Some @MLKSHK design filth
It’s no secret that I adore MLKSHK — it’s one of the things that excites me on the interwho at the moment.
Here is one example of awesome.
This is the handy New Post panel that appears when you click the er, New Post button. Naturally, you can click Upload an image to bring up a file browser window where you can select an image to upload.
However, you can also drag an image to that panel and it’ll upload! It’s a small, hidden cheeky bit of functionality but such is the design of MLKSHK, you already know it’s going to work before you do it.
Intuitive is defined as “Using or based on what one feels to be true even without conscious reasoning“. MLKSHK has fun, intuitive design in bucket loads.
Few websites/apps that I use these days have any sort of personality, which I find sad.
Troubles installing gems
I’ve had this problem with a few machines that I’ve recently formatted (fresh install of OS X Lion) so I thought I’d jot down the solution for my future sanity.
The problem occurred when trying to install the Jekyll gem. After updating my RubyGems it was spitting an error. Peruse my Terminal:
To fix, I went into Xcode, opened Preferences and clicked Downloads and installed the Command Line Tools.
I found the solution after some Googling but I’ve mislaid the source. Sorry about that.
Nike+ FuelBand
The Nike+ FuelBand is water resistant. It is safe to wear in the shower or when dancing in the rain. Since it’s not waterproof, it’s not recommended for use while swimming.
I bought one of these wondrous devices.
Set Soft Tabs in TextMate by default
For the preservation of my future sanity, set a .tm_properties file in either ~/ or your project root with the following:
softTabs = true
tabSize = 2
Found on this Stack Overflow thread.
Links for Tuesday
- Today I learned a single twttr update is 2.0 MB (via @iamdanw)
- This is a foursquare list of all the Sam Smith’s pubs. In other news, Naveen has left foursquare.
- @bon‘s responsive tag on Pinboard. Using this stuff at the moment
- Andre Torrez’s desktop twttr app wishlist. For what it’s worth, I’ve only ever used twttr’s own desktop app
- SXSWi 2012 talks ← there are many! I need to choose some.
@mikesten said: “I’d recommend picking sessions that you’d never normally go to”. I shall be following his advice.
Kickstarter idea
Google’s design decisions
Clicks on logos no longer taking you to the top page of that site and/or refreshing content? That’s just batshit crazy.
— Kevin Fox on Google’s recent changes to Gmail
Nokia Lumia notes
I’ve been given a Lumia by Nokia for testing. Here’s a bunch of loose notes I’m keeping as I use it:
- Straight out the box it’s a very nice device. The hardware is solid. Seems a bit bigger than my 4S, though.
- There are no open ports on the device, had some trouble opening the two slots/flaps on the top (one for USB and one for the SIM tray).
- Quite impressed with Windows Phone 7 — I’ve never used it before. Very playful. There’s iOS-standard smooth scrolling!
- Installed twttr and foursquare. The foursquare app is particularly slick.
- The XBOX Live app works on the Lumia. Couldn’t get it to work on iOS.
- Tried to view a PDF somebody had emailed to me but I was forwarded to the download page for the Adobe Acrobat app. No thanks!
- Does Windows Phone not have companion software? iPhone has iTunes, for example.
- I like how the screen rounds off into the case, it’s comfortable. Somewhat organic? Like a pebble?
Status
But there was something special about ‘w’ for me. In those days of shared servers I would auto-run a shell script that would parse ‘w’ and highlight my friends and see what they were up to and if they were available to talk. If they were in Pine of course you wouldn’t bug them, but if they were just idle in a shell or working on homework, they were probably up for talking or helping you find some new warez site or want to meet up for a slice of pizza.
— Torrez’s i miss w
I still think there’s something else you can do with status. I just haven’t figured it out yet.
Links, loose
- CSS3 Drop Caps
I’d like to find a reason to use this. - The Messy Art Of UX Sketching
Really enjoyed reading this, mainly because I do all these things. - TextMate 2.0 Alpha has been released
- Alpha Clock Five from Evil Mad Scientist Labs looks like a lovely little project
- Urbanears ← no idea how good the headphones are but I like the website!
