04.09.12 |
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Lori Houston, O’Reilly:
The last question touches on a bit of early O’Reilly history. Edie Freedman (now O’Reilly’s Creative Director) was hired to design the first book covers. She thought the books had the strangest titles–sed and awk?–that evoked images of the popular fantasy game, “Dungeons and Dragons.”
While looking for imagery, she came across the Dover Pictorial Archives, a series of books (and now CD-ROMs) containing copyright-free collections of 18th- and 19th-century wood and copperplate engravings of animals. She encountered a pair of slender lorises and had an epiphany. “That’s sed and awk!”
She scanned several animals from the archive and placed them on mock-up covers, which she then presented to everyone at O’Reilly. O’Reilly had ten or so employees at the time, and people wondered if the animals were appropriate. But Edie convinced them to follow her instincts. Customers wound up loving the covers, and a brand was born.
I’ve always been curious why O’Reilly books have always been synonymous with animals on the cover; now we know.
04.09.12 |
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Laurie Segall, CNN:
Johnnie Manzari, a prominent user interface designer for more than a decade, says he gets weekly phone calls from people asking him to recommend good designers.
“There’s a huge demand for finding talent,” he says. “Just like with engineering, one of the reasons it’s been so difficult is there just aren’t many people that are that good. Not only are people looking for designers more than they used to, but the bar they’re willing to accept has gone up.”
Several of the industry’s power players have been on design-focused shopping sprees.
This whole article reeks of being about six months to a year behind coverage in tech news sites like Engadget and Hacker News. Many traditional “engineering heavy” companies, most notably Google and Dropbox, have seen their design focus ramp sharply upward as soon as early 2011. Around then or by that summer, there were a lot of websites and apps that saw a serious bump in usability and their aesthetic quality.
I’d argue a interesting issue, largely sidestepped by CNN, is why design salaries still don’t equalize that of developers, at least in more entry level positions. It’s a hard nut to crack, yet I find the disparity, given design’s (much deserved) increasing prominence in tech land, increasingly difficult to justify.
04.06.12 |
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Great idea. I see this really being useful for getting some of my Paper shots quickly sent to my Mac with minimal fuss. (h/t Ben Brooks)
04.06.12 |
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There’s been of takes on the Lumia 900 this week, yet I’m fascinated most by Ars Technica’s Casey Johnston’s analysis on the shortcomings of the Metro UI:
[At times] the large fonts that characterize the OS take up too much valuable screen real estate.
The headers in the Outlook app, for instance, have a lot of breathing room. It makes the layout look nice, and choosing to display your contacts’ names in the largest font, twice the height of the rest, rather than the subject or snippets of content presumably makes you feel popular and keeps it people-centric. But I generally care just as much, if not more, about the subject and content preview than the sender, which are grayed out compared to the sender’s name.
In Mail on iOS, you can customize the font and the number of lines of the message preview, but Windows Phone provides no such options. Because of all the white space and large font, and the inability to fix that through settings, I can skim less of my e-mail at once, requiring more scrolling to go through it all. These information-sparse design cues extend to many of the third-party apps we tried, including Yelp and Twitter, where screen real estate often seems wasted by big fonts and white space.
I’m generally critical of the opposite problem on the web: a lot of websites, especially those on the arts/fashion side of things tend to emphasize small, 10 or 11px font as a primary body font. Yet in the process of going big, you can go too far – it looks like Metro fell down that trap.
04.06.12 |
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There’s several Apple vs. Nokia camera mashups to pick from, but I prefer this one from Tested. Bottom line, it reinforces what was apparent in other reviews: the Nokia stacks up the to the iPhone in great lighting conditions but falls apart in low light situations. Given how often people shoot later in the day or indoors, I’d argue that in practical use, this is a deal killer for the Nokia.
04.05.12 |
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In app browser, send and archive, and more.
Best of all:
Thanks to your amazing support, we feel confident that Apple might revise its position on the Push API. We’ll submit a first version of Sparrow 1.2 including it. This might delay Sparrow 1.2 validation but we’re already working with some partners to include Push in future versions of Sparrow without needing Apple clearance.
Push is coming. If Apple can’t help us yet, we have other ideas.
Hell yes.
04.05.12 |
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Great idea by developer David Kaneda. Totally should come in handy during my cross browser testing phases.
04.05.12 |
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Programmer James Hague:
When I sit down to work on a personal project at home, it’s much simpler. I don’t have to follow the familiar standards of whatever kind of app I’m building. I don’t have to use an existing application as a model. I can disregard history. I can develop solutions without people saying "That’s not how it’s supposed to work!"
That freedom is huge.
Having recently knocked out some side projects of my own recently, James really hits it on the head. If you’re a developer and don’t have the time space to go off and run with your own thing on your own time, you’re missing a big growth opportunity.
04.05.12 |
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It’s certainly made the horn since The Talk Show podcast, but this is big news. Weight and heft has been the big pain points for iPad usage; it’s why my iPad generally stays in its case while my Kindle and iPhone get very heavy use. A (cheaper?) 7.85″ iPad could change all that, especially with full compatibility of existing iPad apps.
10.06.11 |
Technology |
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I’m a relative newcomer to Apple and Steve Jobs. Apple computers were an influence growing up, but I didn’t really start using Apple products until my post college days. Yet, after getting my hands on my first Mac, a Powerbook G4, I was hooked. The accessibility and design of Apple’s products always matches the tech power under the hood – a rarity in our industry. I don’t think any of it would have been possible without, as Jobs often said, Apple at the intersection of technology and liberal arts. It makes the company’s work unique and often amazing.
Jobs was a genius, yet still fallible; his flare ups of anger and arrogance were well documented. Paradoxically, the weaker sides of Jobs made him even more approachable, human, and charismatic. That made news of his passing all the more tragic. Not every Apple launch under Jobs has been a success, yet his successes fundamentally changed the technology industry at least three times with the Mac, iPod, and iPhone. Who other single person has had that kind of impact?
Jobs also had an incredible gift at intertwining technology and design, along with a relentless drive. Both are traits that I strive to achieve every day in my career.
Rest in peace Steve and thanks for always moving the ball forward.