Requiem for the Browser Search Box

The changes promised in Apple’s forthcoming OS X Mountain Lion release look promising on the whole, but there’s one that makes me sad: the next major version of Safari will sport a unified address bar. Instead of two fields, one for the URL and one for search, Macworld writes that “the browser now sports a single lengthy field that can be used to type in a URL; pull up the top result in your selected search engine from a keyword or search the Web, your bookmarks and history, or within the page itself.”

Though I spend most of my time using Firefox, which still has both an address bar and a search box, I also spend a fair amount of time using Chrome which of course, popularized the concept of the unified search bar in the first place. I find the unified search bar to be a fine complement to the way I use my browser, but I still stubbornly prefer two fields up there.

Continue Reading …

+

InVision: Prototyping Tool for Visual Designers

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

This designer-centric tool for creating interactive prototypes using real design assets has apparently been gaining traction for some time, but I’m only getting a look at it today. Their logo parade of customers is impressive, and they already boast that InVision is used by almost 20,000 agencies. I’d be curious to hear what people who have used the product think about it, but I’m glad that someone is trying to fix this problem.

For many years, there’s been a gaping hole in the market for a more capable prototyping tool than Photoshop or Fireworks or just HTML, and it’s always puzzled me that no one has tried to fill it. There’s an article about the company at TechCrunch today, and you can find out more about the product at its Web site.

Jump to this link

+

Getting Airlines off the Ground

Over the weekend my family took a short trip by plane. The experience of flying — which I never enjoy — was so bad, it made me despair again for this incompetent industry that we all seem to be stuck with but have little recourse from. The ineptitudes of nearly every airline’s customer experience just boggle the mind and make me marvel at the fact that they can even exist as businesses.

Continue Reading …

+

Hisaji Hara

Hisaji Hara

Beautiful, nostalgic photographic style from Japanese photographer Hisaji Hara. There have always been artists whose principal hook has been to recall the styles of the past, but I wonder if currently experiencing a fundamental shift in the art of photography where its central idea — or one of them — is now to recall the past. More here.

+

MichaelHoppenGallery.com

Some Generalizing about Specializing

When I worked at The New York Times, I used to have friendly arguments with a colleague about the role of information architects on a digital design team. The debate was over the things that an information architect does — evaluating goals, planning features, constructing wireframes — were things that should be the purview of visual designers instead. We would go back and forth over the usefulness of dividing these responsibilities, segregating the nitty gritty planning from the visual execution. Put another way, the question was whether the information architect was even necessary?

I invariably argued in favor of information architects because I’ve always felt that there is a significant population of talented designers and thinkers who can envision, plan and manage a user experience design solution even in spite of their inability to render the user interface itself in Photoshop, Illustrator, HTML etc. What’s more, there are lots of visual designers of the ‘heads down’ type, who are superb craftspeople but are not very adept at the holistic thinking necessary to plan out the entirety of a user experience, or capable of the articulation necessary to convince others of a particular UX strategy.

Things seem to be changing. For one, the term “information architect” seems to have gone out of style. What I hear a lot more these days is “user experience designer.” Now, I dislike few things as much as debating the semantics of these particular job titles, but it does strike me that part of the shift to this nomenclature has to do with the fact that, more and more, what employers want is a single person who can do both the feature planning and the visual execution.

Continue Reading …

+

Multiple Sclerosis and Mixel

Ratings

4 of 5 stars
What’s this?

One of our most prolific users on Mixel is John DeFord of Bad Axe, Michigan. In a month a half, he’s posted over one hundred mixels (we’re working on adding profile pages to our Web site, so soon you’ll be able to see all of a user’s work outside of the app). I didn’t realize until I read this blog post that he also suffers from multiple sclerosis.

“If you have MS and are mobility restricted, like me, and if you have the means, I again recommend that you obtain an iPad and mount it to your wheelchair. It connects you to the world again. And, with Mixel all you will need is two working fingers to create beautiful collage art and meet other people around the world, all from your wheelchair.”

That just blew me away. Thank you, John, for sharing that. Read the full blog post here.

Jump to this link

+

Tumble-blogging at Subtraction.com

For the past week or so, I’ve been playing with a slightly different kind of content here at Subtraction.com. This is something I talked about in a recent post in which I rambled on about the state of several different blog tools; I’m now experimenting with Tumblr-style image blogging that in most cases is purely about the image, with only a short line of additional text, if any. Here’s one example. (There are still some kinks to be worked out, so bear with me.)

This might seem unremarkable to regular readers since I already publish short, image-heavy, posts with just a bit of text. On the back-end though, it’s quite different, or at least meaningfully different. With the help of my friend Adam Khan, we’ve customized an ExpressionEngine ‘channel’ that presents a much more succinct publishing interface than the one I normally use. In essence, there are fewer fields to fill out and the fields themselves are physically smaller, which dissuades me from writing at any great length. On top of that, we’ve cooked up a bookmarklet that drives a simple script for grabbing images and auto-populating the forms, so creating a new post when I come across something I like only takes a few clicks.

None of this is novel in the least, as plenty of Web apps already do this much better than what we cooked up in an ad hoc fashion. But it’s long been a struggle for me to post here as regularly as I’d like, especially as my schedule just keeps getting busier and busier, so anything that makes it easier for me is something worth experimenting with. It’s also a useful reminder that interface design does matter — having a simpler, more concise publishing U.I. directly influences the kind of content that gets produced.

To be clear, this does not mean I’m giving up on posting longer pieces of real writing here. I still enjoy that a great deal; it’s just a matter of finding the time. Hopefully this supplemental style of blogging will help fill the void, but if you have any thoughts on how successful — or unsuccessful — it is, please let me know in the comments.

Continue Reading …

+