If there’s any single point to take away from Henri Bergius’ essay, it is this:
The web is its own platform, and as such it is foolish to try and mimic traditional desktop applications. It will never feel quite right whatever you do.
It is a lot better to accept this and fully embrace the unique advantages of the web platform.
I also really enjoyed his remarks regarding the workflow between developers and designers. In short, design for mobile first.
Director Nicolas Winding Refn, interviewed by The Dissolve:
Television has gotten much more aggressive, and much more mind-expanding and progressive than cinema, which is still the crown jewel, and will always be the crown jewel. We need to remember that cinema is not just about, “How much money did you make on Friday to Monday?” but also, “What is your actual interest?” Filmmaking is an art form, and the art can inspire. But if everyone’s afraid of standing out and risking polarization, which essentially means it’s a singular vision, then the world will become less interesting.
It’s a well spoken point. Among the film critics I follow on Twitter, TV discussion comes up again and again; we’re truly in a remarkable time period. I just haven’t seen film take the same risks over the last year or so, at least compared to years prior.
Alas, Refn’s “singular vision” reached a point of near parody in Only God Forgives. I’m generally a big fan of Refn’s work, and Only God Forgives is a visually striking, haunting film with a great Cliff Martinez score. But by the end the style excess and lack of dialogue felt suffocating.
Macaw looks very impressive. As the narrator mentions in this twenty minute video demo, you can get into dangerous territory when a web design tool tries to also be a full WYSIWYG code generator at the same time (maybe I’m just picky, but as cool as Sketch is as a program, it’s HTML/CSS export options are not as great as I’d like.) Macaw seems to take a really balanced approach: fundamentally a design tool, but with most of its settings and tools rooted in HTML/CSS fundamentals.
Perhaps most importantly, while the app is native, it apparently renders all of its content in actual HTML. No more gradients, font styles and other “Photoshop only” actions that look very different once they actually get rendered in browser code.
I’m keeping my eye closely on this one.
Sam Gibbs writing for Gizmodo UK (sourcing data from a lengthy Eurogamer article):
It turns out that despite having 50 per cent more power in the GPU department, the in-game graphical performance of the surrogate PS4 only managed around 25 per cent faster frame rates, like-for-like in the gaming benchmarks. The interesting thing here is that the homebrew Xbox One test rig kept up with the PS4-like kit if the resolution was turned down from 1080p a smidgen, which makes me think that on the whole the two are going to be very evenly matched.
Pretty much all tests, signs and evaluations we’ve heard is that at least out of the gate you won’t notice much difference between the two systems in terms of raw graphical performance. But years down the line as graphical needs get pushed further upward I’m curious if the extra PS4 power will make a noticeable difference, at least on first party games.
Kathy Sierra:
If your UX asks the user to make choices, for example, even if those choices are both clear and useful, the act of deciding is a cognitive drain. And not just while they’re deciding… even after we choose, an unconscious cognitive background thread is slowly consuming/leaking resources, “Was that the right choice?”
If your app is confusing and your tech support / FAQ isn’t helpful, you’re drawing down my scarce, precious, cognitive resources. If your app behaves counter-intuitively – even just once – I’ll leak cog resources every time I use it, forever, wondering, “wait, did that do what I expected?”.
Every choice is a cost. It’s an utterly simple principle, but it makes me step back and reconsider a lot of design choices made, both professionally and in side projects.
There’s a nice interview over at iMore with Instagram’s former head mobile designer. Given his track record Tim is clearly a talented guy. It was interesting hearing his brief takes on porting Instagram’s design from iOS to Android along with a bit on his overall design workflow. I do wish there was more on his motivations for now jumping over to Dropbox, but I bet we’ll hear more on that at a later date.
Designer Khoi Vinh:
I’m really enjoying Sketch’s more streamlined feature set, and how it is clearly purpose-built for designing user interfaces. Simpler tools are very often better tools.
As noted previously here, Sketch’s focused toolkit has really grown on me. Awesome to see a great designer like Khoi is jumping on the Sketch train as well.
I thought I had the basics of aspect ratio down cold, but this video by filmmakeriq.com taught me some new material (e.g. why widescreen TVs settled on 16:9 as the HD standard). It’s also very well edited with solid narration and starts simple enough that newbies won’t have trouble following along.
I have not gotten the chance to use Phantom CSS out yet, but it’s promise and buzz among fellow web developers is promising when it comes to visual regression testing. To put it in the words of its creator, developer James Cryer:
PhantomCSS takes screenshots captured by PhantomJS and compares them to baseline images using Resemble.js to test for rgb pixel differences with HTML5 canvas. PhantomCSS then generates image diffs to help you find the cause so you don’t need to manually compare the new and old images.
Think about it: an open source delivery system to generate images for differences in a web site. That’s extremely powerful stuff as it can catch errors eyeballing code often misses, especially on a large web site base where visual spot checks on every page are out of question.
Andrea Phillips:
Now, I’m not saying you should never write unless you see the Benjamins. I’ve written for free before; I’ll do it again. Sometimes, yeah, the exposure is worth it. But even then, it would be foolish to use Medium as a primary platform for your work. If Medium goes away — like Geocities, Bloggers.com, Posterous and countless other startups lo these twenty years gone by — your digital footprint will be gone, too. Poof.
I don’t know about you, but the idea of every link pointing to my work for the last few years suddenly breaking… well, it makes me feel a little queasy. Third-party platforms come and go, but a site and domain you own are forever. Protecting yourself and your work from bitrot is important.
I think Medium is a gorgeous looking platform, but there’s something to be said for protecting your own content. Let’s not get paranoid; I write my thoughts publicly in a lot of places “for free”, from Twitter to GitHub, even maybe someday Medium. But if it comes to selling your content – serving ads, paywalls, much of traditional journalism – think carefully about where you’re placing that content and your associated rights.