Mike Rundle:
Designs can succeed or fail on a number of levels, some of which are subjective, some of which aren’t. Things like the overall concept, mood and its visual appeal are subjective: one person might think a design succeeded in its overall goals whereas another might think it failed.
So without any context what can you really critique? Design execution. The execution of a design is the nitty-gritty details of the design. The pixel-level details. The alignment of individual elements. The kerning of a logo or headline. The sharpness of an edge. These can be wrong. These can be so incredibly wrong that they stand out no matter how good the overall concept, mood and visual appeal may be. Screwing up the execution of a design ruins the design. Game over, it’s wrong, and no context is needed to understand its wrongness. A 400×300 pixel screenshot on Dribbble can be wrong without knowing anything about the project. An iPhone app icon can go from right to wrong in just a few pixels. One misplaced pixel. One misaligned button. One blurry edge. This is what makes a design wrong, this is what makes an execution of a design go from good to garbage.
Still in beta, H.264 GPU decoding in Mac OSX is now officially enabled in the Flash Player. Here is some background info:
The primary reason this API exists is because we have been working with Apple to come up with a way to reduce power consumption on Macs. As we see more and more HD content on the web it is critical that we take advantage of hardware resources when available. In that context it is important to understand that this API targets HD content, not SD or smaller sized video. In fact SD sized content will not be accelerated in most cases. The decision of what content is accelerated and on which machine it is supported is up to Apple.
The Incident is a fast-paced, retro-style action game from Big Bucket Software. Run and jump your way to safety as an angry rain of just about everything in the world falls and builds a mountain of platforms for you to climb up, up… up to the source of it all: the cause of The Incident.
It’s only been one day with the case, however, I really like it! Sure it adds extra weight (not much since the materials themselves are lightweight) and bulk to the iPad, but it’s so incredibly slick looking!
I really have enjoyed the angled of interacting with the iPad when the lid is flipped backwards – makes for easier typing too! It’s easy to remove the iPad, yet not too easy for it to just fall out. I’ll be interested to see how this holds up over time, but from first use, this thing is well made and well worth the 6 week wait time.
The deal goes into effect on September 1st, and as always, there are some major caveats.
So, “Great Movie Starring Some Person” is released to theaters, a few months later it appears on Epix, then three months later it can be streamed on your Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, or whatever other device you have that streams Netflix.
Introducing Times. Your personalized newspaper for iPad.
Lex Friedman:
I’m a big fan of Safari Extensions. I’ve written several of my own, some of which I share with the Internet public. But because I’ve built those extensions, I’ve realized how easily a malicious developer could harvest all sorts of information about you, using a method that could sneak in and evade immediate detection.
Installed extensions can add any HTML to any page you surf to. And that’s where the danger comes in — and that danger is actually even worse than it first seems, which is already pretty bad.
Friedman’s extension is a little fugly – if he is using the extension himself, I am sure he will work on the aesthetics.
Even Okuda was impressed with how natural and fluid the interface of the iPad feels in use. Actions that involved complex post-production effects on a PADD actually seem easy on an iPad, he said. “There are a lot of things that are very easy to do in a prop, but actually very difficult to do in reality,” he told Ars. “For example, pinch to zoom—that was relatively difficult to do even as a visual effect. It’s implemented brilliantly on the iPad and the iPhone.”
The iPhone. It was something they had never seen before. Their response? Manufacture iClones; simulations of a truly remarkable product that are half baked, and truly un-revolutionary. The problem? The market got saturated.
Before iPhone, the market defined a smartphone as, “a mobile phone capable of providing the functionality found in a PDA.” If the device had a touchscreen, it used a stylus. No touchscreen, no stylus. Somewhere along the lines, iPhone changed the definition of a smartphone to a more socially accepted definition, “a mobile phone capable of providing the functionalities found in a PDA, and has a touchscreen.” Hence iClone.
RIM founder and CEO, Mike Lazaridis, took the stage, ready to announce the biggest change BlackBerry had ever seen: the BlackBerry Torch, and the all new BlackBerry 6. If you predicted RIM would announce a major update to the BlackBerry OS, capable of competing with the iPhone – you came close. The Problem? RIM made the decision to mold the BlackBerry from a world-renown messaging and communications device, to an iClone with a keyboard.
