April 21, 2014
Microsoft’s Azure Web Sites service ∞
Justin Williams recently moved his Web site to Azure. Microsoft has been getting a lot of play recently with Azure hosting apps and Web sites.
Unread RSS reader ∞
This is such a great app.
Apple, Google vie for game developers ∞
Both the companies are trying to lure game developers by offering premium placement to these games on their app stores’ home pages and features lists
Considering the reports of how few people spend money on Android apps, I’d be surprised if Apple didn’t win this battle.
Apple adds A&E, History Channel, and Lifetime to Apple TV ∞
Apple today has added three new channels to the Apple TV lineup: A&E, The History Channel, and Lifetime. Each channel does require a cable subscription to unlock full content. At the time of launch, each channel only supports DirecTV, Verizon FiOS, and Cablevision Optimum, but the network says it will add support for more providers soon.
I always get excited about the new channels, until I see that you need a cable subscription.
Shakespeare’s annotated dictionary ∞
If it’s real, it’s the literary find of the century. New York antiquarian booksellers Daniel Wechsler and George Koppelman believe they have found William Shakespeare’s annotated dictionary.
An incredible find.
An inside look at Apple’s environmentally-friendly data centers ∞
Steven Levy gets a rare inside look at Apple’s data center in Nevada.
Create Typographic Images with Typo-Painter – only $5 [Sponsor] ∞
Typo-Painter for Adobe Photoshop will quickly become your absolute favorite plugin in your artistic toolbox! This plugin lets you create a typographic painting from any image, using any text you’d like! What’s more, it can also save your file as a vector EPS for easy editing and resizing! Now, read our lips… for a limited time only, thanks to this Mighty Deal, you can get this fantastic app for a mere $5!
Samsung’s portrayal in the media ∞
Yesterday, USA Today ran the linked article discussing Samsung slugging it out with Apple for customers. To me, it read almost like a love letter to Samsung, full of appreciation for a scrappy underdog. For example:
In this escalating slugfest, Samsung has become tech’s Joe Frazier to Apple’s Muhammad Ali, less flashy but tenacious in battering its opponent with a flurry of new products. Apple’s product arsenal remains select — by design.
I find this sort of assessment hard to digest. Did Samsung copy Apple’s design efforts? A federal jury certainly ruled that to be the case. And based on what I’ve read, this seems to be a fair finding.
So why the love for Samsung? Where’s the indignation? I just don’t get it. Samsung as Joe Frazier? Really? Yeesh.
Are you tone deaf? ∞
This test will tell you if you are tone deaf. I’ve always wondered if tonality can be taught or if it’s purely an innate talent.
Why the music industry is trying—and failing—to crush Pandora ∞
There is a lot to digest here. How Pandora works, what are the motivations of the various players, are songwriters being paid fairly?
At the center of this conflict is the consent decree:
Under a “consent decree” issued by the Justice Department in 1941, ASCAP and the other main publishing royalty organization, BMI, which together control about 90% of all commercially available recorded music, are obliged to grant blanket licenses to anyone (mainly radio stations) requesting them. When a fee can’t be agreed, a rate-setting court decides the percentage amount of royalties these license holders pay in exchange.
This arrangement makes it logistically possible for the radio business to exist—a station effectively only needs to deal with two companies, rather than millions of artists, composers, and publishers, to get access to a vast array of music. And songwriters don’t have to spend time worrying about negotiating or policing the licenses for their work.
Unlike old-fashioned radio companies, internet-based services like Pandora are also required to pay separate performance royalties, which go to record companies, and then performing artists. In fact, this is Pandora’s single biggest cost. It paid out 49% of its revenue last year in performance royalties, compared to 4% in publishing royalties, which go to publishing companies, and eventually songwriters.
Radio has been around for a long time. Pandora is a relative newcomer:
Pandora started its internet radio service in 2005. A five-year, experimental accord agreed with ASCAP that year was one of the factors that allowed it to do so. By 2011, when the company went public, it had amassed 80 million registered users, and was valued at about $2.5 billion.
