I’m avoiding linking to excerpts and spoilers from Steve Jobs’ biography. However, I noticed that Amazon is currently pricing the Kindle version at nearly three dollars more than the hardcover, and a dollar more than the abridged audiobook. On the iBooks store, the book is priced about the same as the hardcover is on Amazon.
This isn’t an affiliate link, by the way.
Moby is crazy enough to think that soul, blues and electronic elements would combine in a pleasing way. Yet again, he’s correct.
Robin Wauters, reporting on findings by research2guidance:
37% of the applications that were published on Android Market were later removed – for a variety of reasons – while Apple has kicked off only 24% of published apps,
Here’s the free report, if you’d like to read more.
Writing that post on skeuomorphism reminded me of this excellent talk by Josh Clark. It’s a few months old, but still excellent.
Marco Arment:
Aggressively pursue simplification, elegance, craftsmanship, and the highest-class user experiences in the product line. Ruthlessly cut or hold features or entire products that aren’t good enough.
There are a number of companies that could learn from this list. The point above, in particular, is abused on a nearly constant basis to the detriment of end users.
John Gruber:
No one — no one — is criticizing Roboto because it isn’t Helvetica. If anything, the complaint is that it’s too similar to Helvetica. […] The criticism is simply that Roboto ungainly, homely, unharmonious.
Roboto is an enormous improvement over Droid Sans, but it’s still not quite there. Google is in a bit of a bind because they can’t use any commercial typeface (that I know of) in their open-source OS. Therefore, they can either include an existing free-license family, or commission one. They’ve chosen the latter, but they need someone of the calibre of HF+J to make it worth the effort.
On the plus side, the 1% of people visiting this site on an Android phone will now see it as slightly closer to what I intended (it’s set in Helvetica Neue).
“There’s this thing that’s happening right now in user interface design that I find kind of shackling. The faux wood paneling trend, […] — Matias Duarte
At that big Android event yesterday, Matias Duarte and Company made great pains to show the world how their new release – dubbed Ice Cream Sandwich – is different from the worlds of Windows Phone and iOS. What the team at Google built is not entirely unique, as it reads as a blend of Apple’s attempt at an idealised photorealism with Microsoft’s purely digital environment. Duarte emphasised what he sees wrong with iOS in an interview with Josh Topolsky, noting that Apple’s user interface is “not photorealistic, [but] illustrations”. Apple has fully embraced real-world materials, right down to a bullet-point in their Human Interface Guidelines (HIG):
When appropriate, add a realistic, physical dimension to your application. Often, the more true to life your application looks and behaves, the easier it is for people to understand how it works and the more they enjoy using it.
Apple’s emphasis on idealised realism is not a recent trend. This is the same section from the Mac OS X HIG:
When appropriate, consider adding the appearance of real-world materials. In some cases, real-world textures, such as wood, leather, metal, or paper, can enhance the experience of an app and convey meaning to users.
This approach is known as skeuomorphism. The term describes the imitation in newer products of historical or traditional materials, in a non-functional, decorative manner. It’s often used to add familiarity to a newer product. It’s the reason why there’s often grain added to digitally-shot movies, and why there’s faux cork printed onto the filter end of some brands of cigarettes.
In many cases, skeuomorphic user interfaces imitate reality to increase the ability for new users to know immediately what they’re using. The Compass application that began shipping with the iPhone 3GS is a perfect example. There is no doubt as to what that application represents, and what it does. This is also true of Calculator, Notes and iBooks. The latter would be difficult to interpret as an ebook application without the use of shelves, and the shelves themselves would be unclear without the wood texture.
Sometimes a skeuomorphic user interface doesn’t enhance usability, but adds a sense of depth to an otherwise dull UI. Consider Reminders, an application that began shipping with iOS 5. I created a version without texture and where many of the real-world paradigms are removed. It isn’t necessarily less-readable as a to-do list, but it’s less engaging. It looks like it lacks detail; it looks unfinished.
There is one application, however, that throws a big-ass wrench into Apple’s traditionally focused sense of interaction, and it’s appalling: Contacts, otherwise known as Address Book. The current incarnation began on the iPad and it spread like a gangrenous wound to the Mac. The metaphor of a book is, in theory, a sound one. Contact information has traditionally been stored within a little book. But this paradigm breaks in the digital realm, and especially in Apple’s implementation, because any book-like interaction is missing. It’s not that book-like interaction can’t, or doesn’t, work (look at iBooks on the iPad for instance), but that this cannot exist when there is no reason to flip pages. As a result, the stylised book fails to behave like the object it represents, creating a disconnect.
