Jordan Koschei, writing for The Industry on Dropbox’s “get free space” push to have the user complete extra steps after first signing up:
This solution is much more elegant than simply forcing users to sit through instructions. For one thing, it offers them a choice; nobody is forced to go through the steps, but most people will anyway in order to gain the reward. Furthermore, the reward is intrinsically linked to the product — it isn’t a tangential incentive like a badge, but rather more of the product itself. Rewarding appropriate use of a product with more of the same product is simple and elegant.
Dropbox’s approach is novel. I know many non technical people who still rely on Dropbox everyday for syncing critical files between multiple computers. I never would have guessed that such a hard to explain, engineering focused product would have such an elegant setup process, but they do.
Quip isn’t your average Twitter client. While you can just read your timeline, the focus here is on alternative modes: check out extended conversations, read the most retweeted tweets, and lay out all Twitter friendly embedded images in a simple grid. It’s really cool as a ‘lean back’ experience to run through on my iPad at the end of the day.
If you’re anyone that dives into CSS on a regular basis you’ve had to fish for extra colors for use on gradients, hovers, border edges, and other HTML elements. For tonally consistent options I’ve relied on colllor in the past. Yet often I just want to slightly lighten or darker a specific hex color, but don’t want to open up Photoshop just to slightly adjust a HSL curve.
That’s exactly why 0 to 255 works so well. No more Photoshop or big third party tools. Just head here, enter a hex color, and you get a full spectrum of colors from light to dark.
Essential reading for technology fans who want to avoid crushing, poorly managed corporate culture. The “curve” rating system that required ranking of team members, struck me as especially damming. Yet overall I was a bit disappointed by Kurt Eichenwald’s writing. It felt overwhelmingly one sided and at times a bit superficial. If poor practices like the curve ranking system weren’t liked by almost anyone interviewed, why did they exist? Was it Ballmer? High amounts of red tape? I wanted a bit of a deeper dive here.
Google Chrome’s start screen that shows your most trafficked sites is nice, yet lacks customization. Enter Speed Dial 2, a Chrome extension that’s been out for a while, but has gotten enough frequent updates to stay very relevant in the browser market. Speed Dial at its heart is similar to the Chrome default with a series of thumbnails for quick access to frequently accessed websites. Yet the customization here is awesome. Pick thumbnail size, number of columns rows, background color schemes, refresh rates and more.
One complaint is its memory usage. It burns up 70 or so MB on my Macbook Air. It’s still worth a try for Chrome start screen fans.
I rarely find work that’s as tedious as determining proper CSS from sprite sheets. Sprite Cow makes the process far more easy: Upload a sample sheet and click directly on individual sprites to get their proper CSS coordinates.
Usually I’m not the biggest fan of list style posts, but The A.V. Club‘s work here is really useful. I’d recommend you do what I did: make a quick scan and add what looks interesting to your Netflix queue. There were a few big ones that were completely off my radar, like Once Upon a Time In Anatolia.
Thoroughly enjoyable, useful interview over at The Verge with the head of design studio Information Architects, probably best known currently in the tech world for their work on iA Writer. I especially liked Reichenstein’s take on good typography:
The only thing that makes me think that Microsoft might have a chance on mobile devices is that they seem to invest a lot in typography, while Apple doesn’t seem to. For example, Microsoft’s latest future video uses Gotham as a system font. And while I don’t think that Gotham would be a good system font, it has the warmth and friendliness that Neue Helvetica on iOS lacks. I read that as “we care about typography”. With good typography you can score on a level that is subconscious to most users. Hardly anyone can discern good from bad typography, but everybody can feel it.
Given all the press over The Dark Night Rises, articles and analysis on director Chris Nolan have reached the point of absurdity. Yet the British Film Institute’s work here is standout and well worth your time. I loved author Joseph Bevan’s analysis of trends throughout Nolan’s work. For instance, Bevan suggests video games influences Nolan’s work:
While it’s hard to imagine him adding to the regrettable lineage of video-game film adaptations, he has paid direct homage to newer games in his last two films. The elevated shots of Bruce Wayne’s speeding Lamborghini in The Dark Knight mimic the player’s view in Grand Theft Auto, while Inception’s infiltration of a snow-bound compound echoes the Splinter Cell games, as well as the Japanese game Metal Gear Solid.
These resonances also occur at script level. Inception’s dream levels are structured like the levels of a game, while Memento – with its emphasis on a lone hero picking up clues while working his way around strange environments – is reminiscent of myriad point-and-click adventures.
I’ve used a lot of Flash blocking extensions, but this elegant solution suggested over at The Verge forums by user David Pierce is the best I’ve found. Simple, native and smart.