Since then Pandora’s rise has been meteoric. At last count, the company had more than 200 million registered users (75 million of them were active, or logged in, last month) and accounted for 9% of all radio listening in the US.
The conflict touches on all aspects of the music business. For this all to work, every part of the massive machine needs to get paid including, most importantly, the songwriters who create the music in the first place. A terrific read.
April 20, 2014
British Pathé releases 85,000 films on YouTube, including vintage Beatles and Stones ∞
I’m like a kid in a candy store here. Some fantastic vintage short subjects, including a boat load of old Beatles and Rolling Stones shorts. The films span the years from 1896 to 1976. Amazing.
Here’s a link to the Pathé YouTube channel. Happy browsing.
NY Times compares Samsung S5 to iPhone 5s ∞
While there are probably some people who go out to shop for the best Android phone, I suspect that most people want to know which phone is best of all, whatever operating system it runs. In other words, how does the Galaxy S5 compare to the iPhone 5S, Apple’s six-month-old flagship device and the champion to beat?
The answer: Not very well. I’ve been using the new Samsung for about three weeks, and while I do think it is the best Android phone you can buy, it sure isn’t the best phone on the market. By just about every major measure you’ll care about, from speed to design to ease of use to the quality of its apps, Samsung’s phone ranks behind the iPhone, sometimes far behind. If you’re looking for the best phone on the market right now, I’d recommend going with the iPhone 5S.
No surprise there.
Indeed, for many people, there will only be a single obvious reason to buy the Galaxy S5 over the iPhone 5S: The Samsung phone has a much bigger screen. Size isn’t an objective advantage but rather a matter of preference — some people like big phones and some people like small ones. For the next few months, for big-phone lovers, Samsung’s massive size will make it the clear winner.
There’s clearly a presumption there that Apple will release a larger phone. Hard to say how I’d react to a larger iPhone screen. I really love my iPhone 5s, don’t find myself pining for more screen real estate. But if Apple made the choice to create a larger phone, I trust that enough thought would have been put into the design to make it a superior experience.
April 19, 2014
Backblaze: Backup your data online for $5 a month ∞
Many thanks to Backblaze for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week. Back up all your data with Backblaze online backup. It’s unlimited, unthrottled, uncomplicated, and unexpensive. At just $5/month for all your data it’s a no-brainer.
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The design flaw that almost wiped out an NYC skyscraper ∞
Slate:
When it was built in 1977, Citicorp Center was, at 59 stories, the seventh-tallest building in the world. You can pick it out of the New York City skyline by its 45 degree-angled top.But it’s the base of the building that really makes the tower so unique. The bottom nine of its 59 stories are stilts.
This thing does not look sturdy. But it has to be sturdy. Otherwise they wouldn’t have built it this way.
Right?
I’ve been reading about this story for years and it’s a fascinating one of design, ethics and responsibility.
Friction free parking ∞
Über succeeded by reducing the friction from the process of getting a taxi. You pick up your phone, tap a few times, your car is on its way. If you like, you can text or call your driver directly and watch the driver’s progress on a map built into the Über app. When you are done, leave your wallet in your pocket. The billing is done automatically with an electronic receipt arriving in email to complete the process.
There have been a number of efforts at bringing that same friction reduction to the process of public parking. The main problem is a lack of uniformity. Every parking lot is different, making a one size fits all solution difficult to imagine. The ultimate solution would tell you about an available parking space near you and would hold that space for your arrival. Finally, payment would be made without you having to pull your wallet or change purse out of your pocket.
The linked article describes one such system for parking garages.
> In Pell’s world, parking could work like this. You’ve downloaded an app (LoCoMobi’s is QuickPay) and entered your credit card and license plate. When you drive up to a garage, which might could someday be fixed via Chicago Garage Door, a nearby camera scans your license plate and recognizes you. That information is also sent to the garage, so it knows exactly how many people are parked in the garage. > > On your way out of the garage, another camera scans your license plate. Your credit card is automatically charged and a digital receipt is sent your way. Your wallet never leaves your pocket or purse. The system would be better for customers, and more profitable for garages.