Loose links sink ships
- The condescending UI
“I have a kneejerk reaction to most modern computer user interfaces (also, all microwave user interfaces)” ← Who doesn’t hate microwave user interfaces? - No Copyright Intended
“Remix culture is the new Prohibition, with massive media companies as the lone voices calling for temperance.” - The Quiet Tinkerer Who Makes Games Beautiful Finally Gets His Due
Tim Sweeney gets props - Why Spotify can never be profitable: The secret demands of record labels (via jb)
- In the end, the GOOG “politely declined” Kevin Fox’s offer (previously)
- Devastating Explosions, at the Touch of a Button
↑ does what it says on the tin!
The beginning of the end(?)
What also worries me is that these changes suggest not only a difference in opinion regarding how a Twitter client should work, but also regarding just what the point is of Twitter as a service. The Twitter service I signed up for is one where people tweet 140-character posts, you follow those people whose tweets you tend to enjoy, and that’s it. The Twitter service this new UI presents is about a whole lot more — mass-market spoonfed “trending topics” and sponsored content. It’s trying to make Twitter work for people who don’t see the appeal of what Twitter was supposed to be. It all makes sense if you think of the label under the “#” tab as reading “Dickbar” instead of “Discover”.
— Gruber’s The New Twitter (R.I.P. Tweetie)
This is worth reading. I particularly agreed with the above paragraph. Gone are the days of simplicity. It seems that there’s a push to “make money” which isn’t a bad thing at all but when it comes at the expense of user experience and/or common sense you’re doing something wrong.
Gold coins
Like a service? Make them charge you or show you ads. If they won’t do it, clone them and do it yourself. Soon you’ll be the only game in town!
DISCLAIMER: I run a paid bookmarking site. Every morning I wake up and dive into my vault of golden coins.
— Maciej Ceglowski’s Don’t Be A Free User
Remove bloat from Google search results
This morning I was emailed a gem of a PRO TIP by John Blackbourn:
So you know Google adds those F_CKING ANNOYING instant previews and +1 buttons to search results? whack these rules into your ad blocker and they’ll disappear:
- www.google.co.uk##.vspib
- www.google.co.uk##.eswd
Thanks, John!
Underwater basket weaving
I did make a bunch of money by winning the Netscape Startup Lottery, it’s true. So did most of the early engineers. But the people who made 100x as much as the engineers did? I can tell you for a fact that none of them slept under their desk. If you look at a list of financially successful people from the software industry, I’ll bet you get a very different view of what kind of sleep habits and office hours are successful than the one presented here.
Some loose links
- Steve Jobs: The parable of the stones (via)
- WolframAlpha can show you what planes are currently overhead using your IP address (via)
- Instagram Engineering Challenge: The Unshredder
- Reader redesign: Terrible decision, or worst decision? ← written by a former product manager on Reader (via)
Social graph
Now tell me one bit of original culture that’s ever come out of Facebook.
Right now the social networking sites occupy a similar position to CompuServe, Prodigy, or AOL in the mid 90′s. At that time each company was trying to figure out how to become a mass-market gateway to the Internet. Looking back now, their early attempts look ridiculous and doomed to failure, for we have seen the Web, and we have tasted of the blogroll and the lolcat and found that they were good.
— Maciej Ceglowski’s The Social Graph is Neither
I’ve never been interested in Facebook. It’s a hungry monster that you’re feeding. No thank you!
More on the Google Reader redesign
There’s been some interesting critical discussions of some design and product changes within Google Reader recently and I’ve kind of stayed out of it since I’m heads down on making big changes elsewhere. But I grabbed a few minutes, and I’d like to share a few notes I’ve written about it…
— Chris Wetherell’s Dreams, discernment, and Google Reader
Failure
I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.
