Tag Archives: design

The Skeuomorph Debate

February 16, 2013 – 6:39 am

“So, will Jony Ive remove all textures and ‘designs that look and work like real things’ from iOS? I highly doubt it. There’s simply no reason to make unilateral design decisions like that outside of frustrating designers and making things worse for users.”

(via The Next Web.)

Extremely well thought out argument from Matthew Panzarino here. I agree with it completely.

People love to take the extreme sides of every argument. X is always right. Y is always wrong. But as we all learned when we prepped for multiple choice tests in high school, so little in life is always or never true.

My guess is Jony Ive is currently looking through every app on iOS and assessing what works and what doesn’t. He’ll make changes where he feels change is necessary. No more. No less.

Besides, do we really want every app on our phones to look and behave exactly the same? One of my biggest issues with the Windows 8 flat style is that it pins designers into a corner. You lose the ability to make your app really shine on the platform once you rule out too many possibilities. Sure, it looks nice with five or six apps, especially since it’s such a change from the iOS look. But what about when you have fifty apps? Or a hundred?

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It Bothered Me Enough

October 24, 2012 – 10:16 am

I was really happy that I was able to learn enough Objective-C to make my own app, put it on the App Store, and see other people getting use out of it. The response has been great so far, and I’m planning lots of new improvements already.

But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit there was one thing, visually, about the app that was bugging me. And that was the default Apple keypad.

Not that I don’t think Apple’s keypad is a great design. It looks good and it functions perfectly. But because I had chosen to use Futura throughout the app, the default keypad’s use of Helvetica just didn’t quite blend with the rest of the app’s look. It’s the kind of thing maybe most people wouldn’t notice, but my audience here is graphic designers. So this was important, no matter how much I tried to convince myself otherwise.

I also didn’t like the color of the keypad for my app, nor the use of letters under the keys. The letters make sense for phone dialing, but they were adding visual clutter that is completely unnecessary for my purposes.

Because I was a noobie to programming, I assumed that changing the default keyboard would be a huge pain in the butt. So when releasing 1.0 I decided to live with it.

After all, you have to make compromises to ship apps, right?

Then I started playing around with making the app iPad compatible, and I quickly realized that the iPad doesn’t have a default keypad. You literally have to roll your own keypad if you don’t want to use a full keyboard.

So I figured I have to build my own keypad soon, anyway. Why not put it in the iPhone version first?

As with many other aspects of iOS app creation, coming late to the party made my life a lot easier. Switching out input views in iOS is a lot easier now than it was when iOS was much younger. That’s not to say it wasn’t still more work than it should be, however.

While dropping in my new, pretty, Futura keypad, I got to see firsthand what so many of my developer friends have told me over the years. Every time you solve a problem in your app, two or three new problems seem to crop up. I pop in new code, and something breaks somewhere else. You think you’ve got one new thing to learn how to do, but you actually end up having to learn how to do four or five other things before you’re done.

It was a huge reminder of just how little I really know, having just built one simple app. But it was also encouraging, because ultimately I was able to figure it out on my own. One more thing I’m confident I can do the next time it comes up. And several other things I understand about how classes and nibs work that I didn’t know.

A look at the before and after, I think, speaks for itself. This is a huge improvement to the app.

X2y newkeypad

 

Version 1.1 was submitted last night, and will be available as soon as Apple approves. I also added in a few extra ratios to the list of Common Aspects whlie I was at it.

Now to tackle the rest of that iPad layout.

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Why Would a Designer Want to Learn Objective-C?

October 19, 2012 – 8:18 am

I work with an amazing team at Bombing Brain Interactive. While my role there has always been visual and user experience design, along with web site development, one of my goals this year was to branch out a little into real, honest-to-goodness app coding. Not that we don’t already have an abundance of coding talent going on with Gene and Tim, but because I wanted to improve my skill set and make myself more valuable to the group in any way I could.

I believe firmly that in order to work with other people in various disciplines, it always helps to learn a bit about what your collaborators do all day. Not only does that help inform decisions you make in your own role, it also helps with empathy for your teammates. You need to appreciate everyone else’s contributions, and that’s so much easier when you can see clearly just how hard their jobs are.

Does that mean I plan on being a super-pro coder someday? Not necessarily. But I did want to bring something more to the group than I was able to a year ago.

So I embarked on a quest to learn Objective-C and to get more comfortable inside Xcode.

I didn’t come into this with no coding experience at all. I do have several years of Javascript, HTML, CSS, and a touch of PHP under my belt. But I don’t kid myself into thinking any of that makes me a programmer. That’s baby stuff, essentially. And I’ve never had any formal training in C or any other computer language. I’ve always sort of hunted and pecked my way into figuring out whatever the current project needed, much the same way I did with Photoshop and Illustrator so many years ago.

