At Home with Facebook Home

I took a so-called “stay-cation” last week to work on the house. I also spent a bit of time playing with Facebook Home on my HTC One X. I was excited to try it, because the prospect of adding a layer of elegance on top of my One X, which is awkward in just about every way, was very appealing.

Facebook Home delivers on that promise, if not completely then at least on a few levels. Installation was painless, and the immediate experience of running what essentially amounts to a Facebook-fueled screen saver on my phone’s home screen is a powerful emotional moment. I found myself getting pulled into Home often, flipping through many more status updates than I normally do on Facebook’s Web site. Its full-screen pictures are truly beautiful; Facebook’s engineers and designers have pulled off some fancy trickery that makes just about every image — and every status update comes with an image — look great.

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Nubook

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

There are many products that purport to solve the problem of Web pages still being fundamentally difficult for just about everyone to create, but Nubook is aimed specifically at so-called creatives — “designers, photographers, architects, artists, actors, stylists, collectors” — who don’t have the skills to code a page or manage a server. In my limited playing around with it, Nubook does in fact seem quite easy, and loaded with exceedingly elegant templates (which is what you’d expect when one of the key folks behind it is Thomas Brodahl). More to the point, the service is focused on presentations, and is not meant to be a traditional host for fully-fledged Web sites or blogs in the traditional sense. That limited focus is a potentially meaningful distinction; I think it’s really smart. Give it a spin at Nubook.com.

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Designing for the Ideal

Sometimes a designer doesn’t completely account for the reality of how a solution or product will be used, and instead designs around a set of requirements that seem to be fully representative of the problem at hand, but are actually narrower in scope. I call this designing for the ideal, because the designer typically chooses a band of requirements that play nicely with the favored solution — content that looks great or inputs that behave wonderfully within the design as it is being crafted. More often than not though, when the product is released into the real world the designer is in for a rude awakening.

There was a bit of designing for the ideal, I think, when the three major browsers — Safari, Chrome and Firefox — each started presenting a gallery of a user’s most visited Web pages within new tabs, instead of just a blank page or a user’s designated starting page. This feature has been around for a while now, but it’s remained broken for quite a long time.

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Photoshop Blend Modes Explained

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Photoshop’s blend modes are incredibly powerful, but their documentation is somewhat sparse, and most people use only a fraction of their power, I would bet. Photographer Robert Thomas fills in the gaps with this incredibly detailed look at how blend modes work, explaining how to manipulate blend layers through obscure keyboard shortcuts that I had no idea were available (and I use a ton of keyboard shortcuts in Photoshop), as well as diving into the actual mathematical operations that drives each mode. It’s probably more in-depth than most users have need for, but in those cases when a deeper understanding of how these features work, this is remarkable. Read all about them here.

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Goodbye to Two Greats

The world has been mourning Roger Ebert, who passed away last week, and I join them. I learned a lot about watching movies from the man, but as I observed from afar as he struggled valiantly with disease I learned a lot more about what it means to fully become a person. His film criticism was always commendable, but the way he used it to undergird a life of great curiosity and thoughtfulness was remarkable. He’ll be greatly missed.

I won’t try to write any more than this about Ebert, since so much has already been written about him just in the past two days. Not as much will probably be written about the passing of longtime comics great Carmine Infantino, though, but that doesn’t take anything away from his own remarkable life.

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Facebook Home at First Glance

Somehow last year I ended up owning an HTC One X in addition to my iPhone. It’s never been particularly useful (AT&T has stranded it with an older version of Android) but now it has a purpose in life: the One X is among a few of the first phones that will run Facebook Home, just announced yesterday with much fanfare. I will definitely be installing Home on my One X when it launches on April 12.

I have decidedly mixed feelings about Facebook, most of them negative. But I do respect what they’ve done. You’ve got to; awful as it is in so many ways, it’s too massive, and too difficult to ignore.

Facebook Home, at least at first blush, only gives me more reason to respect them. I see at least two reasons to believe that the company may have pulled off things that other, similarly massive companies have tried and failed at.

First, Facebook Home seems to be a genuinely fresh approach to what a phone operating system can be (whether it really qualifies as an OS or not is debatable). Its conceit is that it eschews the ‘app-centric’ approach that almost every other smartphone OS takes, preferring instead a ‘people-centric’ approach. If it works, it will be a meaningful differentiator in the market, and more or less exactly what I criticized Blackberry for failing to do with their newest phone products.

Second, Facebook Home aims to wholly subvert the resident operating system on the Android phones on which it runs with Facebook’s own ecosystem. I think mostly of Adobe in this regard; for years, they’ve taken an insurrectionist approach with their Creative Suite software, piggybacking what amounts to an entire, largely unwanted operating system’s worth of code (if not features) along with Adobe’s otherwise useful applications. It’s always been a bear for end users, and it has hardly succeeded in establishing CS as a beachhead for doing anything other than what you would have turned to Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator for without it.

If Facebook Home sees wide adoption among both users and developers, it will achieve exactly what Adobe strove for: supplanting the OS that came preinstalled on your hardware (unless of course you buy the HTC First) with something entirely different, effectively stealing customers away from Google. That’s incredibly bold, and if they pull it off, wow. I won’t like them any more for it, but I will respect them more.

One more begrudging note of appreciation, offered again with the caveat “if Facebook Home succeeds”: this could be the definitive contribution to the argument that Mark Zuckerberg is the most talented product designer since Steve Jobs.

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