— Michael Jordan (via)
Google Reader redesign
And so I put my resources where my mouth is. As the former lead designer for Google Reader, I offer my services to Google, rejoining for a three month contract in order to restore and enhance the utility of Google Reader, while keeping it in line with Google’s new visual standards requirements. I will put my current projects on hold to ensure that Google Reader keeps its place as the premier news reader, and raises the bar of what a social newsreader can be.
— Kevin Fox’s My offer to Google Reader
I really hope the GOOG take him up on this. The Google Reader redesign is terrible :(
Entrepreneurs
I hate it when people call themselves ‘entrepreneurs’ when what they’re really trying to do is launch a startup, so they can cash in and move on. They’re unwilling to do the work it takes to build a real company, which is the hardest work in business.
Resize an image in OS X using command line
sips --resampleWidth 500 your-image.jpg
Adobe eats Typekit
When I heard the news, my immediate reaction was not positive. There may have been an expletive uttered. I am happy for the crew at Typekit, several of whom are my friends, but Adobe products do not fill me with joy when I use them. No one I know is filled with joy when using Adobe products…mostly the opposite. Typekit is a great service; I hope Adobe keeps it that way.
— Jason Kottke’s Adobe acquires Typekit
Swipe gestures in Chrome broken after Lion upgrade
Last week I downloaded the newly released Lion update for OS X.
Unfortunately, the three finger swipe gestures to go forward/back through web pages in Chrome had stopped working :( Clicking the back button or hitting backspace was driving me nuts so I hit the GOOG and found a fix, courtesy of a Google employee:
Three finger swipes still work in Chrome. The issue you’re having is that default swipes in Lion are two fingers. Go into System Prefs, then into trackpad and change the swipes from 2 fingers to 3. You can also make it both 2 and 3 finger swipes to accomplish the same thing, in which case swiping will work in Chrome and you’ll see get the cool two finger swipes in Safari that have special animations.
Vision
I’d rather use a service that has a strong, single-minded vision, even if some of the decisions aren’t exactly how I’d want them, than a washed-out, milquetoast service created by committee, designed to meet market demand, that tries to make everybody happy.
— Andy Baio’s Sweet Tea
On Facebook
I think it’s an ugly, stupid service designed to teach you to systematically undervalue your privacy.
On Google+
Oh Google. I’m really sorry. I’m sure you’ll make it look better over time but this is not yet good. The very thing you purported to make better, sharing and privacy, is not made better. In fact, I think my privacy feels even more trampled on than before.
6.11.0419.0755
If you update your Email Accounts application on your BlackBerry to 6.11.0419.0755 you will find yourself with a very broken BlackBerry. Don’t do this if you value your sanity.
In the mean time, you can avoid this buggy update by doing the following:
- Go to mobile.blackberry.com on your BlackBerry
- Select your country
- Choose the Email link under the Communicate category
- Select your email provider of choice then choose Integrate Now
- You can now update your email settings! Winner!
I found this solution on the CrackBerry forums. SirPaulH, whoever you are, I owe you a beer.
BlackBerry + Gmail IMAP problem?
So last week I got an email from BlackBerry that said:
Your yournamehere@gmail.com email messages are not being delivered to your BlackBerry® device. To receive your email messages, turn on the IMAP setting for All Mail in your yournamehere@gmail.com account.
After you turn on the IMAP setting for All Mail, you must validate your account on your BlackBerry device.
- Click the Setup folder (if available), then click the Email Settings or Setup Internet Email* icon.
- Click Email Accounts.
- Validate your yournamehere@gmail.com email account.
The other email accounts on your BlackBerry device are not affected.
BlackBerry® Internet Service
* Note that some BlackBerry devices and some themes may have different icons or menus than those mentioned.
– Automatically generated email: Do Not Reply to this email –
In trying to find a solution, the OS forced me to update the Email Accounts application to version 6.11.0419.0755. You don’t want to do this as it’ll break your BlackBerry. Here’s how to update your email accounts whilst avoiding this buggy update.
