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Pedro Gonçalves

Flat Pixels: The Battle Between Flat Design And Skeuomorphism - 0 views

  • Defining Skeuomorphism This obscure word describes the way designs often borrow a particular feature from the past, even when the functional need for it is gone. Examples include pre-recorded shutter noises on smartphones to remind us of film cameras, or calendar apps that feature torn paper and metal rings. Or, as Wikipedia tells us [1]: A skeuomorph is a physical ornament or design on an object copied from a form of the object when made from another material or by other techniques.
  • the digital world has seen skeuomorphism popularized in the past couple years mainly thanks to the recent iOS-inspired trend of rich textures and life-like controls.
  • By opposition, the other side of the coin would be the newly popular "flat style", of which Microsoft's Metro UI is probably the main example. Flat Style embraces visual minimalism, eschewing textures and lighting effects for simple shapes and flat colors.
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  • this trend is not always about skeuomorphism – which implies a connection to a past incarnation of a similar design – but rather often about realism [2]: a purely visual style that tries to imitate real-world materials and textures, exemplified by Apple's tacky over-use of leather textures in some of their own apps.
  • skeuomorphic designs tend to look realistic (to make the connection with the original object clear), and realistic designs tend to be skeuomorphic (otherwise the realism would look out of place).
  • touch target couldn't be smaller than a certain size (Apple's Human Interface Guidelines recommend at least 44 by 44 pixels).
  • showing less on the screen, but doing more with it.
  • realism done wrong can morph into kitsch
  • the problem of getting skeuomorphism wrong: making something look like a physical object, but not work like it
  • That problem is that when borrowing elements from a design's previous incarnation, you often also bring its limitations along for the ride, even when these limitations have no reason to exist anymore
  • When done right, skeuomorphism and realism will trigger strong associations with real-world counterparts. This is both a strength and a weakness: sometimes, the association can be so strong that it will stop you from improving on what's already been done.
  • Gone were the shadows, highlights, gradients, and textures of iOS apps. Instead, Metro offered flat squares of color with big typography.
  • Microsoft's new design philosophy certainly seemed to strike a chord within the tech sphere, with many praising Metro's strong focus on typography and colors.
  • And while flat design is often purely visual, it does resonate with designer's love of minimalist concepts, embodied by the famous Antoine de Saint-Exupery that “perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”.
  • Two of the most talked-about games in recent month, Letterpress and Hundreds both feature flat designs. In fact, Letterpress creator Loren Brichter even revealed that the whole game only uses a single image!
  • When you have a high-definition display and screen-optimized fonts, you quickly realize you don't need much else to create beautiful work.
  • is pushing many designers towards prototyping in the browser directly, foregoing static mockups entirely.
  • Add all this together and you begin to see why many designers are moving away from texture-heavy realism towards the more flexible and lighter-weight flat style.
  • keep in mind that the needs of users should always come before our aesthetic pursuits
  • visual style is nothing more than a means to an end [15]. If the situation calls for realism, go nuts on textures and highlights. On the other hand, if a flat aesthetic achieves the design's goal better then it might be time to go on a gradient diet.
  • With the recent releases of their newer mobile apps, Google has started pushing a style that some describe as "almost flat" [18], or maybe "skeuominimalism" [19]. Unlike the drastic visual wastelands of Gmail or Google Reader, this new style uses elements like shadows and gradients in a tasteful, subtle way. This style offers the best of both world: realism's affordances and subtle hints combined with the purity and simplicity off flat design.
  • another way to look at it is that it's simply design done right: seeking efficiency and simplicity without sacrificing usability to the altar of minimalism.
  • I will pick a camp and put my chips in with flat design (specifically, Google's less-extreme variety).
  • Google is not so much pioneering a new style as showing us what digital design looks like when it's done right
  • catch up with what the web has to offer, we'll have to get our hands dirty and start coding [21]. And when you're both designing and coding a layout, you start to appreciate the value of keeping things lightweight.
  • Flat design also forces you to really care about typography and layout, two areas where web design has traditionally lagged behind its more established print cousin.
Pedro Gonçalves