This is the most friction free general purpose parking system that I’ve yet encountered. Ideally, I’m still holding out hope for more, for a utopian system that knows where I’m heading, then finds me a spot and guides me to it, reducing my parking stress to zero.
Space X rocket taking off and landing in same spot
By far, the largest cost in a rocket launch is the cost of the rocket itself. By making the first stage of the rocket reusable, Space X can drop the price of a rocket launch from the traditional $100-$250 million all the way down to $55 million. That number will likely drop even further as reusability improves over time.
Ultimately, reusability will bring the cost low enough to make the Mars Colonial Transporter (another Space X project) a reality.
The video below was shot with a hexacopter. One of the keys to reusability is having the booster separation occur early enough in the launch so the rocket is still moving relatively slowly. Amazing to watch.
April 18, 2014
The Loop Magazine Issue 25 ∞
In this issue:
What’s better, an iPad or a MacBook for university; being a freelance writer; a great story about Axl Rose running off stage; nurturing curiosity through mentoring; and iTunes and Indie bands.
Gillette’s new razor is everything that’s wrong with American innovation ∞
New York magazine:
The Wall Street Journal obtained the marketing materials for Gillette’s new razor, the ProGlide FlexBall. The ProGlide FlexBall can cut each whisker 23 microns shorter — about a quarter of the width of a strand of human hair.I won’t mince words: ProGlide FlexBall is a bad idea. A really bad idea. In fact, the razor represents everything terrible about America’s innovation economy.
It’s amazing how many gimmicks razor manufacturers have come up with to try and get us to buy sharp bits of metal to scrape along our faces.
Epic pen spinning
You know that pen spinning thing you do? You can stop now. These kids do it better than you could ever imagine doing it.
Design Flex
This article first appeared in The Loop Magazine Issue 20.
“Design is not just what it looks and feels like. Design is how it works.”—Steve Jobs
Design never exists in a vacuum. A designer is always creating something with a defined purpose. The essence of the designer’s job is a complex series of decisions that the end user has hired them to make.
Nearly 14 years ago, we first saw the public beta of Mac OS X. As intended, most people’s reaction was an uncontrollable desire to lick the user interface. The buttons looked like candy. It was beautiful. For the first time, designers had really been let loose on the UI. Back then, the vast majority of us were running CRT displays. Things really look different behind a thick piece of glass and at 72 dpi compared to the LCD panels of today. Computers were much slower. I’d often sit down with a magazine when browsing the Web because of how long it took to load pages. Using Photoshop, you would routinely see a progress bar for something as simple as applying a filter or resizing an image. File sizes greater than 100MB were virtually unheard of. So there was a good reason to make the interface as visually appealing and “lickable” as possible—you were going to spend a lot of time looking at it while waiting to see your content.
It was in this decade of user interface decadence that interactive designers really started flexing their muscles. The Internet became a playground for extreme drop shadows, brushed metal, and three dimensional navigation schemas worthy of Hollywood opening titles. No one wanted something straightforward; everyone wanted something that had never been done before. Design flex really gestated during this period. An attitude of “we should because we can” proliferated, as projects pushed the boundaries of designers’ imaginations and often users’ patience.
Over the years people would grow tired of how lick-able the interface was and little by little things became refined. Today in Mavericks there’s only a few shiny candy coated UI elements left. Good luck trying to find any brushed metal.
As the years went by, Apple stripped out the candy buttons and brushed metal, as the world moved to laptops, LCD displays, and higher resolution displays. Eventually, iOS arrived and inherited many of the desktop stylizations, which was only natural. I was ecstatic when I saw that my first-generation iPhone had the same volume graphics as my Mac. It was what we had always dreamed of, a phone-sized extension of our computer. But then a shift started, first on the Internet, then on the App Store. Flatness.
Think about the first time that you saw it done well-it was refreshing. After all the years of looking at over-embellished pixels, it was nice to just pay attention to color, form, image, and text. It started to make the trompe l’ oeil used everywhere else look false. Your eye would no longer accept that a gradient and a drop shadow equated to three dimensional space. It was always a very delicate balancing act, and now it was over.