Anyway, here is how to get your Gmail on your BlackBerry working again:
- Open your Gmail Mail settings and go to Labels
- Make sure the Show in IMAP checkboxes are ticked for both All Mail and Drafts
- This got my Gmail working again!
Linky link links
- The Most Important Page on Flickr (via jk)
- Twitter’s Sh_t Sandwich (+ more from Marco)
- Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse (via bb)
- Solarized for pretty terminal/gui apps (via @mikesten)
- The Information Sage aka. Edward Tufte
Misc links
- Cheap Magic – “We do what we do because we want to be magicians.”
- Fix Tumblr – written last month but true today. I find Tumblr to be increasingly flaky, which is a shame, because it’s very well designed + I use it on a daily basis.
- text-align: centaur; – does what it says on the tin
iPhone Tracker
This open-source application maps the information that your iPhone is recording about your movements. It doesn’t record anything itself, it only displays files that are already hidden on your computer.
The app is a bit buggy but does the job. I’m somewhat amazed and creeped out by this.
More links:
Embrace and Enjoy the turbulance
When things become chaotic, unpredictable, and overwhelming, the best thing you can do is embrace and enjoy the turbulent ride. The more you worry, the worse the situation gets. What you focus on increases. Once you flip off the worry switch, things become easier to deal with and even enjoyable.
You can’t always control the winds and the turbulence – the only choice you have is to freak out or enjoy it.
Various links
- Instac.at ← does what it says on the tin
- @mikesten‘s Tally Ho – fascinated by how this is changing my behaviour
- Tweetbot‘s UI shows a terrific attention to detail and the sound effects are delightful
- Prompt is a recently released terminal client app from Panic
- Glitch will soon be launching their private beta
Quote
The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.
— Banksy
Does the Open Graph Protocol validate with HTML5?
TL;DR: Not yet.
As far as I can gather, the closest you can get is:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html version="HTML+RDFa 1.0">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta property="og:title" content="Test">
<title>Test</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>Test</p>
</body>
</html>
NB. The HTML+RDFa spec is still a working draft, and the W3C HTML5 validator is still experimental. Therefore this will not pass the W3C validator. But this is valid, according to the current spec.
— Source
Useful links:
- http://forum.developers.facebook.net/viewtopic.php?id=58384 — “So basically there isn’t a way to validate the html with open graph protocol. That sucks.”
- http://groups.google.com/group/open-graph-protocol/browse_thread/thread/6fb82768c9d6f575?pli=1 — “The HTML5 validator did have experimental support for RDFa in HTML5, but this seems to have disappeared now (or at least been hidden from the interface?)”
- http://delrosario.mobi/open-graph-protocol — “HTML5 currently does not validate.”
Errant links
- Mobile UI Patterns
- Sippey points to Khoi Vinh’s post on An Archive for Interaction Design ← very relevant — I need to find time to write about this.
- SimpleSong is a super lightweight, minimal design music player for OS X
- The Untold Story of How My Dad Helped Invent the First Mac by Aza Raskin
Linksss
- BBC iPlayer apps, coming soon to Android and iPad – Also? TIL the BBC has an “Internet Blog”
- “Project Noah is a tool to explore and document wildlife and a platform to harness the power of citizen scientists everywhere” – I like this idea
- Instapaper now has a full API
- Advanced sign-in security for your Google account
Silly record companies
This is fucked up. I want to pay for music. I value the content. But selling it to some people in some countries and not selling it to others is messed up. And selling it in CD only format is messed up. And posting the entire record on the web for streaming without making the content available for purchase is messed up.
— Anatomy Of A Pirate by Fred Wilson
I can’t understand why record companies release music in one country before another. I want to buy music. Having to wait weeks for a later UK release is ridiculous.
Sandy beach
Sippey points to a fascinating post written by Matt Webb about augmented reality apps and how “an interface can be a sandy beach, not a cliff”.
