This Week's Sponsor:

Turbulence Forecast

Know before you go. Get detailed turbulence forecasts for your exact route, now available 5 days in advance.

Posts in links

Is Realistic UI Design Realistic?→

Is Realistic UI Design Realistic?

When Apple introduced the iPad, along with it came a set of Human Interface Guidelines.

This idea is essentially doubling down on skeuomorphic realism — a derivative device containing features from an analog ancestor for purely aesthetic or emotional reasons.

But how good is that advice, generally? This is clearly a call for more than just the polished aesthetic details and refinements a designer takes pride in. This is about advancing literalist design styles and skeuomorphics on the grounds that it improves usability through a natural understanding of how an app works. Apple rightly resisted this temptation in many cases, but the Notes and Calendar apps are a different story. Apple combined analog design with modern UI patterns at the expense of affordance. My real life, analog paper doesn’t scroll. Are we now to expect its digital replication should?

A very few developers seem to understand that you don’t have to necessarily imitate real life objects to create a successful and enjoyable application. [via Beautiful Pixels]

Permalink

Why Developers Create Apps for iOS→

Why Developers Create Apps for iOS

Marco Arment:

The problem is that hardware manufacturers and tech journalists assume that the hardware just needs to exist, and developers will flock to it because it’s possible to write software for it. But that’s not why we’re making iPhone and iPad software, yet those are the basis for the theory.

We’re making iPhone software primarily for three reasons:

Dogfooding: We use iPhones ourselves.
Installed base: A ton of other people already have iPhones.
Profitability: There’s potentially a lot of money in iPhone apps.

With this in mind, think about the installed based of Macs.

Permalink

iPad Guesswork One Year Later→

iPad Guesswork One Year Later

The answer is just the same for the iPad. What is it for? Well, I use mine to browse the Internet, cook in the kitchen, play games, manage my finances, earn a living, entertain the children, look at photos and so on. In other words, it’s a computer and that’s how I use it. The novelty of its appearance, functioning and so on seems to require re-categorization or a some highly-specialized usage scenario. Of course in many ways my iPad is significancy different than my MacBook Pro, but in others it’s quite the same.

Here’s what I’m going to do this weekend: find old articles about “Apple’s tablet” speculations and see how many got it right.

Permalink

Custom Styles for Skype 5.0 Beta for Mac→

Custom Styles for Skype 5.0 Beta for Mac

A few hours back, a new Beta of Skype for Mac hit the interwebs. The twitter was going all crazy for it. This new Beta of Skype for Mac included some drastic UI changes. (read: 100% of the UI has changed)

One of the most noticeable visual changes was the amount of whitespace. Because the window looked like it was a Web View, and I saw something about Chat Styles in the settings, I decided to dig into the Skype.app package.

Also check out Panamerica Mini.

Permalink

iCloud: More Than Media→

iCloud: More Than Media

Justin Williams:

I’m hoping for an official suite of APIs and services that sync and store the application data all your iPhone and Mac apps to the cloud. Anytime you create a new blog post in MarsEdit, it automatically saves the data to the cloud. On your iPhone and beat another level of Angry Birds? It saves those changes to the cloud.
Whenever you purchase a new Mac or iPhone, you’ll just sign in with your Apple ID and start pulling the data in automatically from Apple’s cloud services. Google already offers a portion of this idea for their Android platform. Whenever you purchase a new Android phone, all your data is restored as soon as you sign in with your Google ID.

That certainly makes more sense than a Dropbox-like solution which would require users to mess with files and folders. That’s why Apple didn’t buy Dropbox.

Permalink

Ben Brooks’ MacBook Air Review→

Ben Brooks’ MacBook Air Review

The 13 though is more like a sports sedan: it will do most everything that you do in your SUV, but there will be things that it can’t do as well. Things like huge Costco or Ikea trips, off-roading, towing a boat and driving in the snow. Most people though will never use their SUV for such things, making the extra money they paid for it a waste. The few times that you may do those things you seem to always find a way to get by without the SUV.

If you only read one in-depth review today, make it this one.

Permalink