After their first – and second – touchscreen failures, why would RIM continue to trot down this road? Multi-touch has become the de facto way to control any handheld device. It’s like having a camera on a smartphone, a necessity instead of a feature. To prove my point, let’s take a leap into the advertising sector of the market. What feels more intimate?
Person A, typing away on a keyboard.
Person B, swiping their way around the multitouch interface.
Sure there is an ad campaign for a keyboard-based UI, but it will feel dated compared to the ad campaign of any truly competitive touchscreen device. The market is filled with tons of copycats, and grams of innovation. Consumers are always looking for a revolutionary product – four years later, the iPhone is still the smartphone to beat. RIM had the chance, and let’s just say, they blew it.
I’m surprised it took this long.
iOS 4.1 Beta 3, the latest beta version of Apple’s upcoming software update, has a new feature that allows for FaceTime calls to be associated with an email address instead of a phone number.
I might not want to give you my phone number – who knows?
I never realized how big a deal this was, until I tried to download “Hey Jude” from iTunes and was presented with this ghastly version instead.
“(Apple CEO) Steve Jobs has his own idea and he’s a brilliant guy,” Ono, the 77-year-old widow of John Lennon, told Reuters. “There’s just an element that we’re not very happy about, as people. We are holding out.
“Don’t hold your breath … for anything,” she said with a laugh.
This would have need good to know three years ago; R.I.P. 1st Gen iPhone – I will miss you so…
Short version: Power it off immediately and put it in a bag of uncooked rice.
Here is a neat idea.
Instead of having lite flavors of paid apps to try, Apple should implement an App Store-wide 24-hour trial mode. Right now, not all apps have free lite versions and, some of those lite versions, are feature limited. This is a problem, because it limits the user when they want to explore what’s in the marketplace.
I rather have a closed system that works with applications that are checked before they reach the app store and that I know will have the same behavior as other apps and that will not crash under normal circumstances and that will not take me (a geek that can handle any fucking thing you throw at me) a full hour to figure out how to add more information to a contact.
Oh, and did I mention the crapware that cellphone carriers are installing in the Android phones? Speaking of phones mimicking PCs…
Agreed. There is something about the Android OS that does not sit well with me. Granted, I have not given it much of a chance. I do like the fact that when I turn on my iPhone, everything – or almost everything – works as advertised.
Take a look at the Operating Systems Comparison Graph. Without going into the figures, it is obvious the Mac Adoption Rate is increasing exponentially, while the PC Adoption Rate is decreasing. The graph only includes first-year students, and it is unknown what the older students are using as their main computing platform.
Not exactly “Try Before You Buy”, but “Here is a Collection of Free and/or Lite Apps that have Paid Versions As Well.” Nothing special, just another section in the App Store.
It was bound to happen one day, too bad it had to be today.
Schmidt had some interesting things to say at the Techonomy Conference, specifically:
Show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are. You think you don’t have 14 photos of yourself on the internet? You’ve got Facebook photos! People will find it’s very useful to have devices that remember what you want to do, because you forgot… But society isn’t ready for questions that will be raised as result of user-generated content.
I’m not sure I agree with Schmidt. I may not be ready for the ‘Technology Revolution’, but who says my children won’t be; in fact, I bet that they will be.
Case in point, when Facebook started tying into other services, many users found it was too eerie; I am not on Facebook, why am I seeing my profile in another application? Younger generations are seeing this as “the internet” – I am signed into Facebook, and it is only natural for Pandora to link to my profile. There is a natural evolution happening across generations. For me it is scary, but for my children, it is exciting.
John Carey:
I did my best to include a little bit of everything in here. There are 33 images in all and I have decided to make them available as one zip file download or you can access them individually here so you are able to tap one with your iphone and save it to your phone for instant use. All wallpapers in the future will also contain images at this resolution.
Update: I’ve tried my hand at designing one for myself, called ✚ for iPhone 4. Download it, and let me know what you think.
Brilliant.
When your app plays audio in the background, it does not transition into the background suspended state. That means whatever code is running keeps running. This is, unless you’re a VoIP application, the only way your app can keep a persistent connection or otherwise run code indefinitely in the background. This will be taken advantage of in an upcoming Pastebot update to allow syncing to take place without the app running in the foreground.
So, this is what innovation feels like.
Using Camera+ now feels just like a real camera. Your photos can be sharper because you can now hold your iPhone steadier with two hands instead of fumbling around for the shutter button on screen.