Also? The game Webb links to, UFO on Tape, is well worth a play.
Junior
Being able to identify and cultivate those people with potential and skills that may be a bit raw but who have only lacked opportunity is how you find yourself surrounded by a great team.
Gall’s law
Darren pointed to Gall’s law today:
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.
Beautiful URLs
Jim Ray links to a good post by Kyle Neath about URL design (emphasis mine):
Any regular semi-technical user of your site should be able to navigate 90% of your app based off memory of the URL structure. In order to achieve this, your URLs will need to be pragmatic. Almost like they were a math equation — many simple rules combined in a strategic fashion to get to the page they want.
A thousand times yes.
I’m reminded of Simon Willison’s notes on a talk Tom Coates gave in 2006 which are still massively valid (emphasis mine):
Good URLs should:
- be permanent references to resources
- have a 1-to-1 correlation with concepts
- use directories to represent hierarchy (e.g. subordinate parts)
- NOT reflect the underlying technology – especially if it might change
- reflect the structure of the data
- be predictable/guessable/hackable
- be as human readable as possible
[...]
Good URLs are beautiful and a mark of design quality
Bonus: a page’s <title> should be a reply to it’s URL :)
EDIT: Here is a link to the PDF of Coates’ slides from Future of Web Apps ’06: Native to a Web of Data.
Schooloscope
Lovely website of the day is Schooloscope which is a website that:
Take[s] official Government-backed information about state schools in England and try to tease out something interesting from the dry tables of statistics.
The design is splendid and the graphics are are glorious, here is my primary school. Crafted by BERG.
Obvious design
I was floating around the internets when I found Issue Tracking – The Good & The Awful by Cal Henderson, written back in March.
What caught my interest (apart from the fact that I helped build an issue tracker many moons ago) was where Henderson talked about Github‘s system of creating new issues (emphasis mine):
While it doesn’t explicitly tell me that I need to log in to file a bug, it seems pretty obvious. So I go ahead and do that and am presented with the pinnacle of bug reporting forms:
A title and description. And a quick search for previous issues. That’s it. Just report the bug. I don’t need to understand how their development team is organized, how they handle priorities, or what they call individual parts of the software.
When building things on the ‘tubes I find super simplicity (or undesign) wins every time because it results in interfaces that are obvious. No complexity or cruft.
I don’t think there’s anything else I need to say :)
More links lost in the holiday
Some more clearing up from the holidays:
- Miners Need Cool Shoes is a website which lets you create/upload/browse custom avatar designs for Minecraft. I love No Face! (via iamcal)
- Dentsu London launched NewPaper at Borough Market on December 18 — I wasn’t there but I like the idea: “We’ve screen-printed thousands of sheets of Metro newspaper with colourful graphic designs, to give them an exciting second life as wrapping paper for Borough Market stallholders at this year’s Christmas market.”
- The London Cycle Hire Explorer is a simple way of exploring the data surrounding the London Cycle Hire scheme.
MobileMe hacked
On November 27, 2010 my MobileMe account was hacked. I found this somewhat surprising since my password was strong (nonsensical, upper/lowercase, numbers + characters).
Today I discovered that my MobileMe account had been hacked again.
If you find yourself in my situation, your best bet is going through Apple’s Express Lane where I was able to chat with a helpful support person who, after confirming my identity, sent me a link to a page where I could reset my password.
Now this is all very well, however, I’m paying £59 a year for an unreliable service.
What’s particularly vexing is that the email address in question isn’t public and only friends/family know of it so I have no idea how/why my account is being compromised. My MobileMe renewal date is approaching so I guess I’ll have to decide whether it’s worth paying for if I can’t be guaranteed a secure account.
EDIT: I ended up renewing my MobileMe subscription.