So I picked up some books, downloaded some course materials from Harvard’s excellent CS50 on iTunes U, and started reading and learning in my spare time.

Then I came across Mysterious Trousers’ TinkerLearn series. And for whatever reason, that style of teaching really worked well for me. How TinkerLearn works is you download full Xcode projects, and all the lessons are embedded in the files of a real working app. This way, you get to experiment and learn about real code in a very practical way, in context.

After a few lessons, I decided to give myself a project. I’d take an idea and turn it into a full-fledged working app that I could develop all the way to the App Store. I needed something small and easy enough to do without getting overwhelmed, but at the same time, I wanted it to be a challenge, and I wanted the app to be something I’d actually use.

So after some thinking I settled on an Aspect Ratio Calculator. Three main reasons why this was the perfect project for me to work on as my first App:

  1. It wasn’t your typical tip calculator, or other sort of “my first app” project. It was different enough to not be an also-ran, without being something that was completely useless to anyone, either.
  2. I’m a web designer, and I really need to do these sorts of calculations often. So it was a personal project. Usually the best apps are ones made by people who want to use those apps every day.
  3. The aspect calculator apps that were already on the Store weren’t lighting my world on fire. No offense to the other fine apps in this category, but most of them haven’t been updated in quite a while, don’t offer much in terms of visual design, and don’t tackle the problem the way I feel I would want it done. In other words, I needed this app, but nothing on the Store was fulfilling that need to my personal satisfaction.

And thus x2y was born. Simple. Elegant. Solves a real world problem. Whenever I wanted to add a feature that I didn’t know how to add, I would consult YouTube, Apple’s Documentation, web articles, whatever I could get my hands on. It’s amazing how much knowledge is out there, free or very cheap, that could get anyone up to speed on making apps. Developers are extremely generous with their knowledge.

At one point, I even enlisted Tim to help me out with a big problem I was having. As expected, he suffered my noobie questions with grace and got me back on track.

When I started this project, I thought maybe I’d get it done by sometime next year. But once I got past the first few big bumps, I became more driven to finish it. And then I remembered all the other stuff that goes into launching an app. The web site, the screenshots, the description, the keywords, the user guide—there was plenty to keep me busy, but the closer I got, the faster I worked.

I’ll be happy to sell ten copies of x2y; my goal here isn’t to have a big hit. After all, this is a niche app, and a very simple one at that. But I am proud to see that I was able to get all this done in a few short months and that I sweated the details as much as I did. Forcing myself to put the app out there on the Store, with my name attached to it, ensured that I would take every aspect of development seriously. This may be the first app of someone new to Objective-C, but it was built with all the design and user experience expertise that I’ve built up over several years making iOS apps with others.

I’m looking forward to my next project, which will challenge me even further.

But mostly, I’m just glad I’ll finally have a good aspect ratio calculator on my iPhone whenever I need it.

x2y is available now on the App Store for a special introductory price of just 99 cents USD. More infomation can be found on the official x2y web site.

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Introducing x2y

October 18, 2012 – 9:52 am

Today I’m launching my first iOS app, x2y. While I’ve collaborated on many apps with my partners at Bombing Brain Interactive, this is the first app developed entirely by yours truly and published under my own name.

x2y solves an old and common problem. You have an image or other media file, and you need to display it at a different size than the original. But when resizing the image, you need to be careful to keep the aspect ratio consistent, so that your media doesn’t get stretched or pulled.

So you take the original dimensions, the height or width of the desired new dimensions, and cross multiply to get the new missing dimension.

x2y helps make that calculation much simpler. Nothing more or less. Clean. Elegant. And best of all: Futura.

The app is fully compatible with both 3.5-inch and 4-inch Retina screens, works well with Voice Over for the visually impaired, and includes a full user guide within the app itself.

I’m really proud of the way x2y turned out. I had a simple goal this year of learning enough Objective-C to make myself more valuable to the Bombing Brain team, and I thought the best way to do that would be to give myself a project and see it all the way through to the App Store. And because I was putting my name on it, I wanted it to reflect every bit of the polish and care that would go into any project to which I commit myself.

I hope you enjoy x2y. You can find out more at x2yapp.com, or buy it today on the App Store. The special introductory price of 99 cents USD is for a limited time only, as a thank you to my friends and readers. If you have any feedback or want to see a feature added, there’s a contact form on the x2y web site.

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White now the Most Popular Car Color in America

August 30, 2012 – 8:51 am

BMW designer: Apple affected the popular color of cars:

Usually only found in luxury cars because of its high maintenance, white is now the most popular exterior car color in America. It recently unseated silver, which has held that title for over a decade.

(Via TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog)

Never underestimate the power of Jony Ive. The man who turned computers from beige and black to fruity colors, then when the entire world copied that, turned around and made everything white. 

Now that white is so popular, I wonder what color Apple will make cool next? 

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