But why have they renamed dropdowns “spinners”?

This is confusing me.

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).

My year in photos.

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December*

* Jules took this one

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.

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.

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.

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.

Also read his post about the experiment.

New highway signs. Very clean, great colors.

I love how this shows the fluid nature of La Presse across papier, web, and applications mobiles.

(via Brand New)

Speaker Deck, a better-designed SlideShare?