“Before, the shadowing effect we used was a great way to distract from the limitations of the display.”—Craig Federighi
Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, has an amazing insight into the end of skeuomorphism in iOS 7. His comment above on the shadowing effect makes perfect sense from a product and systemic perspective. The screen was the weakest link, and with ample graphics and computational power, it only made sense to use the abundance of one resource to make up for the shortcomings of another. In regard to iOS 7, Federighi points out, “This is the first post-Retina UI with amazing graphics processing thanks to tremendous GPU power growth, so we had a different set of tools to bring to bear on the problem.” So where did the iOS team flex its skills if not on pixel embellishment?
Studying the new Human Interface Guidelines provides a good level of insight behind the philosophy of the design. Here’s a team of designers that aren’t just making a project or a product—they’re making tools and an ecosystem that thousands of designers will use to reach millions of people. The cornerstone of the underlying philosophy is “defer to the content.” This means give the user’s content as much screen real estate and visual weight as possible. If your app doesn’t truly need something, don’t add it in. Let users touch and interact with their content first, then provide a UI for additional functionality.
“Do Less. No, do less. No, less… well you have to do more then that.”—Paul Rudd
That’s the mantra from a scene in Forgetting Sara Marshall where Paul Rudd plays a surf instructor. While this is fairly poor advice for learning to surf, it can be applied to finding the most simple implementation of a design. For instance, when designing an icon, continue to remove elements from your design until it’s no longer readable, then iterate and carefully choose what to add in. You’ll discover that when you have found an extremely simple solution to a design problem, it will communicate more clearly and age better. Now that designers aren’t expected to spend 40 hours perfecting their drop shadows, this should enable us to spend more time considering color, shape, and what it communicates.
Another area that’s critical to flex your design sense involves interactions. We’ve come a long way from the days of the Internet where it was acceptable to tap or click something and simply go to a new page. iOS is rich with beautiful animations and segues. These inform the user to what’s happening. Add a bookmark in Safari, and you see a small icon bounce into the bookmarks button—you immediately understand “where it went.” There’s no greater feeling than when you “directly manipulate” a UI element on screen. It’s taken for granted but simply scrolling your content in iOS is light years beyond what most people have been accustomed to since the invention of a mouse. Control Center, paginated containers, and pinch-to-zoom are other incredibly delightful gestural experiences. Designing an interaction that requires more than a button tap is not something that you can just ask your developer for. It requires teamwork, iteration, and lots of fine tuning. You’ll be better off with a simple button tap if you don’t have the time to properly pull off an advanced gesture.
Focus on solving 80 percent of users’ problems. Which 80 percent is a question you’ll have to answer based on your users. Do you need features for the top 1 percent? That’s only 100 in 10,000 users. Focus on creating the greatest amount of functionality for the most users. The default answer to adding something should always be “no.” Scope increases exponentially. Every interaction you add has dramatic effects and dependencies. How will you have time to perfect animations and fine tune the interface if you’re busy addressing something that you could have just said no to?
“If it bleeds, we can kill it”—Arnold Schwarzenegger
Arnie said that about the Predator but when it comes to human interfaces, it’s movement that lets you know something is “alive.” I was editing a Numbers document on my iPhone and the UI froze. I was struck by how simple the onscreen graphics were at that moment. A second later the app came back to life, and it no longer appeared that way. I was able to drag cells, things animated fluidly, keys reacted instantaneously. I’m a firm believer in always testing designs on a device using something like xScope or by emailing designs to yourself. This lets you know how your layout will feel. While this is critical, it doesn’t reveal the whole experience-it’s still two dimensional.
“Marty, you’re not thinking fourth dimensionally.”—Christopher Lloyd, Back to the Future Part III
If the fourth dimension in media is time, then is the fifth interactivity? Spend too much time just looking at your interface designs, and you may be surprised how they feel when you finally use them. Find a prototyping tool, learn the basics of Xcode storyboards, make an animation. Do something to get a feeling of how your users’ experience will feel. This is also a great time to go find a user and show them what you’ve been working on. Depending on the prototype, ask them to do a few specific tasks. You may be surprised that something you thought was really obvious turns out to be difficult. This is a great time to weigh discoverability against intuition. Is it worth making your users spend a moment learning to make a often-repeated task much more elegant in the future?