In addition, you can plug your iPhone earphones in and use the volume buttons on them as a remote shutter control.
Wave’s biggest problem was indeed the adoption rate, and of course:
No one that needed to know about it, knew about it.
Some were excited to use Google Wave as a replacement for Gmail, alas you could only ‘wave’ with other ‘wavers’.
The Official Google Blog:
Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.
The OWLE Bubo is a camera mount that brings the best features of a camcorder to the iPhone 3GS: stability, optics, microphones and tripods!
iPhone 4 compatibility is on its way.
Chris Michel:
I know that not all of my markup is perfect and I’m sure that none of this validates, but its just an illustration. I wanted to showcase the capability of some new CSS techniques and generally flex my coding muscles.
The possibilities of standard Web Browsers are endless. Here is the direct link to the CSS Keyboard Illustration Demo.
Justin Williams writes, Death To Pull-To-Refresh:
If pull-to-refresh stayed exclusive to Twitter for iPhone, I wouldn’t mind it as much, but like most popular things, my disdain grows as I see more poorly implemented or misguided variations of the feature.
In all these cases, the user has the same interaction of scrolling past the bounds of a table, but each different variation offers a different result for the user. I don’t see how that is a good user experience.
Jeff Lamarche responds, Time Moves On…:
To me, it’s the perfect gesture for the iPhone in apps where you’re primarily consuming small chunks of content in a table, like your inbox or twitter apps. When I’m using apps of this nature, I’m often in one-handed mode, using my thumb to scroll. My thumb can’t comfortably reach the entire screen (e.g. a refresh button in the navigation bar), and I don’t want to bring my other hand over every time I want new tweets.
I have to side with Jeff. ‘Pull-to-refresh’ is a refreshing gesture, especially when you are limited to the mobility of one hand. I think pull-to-refresh would be extremely useful as a system-wide gesture on the Droid X (ha!).
This was truly a fantastic article. It brought to light something I had noticed, but neglected to acknowledge; I am part of what Brook considers to be Group A – someone who wants more then they need. It is true, Apple does seem to be neglecting it’s ‘Pro Users’, but I have my doubts they will drop the line in its entirety. Which computers do Apple use internally to produce everything you see on their website? Mac Pros. I’m afraid Brook is missing a key point to his argument – the future of the iMac. Aside from expandability, which I know is a major selling point for the Mac Pro, the iMac is becoming something of a powerhorse.
Just six percent of iPhone users said they’d buy an Android phone next, and only two to three percent of Android and iPhone users said they’d get a BlackBerry phone. Again, these numbers were collected before the launch of iPhone 4.
I hate to say it, but those ‘missing’ numbers are important. The current numbers are based on – what is essentially – a two-year old phone. The next report should be an interesting – if not, predictable – one.
According to the latest data from Net Applications, the iPhone saw its largest jump in operating system market share ever in July. The report states that the iPhone’s global usage share went from .59% in June to .7% in July. In addition, iPhone usage share grew at over twice the pace of Android over the same period. For comparison, the iPhone’s usage share was just half of July’s numbers—.35%—less than one year ago in September 2009. Net Application’s numbers are based on the 160 monthly million visitors to its clients’ websites.
Kevin C. Tofel:
It’s easier to show stellar growth in the beginning of a product cycle, but Android is nearly two years old. One could make the valid argument that Android really began to mature over the past year with Android 2.1, so from that standpoint, Google’s platform is still an infant when compared to iOS4, BlackBerry and other mobile operating systems.
While Kevin gives Android a ‘pat-on-the-back’ for being in second place, let’s take a look at two important facts.
The iPhone was announced at the Macworld Conference on January 9th, 2007, with the release scheduled six months after the announcement. There have been four (4) iPhones since the announcement.
The Android Platform was originally announced on November 5th, 2007. The first publicly available Android Device was the T-Mobile G1, which was released October 22nd, 2008. There are now over sixty (60) Android Smartphones.
With that in mind, how can we consider the Android Platform – which currently has sixty devices available for purchase – an infant, and not give the iPhone the same credibility? Is the iPhone not evolving as new resources and technologies become available? The obvious answer, based on what Kevin has written: iPhone users expect more from the iPhone, while Android users still expect a flawed experience, because it is in an early stage of its development.