Realism in user interfaces can be a way to add familiarity and ease-of use to an application. There are times, though, when something of an invisible line is crossed, making the application harder to understand. Isn’t it ironic?
I think that’s what Matias Duarte feels, but I don’t think the Ice Cream Sandwich approach works. It doesn’t scrap enough of the nearly-photorealistic elements. Note, for instance, the icons on the home screen. The camera, phone and browser icons sit in an awkward spot between skeuomorphism and digital non-representation. It strikes me as half-assed, especially since the solution is sharing the same real estate. Why not use glyph-based icons, as with that used for the application drawer and the navigation buttons? It seems like it would solidify their commitment to their refreshed user interface. The lock screen in Ice Cream Sandwich fully embraces this to great effect. You can either commit to an interface, or look foolish.
Commit.
It’s shocking how prevalent this stuff is, especially since Flurry pissed off Steve Jobs. A number of applications submit user information over plain text (or barely-encoded text), and download images of a preposterously enormous size.
This is really basic stuff, people.
Vlad Savov at This is My Next:
As to overall performance, we saw a good deal of stutter in the Galaxy Nexus before us. Taps were not always recognized and there were occasional delays in performing an instruction, […] The subtle, pervasive lag that has characterized the Android UI since it inception is still there, which is not a heartening thing to hear when you’re talking about a super-powered dual-core device like the Galaxy Nexus.
Seriously?
“There’s this thing that’s happening right now in user interface design that I find kind of shackling. The faux wood paneling trend, and the airport lavatory signage trend.”
It’s interesting that as Apple moves towards more skeumorphic user interfaces (c.f. iCal, iBooks and Find my Friends), Google is doing their best to move away from that idea. They’re moving towards the Windows Phone 7 end of the spectrum with Ice Cream Sandwich. Josh Topolsky points out that “even the sounds have been changed. The lock sounds and keyboard sounds are now much more digital, instead of trying to replicate real-world objects.”
Windows Phone 7 and iOS are interesting UI-wise because they’re really good at focusing on specific things. WP7 is very digital and very minimal, whereas iOS is more material-based. The combination of those two opposing goals is either going to be really great or unsuccessful.
Hilariously bad.
There are about 3.4 million Android tablets out there. Apple has sold nearly 40 million iPads. Marco Arment said it nearly a year ago:
[T]he market for non-iPad tablets is about as big today as it was before the iPad
The fewer instances of Droid Sans I see, the better things look.
(via Sebastiaan de With)
Nice to see Motorola resurrecting the old RAZR branding for this phone. Interestingly, it’ll simply be known as the Motorola RAZR here in Canada.
The screen size is astonishing. Also, Motorola is touting this as the thinnest smartphone you can buy, aside from where it’s thicker. Seems they’ve been taking lessons from Dell.
The Company posted quarterly revenue of $28.27 billion and quarterly net profit of $6.62 billion, or $7.05 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $20.34 billion and net quarterly profit of $4.31 billion, or $4.64 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter.
These look like oil company figures.
The Company sold 17.07 million iPhones in the quarter, representing 21 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 11.12 million iPads during the quarter, a 166 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 4.89 million Macs during the quarter, a 26 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 6.62 million iPods, a 27 percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter.
No surprise that everything except iPods are up. Apple is cannibalizing elements of their own business, and they aren’t worse for it.
Is it just me, or is it weird that HP is continuing to add new features to a product they no longer make?
A few days ago, I linked to Adobe’s image de-blurring demo. Now, a team of researchers have created an application that detects the light and geometry of the scene and allows the user to add objects to it in a highly realistic way. The results are beyond impressive.
Ryan Heise (the guy behind Dinner With Android) wraps up his four-month experiment. This is worth reading.
Amazon.com has taught readers that they do not need bookstores. Now it is encouraging writers to cast aside their publishers.
No big deal, right?
Amazon will publish 122 books this fall in an array of genres, in both physical and e-book form.
This is huge.
