventing the very idea of an RSS reader. I was looking forward to seeing some radically new user interface approaches that would challenge my notions and habits around feeds. I haven’t seen that, at least not yet.

However, when I think more carefully about what I like and don’t like about these contenders, I realize that in truth I’m actually not looking for something different at all. What I want are the very same paradigms that Google Reader used, the same keyboard shortcuts, the same auxiliary features — basically the exact same interface. When one of these products omits something that Google Reader featured, or takes a slightly different approach, I think to myself, “Well that’s not right.”

Changing habits is hard, especially with something that’s as geared towards expert usage as RSS. It just goes to show how biased towards advanced users Google Reader was; acclimating yourself to its quirks took some time, but once you adopted Google Reader-specific habits, they become ingrained and you never wanted to give them up. Software for experts tends be like this, I find, and in many ways that is exactly the opposite of what a software company wants if they want to build a huge audience. I guess Google Reader never really had a chance.

Continue Reading …

+

New Google Maps Tour

Ratings

4 of 5 stars
What’s this?

The redesigned Google Maps comes with a handy virtual tour to acquaint users with what’s changed. That’s hardly revolutionary, but in a very nice bit of user experience engineering, the tour has some extra smarts built in. If, like me, upon first getting access to this new version you immediately start poking around and trying out various searches and only click on the tour option later, the tour’s messaging will cleverly acknowledge that state:

Google Maps Tour

Messing about with a new product unguided is a completely natural first use case for just about any product, and my guess is almost everybody does this. So creating a corresponding behavior for this tour makes perfect sense. Instead of assuming that the tour will commence with the product in its virgin state, this opening message says “It looks like you’ve already started exploring the new Google Maps!” and guides the user from there.

This took a little bit of extra design and engineering, and the end result does not make or break the product. But to me, it’s significant in that it clearly signals how much thought and care the product team has invested into the app. That’s worth loads.

If you don’t already have access to the new version, you can request access at the preview site, or read Google’s announcement from last month.

Jump to this link

+