Holiday catch up
Over the holidays I’ve starred a bunch of stuff in Reader that I wanted to post but haven’t had time/sufficient internet connection. So in no particular order:
- Kevin Smith wrote a brilliant piece about “how to do what you love and make money doing it” (via jk)
- Jason Scott (of Archive Team fame) dropped a bomb on Yahoo! with YAHOO!LOCAUST. Ouch. (via waxy)
- Nicolas Gallagher’s Pure CSS GUI icons look pretty good, although experimental (via onfocus)
- This article in the New Yorker about Shigeru Miyamoto is worth Instapapering.
Pinboard
Many moons ago I decided to look for an alternative to del.icio.us after Yahoo! launched it’s redesign of the service. It was atrocious: ugly, bloated and the complete opposite of why I began using the bookmarking service in the first place. I knew it was doomed in August 2008.
I began using Pinboard on July 4 2009 and it was exactly what I wanted del.icio.us to be (or remain).
Undesign is what I’m about and Pinboard has it in bucket loads. You should sign up — it’s worth every penny.
Buchheit on Chrome OS
Put another way, the ChromeOS laptops are awkwardly positioned between the established Mac/Windows laptop market, which isn’t going away anytime soon, and the rapidly growing Tablet market, and it has approximately zero users. That’s not a great place for a new platform to get traction and establish itself. But if it does, I will be happy for it. And even if it doesn’t, it may still be a worthwhile experiment.
Penny protectors
These (mostly failing) corporations are so busy falling all over themselves trying to protect pennies that they are going to simultaneously destroy what could be one of the greatest things that ever happened to music: the internet.
Eskay from Nah Right goes off on the craziness of trying to post Puff Daddy’s new video to the World Wide Web, having been sent it from Puff’s own marketing agency no less.
Odds and ends
- Email delegation: Granting access to your Gmail account (via hn)
- Google Cr-48 for Coding · John Resig on using the new Google Cr-48 laptop running Chrome OS for development.
- Morph Vs. Banksy by Aardman Animations
OS X 2D dock
Every now and then I need this so thought I’d jot it here. The 3D dock on OS X hurts my eyes. Whack this into the terminal to turn it 2D:
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock
Odds and ends
- Kottke points to a new feed reader for iPad: The Feed
- “Struggling screenwriter who sells flowers to make ends meet” has been sued by Twentieth Century Fox for $12 million for creating an online library of movie scripts to help fellow screenwriters.
- William Gibson loves his twttr (via dpstyles)
Formalize CSS
I want some measure of control over form elements, without changing them so drastically as to appear foreign in a user’s operating system. Thus, my quest to find a happy medium, where browsers would generally agree and let me keep my sanity. The result is what I’m simply referring to as Formalize CSS.
(via Zeldman)
This looks useful. It’s always been a pain maintaining a continuous look between browsers when it comes to forms. I look forward to using Formalize CSS in future projects. Also? Less headaches :)
I think this is an interesting idea
Using the mobile web as a constraint to think about web design is growing in popularity. I see it in my own efforts and the efforts of our portfolio companies. When users spend more time accessing your service over a mobile device, they are going to get used to that UI/UX. When you ask them to navigate a substantially busier and more complex UI/UX when they log onto the web, you are likely to keep them on the mobile app and off the web app.
I’m starting to think a unifying vision for all apps should start with the mobile app, not the web app. And so it may also be mobile first web second in designing web apps these days.
From Mobile First Web Second (continued) by Fred Wilson
Verified by Visa and Mastercard SecureCode are broken and need to be fixed
Verified by Visa is a pet hate of mine, notably the rules that your password has to satisfy.
More waving
What Works: The Web Way vs. The Wave Way
And people aren’t looking for a replacement for email, or instant messaging, or blogs, or wikis. Those tools all work great for their intended purposes, and whatever technology augments them will likely offer a different combination of persistence and immediacy than those systems. Right now, Wave evokes all of them without being its own distinctive thing. Which means it’s most useful in providing reference implementations of particular new features.
(via Sippey)
Google Wave
[..] 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.
I never understood why Google thought people would prefer Wave over email.