Facebook, For the Win

The Social NetworkThis week’s episode of KCRW’s excellent radio show The Business features a great interview with Dana Brunetti, producer of the critically lauded and Oscar-nominated movie “The Social Network.” In it, Brunetti goes into fascinating detail about how the book and the movie came to be.

“The Social Network” is of course based on the book “Accidental Billionaires” by Ben Mezrich. Apparently, Mezrich and Brunetti have a standing, informal book-to-movie deal — the former writes books that make for good movies, and the latter options them, sometimes before they’re even done. (The Kevin Spacey film “21” is another example.) Such was the way “Accidental Billionaires” turned into “The Social Network”; screenwriter Aaron Sorkin was working on his script while Mezrich’s manuscript was still in progress, working practically in parallel, with the two comparing notes and research. You can listen to or download the interview here.

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Explanations Worth Reading

In my post yesterday about instructional screens, those meta-states that apps sometimes use to literally explain how their functionality works, I said that if an interface has to be explained, then it’s probably broken.

Of course, there are no absolutes in interface design, so a declaration like that should be taken with a grain of salt. The concept of coach marks can work, and quite well, but usually not in the static, superficial manner of the examples I cited in that post.

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MTA.me

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

A clever project that “turns the New York subway system into an interactive string instrument. Using the MTA’s actual subway schedule, the piece begins in realtime by spawning trains which departed in the last minute, then continues accelerating through a 24 hour loop. The visuals are based on Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 diagram.” Built with HTML5 and JavaScript. See it in action here and read the project summary here.

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Unnecessary Explanations

Introducing users to a new app or set of functionality is a difficult task for which there are no easy answers. One of the oldest tricks in the book is to create a kind of instructional screen in which the interface is explained, either diagrammatically or through the use of elucidating circles, arrows, lines and notational text (what Apple has in the past called “coach marks,” a term I haven’t heard elsewhere but that I really like) directly over the interface. The idea is to add a meta level of guidance to help acquaint the user with the key parts of the interface and how to use them.

I’ve been noticing these more and more lately, a trend that I find regrettable. I’ve designed products with instructional screens and coach marks in the past, and they were miserable failures. In my experience, these types of parenthetical interfaces are almost always misguided, mostly because they run up against one of the (nearly) immutable laws of interface design: people don’t read interfaces.

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Otherworld Computing’s Media Center Solution

Ratings

1 of 5 stars
What’s this?

This well-regarded vendor of Mac products is now selling this turnkey, Mac mini-based home theater solution. The preconfigured bundles include additional RAM, up to 12TB of storage, an optional HDTV tuner and an optional, third-party Blu-Ray drive. I would imagine most people who can manage as sprawling a solution as this have already started to build them for themselves, but maybe I’m wrong. In any case, there’s nothing listed among the bundles that mentions a universal remote control option which to my mind would be the single most important part of any turnkey home theater package. Pricing has yet to be released, but you can peruse the offerings here.

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The Argument for Florida

The Argument for Florida

Pictures from last Thursday morning, when an overnight snowstorm left a foot and a half of snow all over the city.There’s been a ridiculously large amount of snow in New York this year and I’m tired of it, but it does yield some nice picture-taking opportunities. As dirty as old snow gets, new snow is gorgeous.

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Netflix Performance on Top ISP Networks

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Netflix, who are now obviously streaming video content to a huge number of users, has published their unique insight into the performances of the major U.S. and Canadian broadband providers. Charter ranks best, Clearwire worst, and my own ISP, Time Warner, is among the top four or five (I guess?). Clearly, it’s a less-than-subtle attempt to goad the poorer-performing providers into improving their service, and to establish the question of “How well does Netflix work on your ISP?” as a metric for how consumers choose providers. See the data here.

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The 100 Best Film Noir Posters

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Yes, I’m on a real film noir kick. The classic crime films blog Where Danger Lives is in the midst of counting down the one hundred best noir posters — the first eighty have been listed already. The images of the posters are of pretty good quality, too, having been color corrected, cleaned up and presented at fairly large sizes (click through each image to see the enlargement).

See all of the posters here.

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