Spinners 3 weeks ago
I just read through the new Android Design guidelines and on the whole they’re thoughtful and well-designed.
But why have they renamed dropdowns “spinners”?
This is confusing me.
Fancy data structures 4 weeks ago
Joel Spolsky explains something I’ve always thought but never put into words:
Spreadsheets are not just tools for doing “what-if” analysis. They provide a specific data structure: a table. Most Excel users never enter a formula. They use Excel when they need a table. The gridlines are the most important feature of Excel, not recalc.
Word processors are not just tools for writing books, reports, and letters. They provide a specific data structure: lines of text which automatically wrap and split into pages.
PowerPoint is not just a tool for making boring meetings. It provides a specific data structure: an array of full-screen images.
Add in a pinch of real-time collaboration and you’ll see why Google Docs is so popular. I’ve used shared spreadsheets to collaboratively plan carpools, update sports rosters, track workouts, share menus, and much more, none of which has to do with math.
Spreadsheet software needs to embrace this and add functions to support it. We need an easy way of counting filled-in cells that isn’t the obscurely named COUNTIF(), and easy ways of applying background colors that are a function of cell contents (e.g. 1 is white, 100 is black, and everything else is a shade of grey between).
2011 1 month ago
My year in photos.
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December*
* Jules took this one
Colons 1 month ago
Take a look at the placement of the colon in “3:05” the Clock app on iPhone:
It’s bottom-aligned with the baseline. Notice that the “3:27” in the iOS bar has the same placement. Of course, both of these things make sense because because that’s where both Helvetica and Helvetica Neue place it, and those are the primary fonts in iOS.
But what about the time on the lock screen? It appears to be Helvetica (or Neue), but the colon has been moved up!
Did they modify the typeface, or is there other funny business going on here? Let me know (@trhaynes) if you know what’s going on.
Vertical overlap 2 months ago
I’ve recently noticed a new design pattern appearing in mobile applications, and I haven’t seen anyone write about it yet. That said, I don’t really know it would be called so I can’t search to make sure. While all of these examples are slightly different, they all have one thing in common: overlapping content panes, used to convey hierarchy and provide a way of navigating it. For lack of a better name, I’ll call this the Stacked Hierarchy pattern.
The new Gmail and Facebook apps use a navigation that hides behind the main content, and can be summoned by a tap in the upper left — on a “Menu” button and row of lines icon, respectively — or by dragging the content out of the way using the menu bar.
Facebook’s also serves a place to list search terms (Gmail’s search is included in the main interface).
Another place I’ve seen this stacked hierarchy is in Asana’s HTML5 mobile app, app.asana.com. Here there are three levels of hierarchy, and the main menu is always visible, even if only slightly. There’s no dragging here (probably partly because it’s a web app living in Safari) but the cards do slide left and right, strengthening the sense of overlap.
I also found some screenshots (on Behance) of a Russian application called Beeline that also appears to be using this strategy.
Update (9/20) Some readers told me about Twitter’s iPad app, which was apparently the first to implement the pattern (in both portrait and landscape views):
At first this stacking pattern struck me as weird because all of these screens are more constrained horizontally than they are vertically, so a smallish sliver of vertical content is actually quite a lot of screen real estate. This doesn’t seem to be a problem, however. Facebook doesn’t need the entire screen width for navigation, and Asana’s task card looks fine with a little less space on the left.
Lastly, the fact that these interfaces use card-like is vaguely reminiscent of Palm OS, except Palm only uses cards to represent entire applications. The hint of off-screen (or “teaser”) content also reminds me of the Windows Phone 7 UI, except I don’t believe Windows uses it for hierarchy.
Are there other examples out there? Has anyone else written about this or given it a name? Let me know.
I’m interested in seeing how this pattern evolves over time.
LomoKino 2 months ago
Wow! Shoot analogue movies on regular 35mm film. A 36-exposure roll gets you 144 frames of lo-fi, wide-screen awesomeness. Check out the LomoKino or watch more mini-movies.
Watching writing 2 months ago
Watch Paul Graham write his essay “Startups in 13 Sentences.”
Text that is yellow will eventually be deleted, making it easy to see his writing process. What starts out as colloquial (“kind of happy”) eventually turns into formal and concise (“semi-happy”). Very interesting.