That brings us to the last critical concept: know your materials. In the atomic world, makers and craftsmen have been working with the same materials for centuries. Wood and metal working techniques have been passed down since the dawn of civilization. But with each generation comes an evolution to what’s possible. We can create things today that were unfathomable just 50 years ago, even though the materials are effectively unchanged. Chefs still come up with new ways to cook an egg. Think abut it—this is iteration on a generational scale.
A designer that understands what is going on beyond the pixels will be much more effective. Take time to watch the Worldwide Developers Conference videos, read the iOS 7 Design resources—you will learn a lot. If you work with your materials, rather then trying to force them to bend to your will, your process will be smoother and the work will be more successful.
In the end, while the only visible result of your work will be pixels, do not flex your design muscles on fancy UI that takes away from the user’s content or purposeless pixel embellishment. Rather, spend time iterating to create clear meaning in your work, delighting your users with meaningful interactions and exploring your materials. If an interaction is as delightful the thousandth time as the first then you know you’ve got something really great.
Do not mistake the pixels as the sum of your work. Remember, the magic is not in the magicians hat, but in the audience’s mind.
Alex Saretzky is a Human Interface designer in New York focused on mobile design. He recently handmade an iOS app called Timer Professional. His mother calls him “one of those Apple people” and has never owned a PC. One time he prank called Steve Wozniack.
Lost your iPhone or iPad? Here’s what to do next ∞
Presumably, you’ve already enabled Find My iPhone. If not, do that now.
Follow the link to learn about Lost Mode and how to turn it on for your iOS device. Even if your device isn’t lost, it’s worth a read, just to have a sense of how this works. Lost Mode has been around since iOS 6, but good to have a reminder.
Lyric acoustic guitar microphone ∞
This looks really interesting.
Facebook’s unfriending problem ∞
As Facebook ages, it faces an interesting generational problem. As people age, their friendships change, evolve. When they are in school, they might have one huge cluster of friends. Their friend list grows indiscriminately and is rarely trimmed. As they mature and move on in life, that large group of friends is curated, resolving into a smaller list of closer friendships. Facebook excels at building a friend list, but does not do such a great job at supporting the curation process.
Personally, I am rarely interested in unfriending anyone. I mostly want to fine tune who I follow closely, who I share with.
Interesting read. And, I think, an opportunity for a social network that recognizes the unfriending problem and that offers a more sophisticated friend curation solution.
Beautifully crafted off-center axe splits firewood like it was balsa
This is just mesmerizing. I love great design.
Please, don’t be a dick ∞
This is “a handbook for clients and designers” on how to deal with each other.
A real world iAd experiment, with surprising results ∞
Last year, the minimum spend for iAd dropped from $1 million to $50, bringing iAd into the budgetary reach of indie developers.
Ever wonder how all this works? Read the linked post, a case study complete with numbers. I found this very interesting.
April 17, 2014
Flickr 3.0 for iPhone ∞
Every day at Flickr we share our passion for inspiring photography by building world-class tools and beautiful photo displays you can access anywhere. Ten years ago we defined online photo sharing as the first major online community to store, organize, tag, and share digital photos. We could not be more excited to continue shaping digital photography with new Flickr app for iPhone coming today to the App Store and for Android in the Google Play store now.
It still shows the old version for me on the App Store.
Update: the app is there now.
Dropbox acquires Loom ∞
This makes some of Dropbox’s recent moves make more sense.
AltConf ∞
AltConf is a free, community driven and supported event, held in downtown San Francisco alongside Apple’s WWDC, 2nd – 6th June 2014. Hosted at a fantastic venue right across the street from Moscone West and featuring a host of amazing speakers from across the industry, AltConf 2014 is shaping up to be a fantastic event.
Love this event.