Month: September 2015

All Aboard the Ghost Train ⇥ bbc.com

Amanda Ruggeri of the BBC:

The train that cuts across the West Yorkshire countryside from Leeds to the small town of Snaith departs just once at precisely 17:16, Monday to Saturday. Return trains depart twice: one at 07:16, one at 19:01.

Given these infrequent departures, you’d expect packed carriages. But on a recent Friday rush hour – when Leeds train station, the second-busiest in the UK outside London, is swirling with commuters – no one, aside from me and my companions, remains on the line for more than a few stops. Soon, one carriage after another becomes completely, eerily empty. You could cartwheel down the aisles.

The Leeds-Snaith line is what rail enthusiasts call a ghost train; Snaith station, a ghost station. The webpage about Snaith on ticket sales site TheTrainLine.com warns that ticket machines are not available at the station. Nor is there a ticket office, taxi rank or cab office.

I love stuff like this.

Google to Demote Websites That Display Modal App Download Prompts ⇥ googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ca

Google engineer Daniel Bathgate:

After November 1, mobile web pages that show an app install interstitial that hides a significant amount of content on the transition from the search result page will no longer be considered mobile-friendly. This does not affect other types of interstitials. As an alternative to app install interstitials, browsers provide ways to promote an app that are more user-friendly.

Thank you.

Don’t Say “Bubble” ⇥ vanityfair.com

An amazing article from Nick Bilton, writing for Vanity Fair:

One Thursday morning in early June, the ballroom of the Rosewood Sand Hill hotel, in Menlo Park, was closed for a private presentation. The grand banquet hall appeared worthy of the sprawling resort’s five-star designation: ornate chandeliers hung from the ceiling; silk panels with a silver stenciled design covered the walls. Behind a stage in the 2,800-square-foot room, a large sign bore the name of Andreessen Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley’s most revered venture-capital firms. […]

[A] presentation, which adhered to a16z’s gray-and-deep-orange palette, seemed to have an ulterior motive. [Managing partner Scott Kupor], his hair neatly parted, was eager to assuage any worry about the existence of a tech bubble. While he conceded that there were some eerie similarities with the infamous dot-com bubble of 1999 — such as the preponderance of so-called unicorns, or tech start-ups valued at $1 billion and upward — Kupor confidently buoyed his audience with slides that read, “It’s different this time,” and charts highlighting the decrease in tech I.P.O.’s, the metric that eventually pierced the froth in March of 2000. Back then, a company went public almost every single day; now it was down to about once per week. This time around, he noted, the money was flowing backward. Rather than entering a company’s coffers in the public markets, it was making its way to start-ups in late-stage investments. There was little, he suggested, to worry about.

And then, toward the end of his reassuring soliloquy, the ANDREESSEN HOROWITZ sign fell from the wall and landed on the floor with an ominous thud.

Eleven and a Half Seconds ⇥ digiday.com

Ricardo Bilton, DigiDay:

Vox’s seven sites took an average of more than 23 seconds to load, far longer than competing publishers such as Mashable and The Huffington Post. Vox’s engineers had declared “performance bankruptcy.”

A few months later, the situation has improved. Vox has managed to cut its sites’ average page load time to around 11.5 seconds, thanks to a combination of smaller and larger tweaks.

It used to take me eleven and a half seconds to load a webpage on a 56K modem. Now, it takes eleven and a half seconds to load a webpage on a 50Mbps broadband connection. Good stuff, Vox.

Google Has a New Logo ⇥ design.google.com

I’m sure this is the first you’re hearing of this — I’m always breaking the news, aren’t I? — so it’s really important that I get this critique right. Google’s new logo is like taupe paint, Virgin Cola, or the “modern art” that hangs in the waiting room at a dentist’s office: it’s inoffensive to the point of being bland. It’s almost a generic redesign: take the existing logo and typeset it in a geometric sans-serif, dust your hands, and call it a day.

Google makes a pretty big deal about the font they’re using, too:

In tandem with developing the logotype, we created a custom, geometric sans-serif typeface to complement the logo in product lockups and supporting identity materials. We call it Product Sans. The typeface design takes cues from that same schoolbook letter-printing style, but adopts the neutral consistency we’ve all come to expect from a geometric sans serif.

The logotype is decidedly not custom – it looks an awful lot like Red Rooster’s Relish Pro, though the tail on the lowercase g is longer on Google’s version. The sans-serif they’ve come up with to brand each of their products looks more custom, but it’s also a bit of a Frankenfont: the uppercase M looks like it’s straight out of Univers, while the alternate lowercase a looks a lot like Proxima Nova’s very distinctive a. Some of the other letters — the p, the s, and the c, in particular — look quite a lot like Avenir. It’s not bad; it’s just not very pretty to my eye.

There are plenty of other components to Google’s new identity, too. I absolutely love the animated dots that Google has come up with to communicate ways of interacting with different features:

A full range of expressions were developed including listening, thinking, replying, incomprehension, and confirmation. While their movements might seem spontaneous, their motion is rooted in consistent paths and timing, with the dots moving along geometric arcs and following a standard set of snappy easing curves.

These dots are joyous. In a screenshot, they’re dull and lifeless, but the animation that Google’s designers have conjured makes them feel alive.

Keep your eyes peeled on Brand New, too; their review will be posted tomorrow morning.

Android Wear Won’t Be Integrated With HealthKit on iOS ⇥ buzzfeed.com

Stephanie M. Lee, Buzzfeed:

The steps, heart rate, and other fitness metrics tracked by Android Wear for iOS won’t appear on Apple’s health dashboard for iPhone, Health. Instead, they’ll be routed to Google’s competing health dashboard, Google Fit.

I’m entirely unsurprised to see this kind of platform antagonism from Google. Most of their existing iOS apps are presented through an interpretation their Material design language on iOS. It looks awkward and disjointed, but it gives them their only “in” with bringing Google-y things to iOS.1 Would it hurt them to send Android Wear data to both HealthKit and Google Fit? Probably not in any way meaningful, but it would give users another reason to stick with iOS. Best keep their data as much in Google’s control as possible.

  1. Apple does pretty much the same thing with iTunes’ UI on Windows, but they don’t make the claim that they’re open with their apps’ information. ↥︎