ReadWrite - The Daily Drops Dead: What Murdoch's Failure Means For iPad Publishing - 0 views

  • research suggests that readers prefer their tablets' Web browsers to the meaty, slow-to-update and even more slow-to-evolve native apps that publishers have been eagerly developing since Steve Jobs first held up the iPad on stage in 2010.
  • Inspired by the Netflix model, magazine subscription service Next Issue launched on iOS in July. For $10 per month, readers can get access to dozens of magazines from the likes of Conde Nast, Time Inc. and Hearst. This approach comes with challenges of its own, but it's certainly worth a try. 
  • Then there's The Magazine. Instapaper founder Marco Arment launched the stripped-down, iPad-only publication in October and it couldn't be more simple. For $2 per month, readers are promised eight thoughtful, well-written articles delivered in bi-weekly issues. The Magazine eschews the clunky, multimedia-loaded digital editions of print magazines in favor of a no-frills, high quality reading experience that Arment hopes people will think is good enough to pay for.
Pedro Gonçalves

Rando's 5M Anti-Social Photo Shares Could Be The Canary In The Social Networking Coalmi... - 0 views

  • Rando only launched in March but the anti-social photo-sharing app that deliberately eschews the standard social network clutter of likes and comments and connections – simply letting users share random photos with random strangers and get random snaps in return — has blasted past five million photo shares after a little over two months in the wild. It is now averaging around 200,000 shares per day, says its creator ustwo.
  • For half that time Rando was iOS only, with its Android app not launching til April. Platform spread aside, the huge point here is that Rando has ditched all the self-congratulatory, endorphin-boosting hooks that apparently keep people tethered to their social networks. Yet managed to grow regardless. As Rando’s tagline pithily put it: ‘You have no friends’. The photos you share here will never be liked, never be favourited, and if they are shared outside Rando to other social networks, a feature Rando most definitely does not enable within its app, you likely won’t ever know anything about it. It’s a very rare digital social blackhole — but one that’s proving surprisingly popular (and all without any embedded social shares to grow virally), even while it’s refreshingly ego-free
  • factor in the rumblings about teens’ declining interest in traditional social networks and Rando could be something of a canary in the social networking coalmine, picking up subtle traces of Facebook fatigue, and identifying a growing appetite among mobile owners at least to take back some control and reintroduce a little private space by slamming shut those social doors. The rise of mobile messaging apps is another key trend to factor in here, apps which put private communication first, and social comms as a secondary add on. Certain age groups’ attention is arguably increasingly shifting to these more contained communications mediums — channels which offer both private and public comms within the one app, as Facebook does, but which aren’t centrally focused on publicly broadcast personal content. Rather they put the intimacy of one-to-one messaging at their core. Some, like China’s WeChat, even include serendipitous discovery features that are similar to Rando — like its Drift Bottle stranger messaging feature. 
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  • Mobile usage is certainly fuelling this messaging-centric shift.
  • if Rando’s rise proves anything it proves that humans communicate in more subtle ways than you might imagine, and need less social reinforcement than you might think. And when you think in those terms, it’s not such a huge leap to imagine the shifting sands of communication eroding the foundations of huge walled social strongholds after all. Lots of little apps, all taking away a portion of people’s attention, could eventually add up to a collective social exodus from the old networks. At least of key youth demographics.
Pedro Gonçalves

Google Is Turning Search Into The Planet's Biggest Anticipatory System - ReadWrite - 0 views

  • the goal was to introduce "conversational search." To have a conversation, you need a conversational partner.
Pedro Gonçalves

New Defaults In Web Design - How Much Has The Web Really Changed? | Smashing Magazine - 0 views

  • Many mouseover interactions are completely dysfunctional on a touch device
  • Instead of buying a state of the art monitor, buying a cheap monitor and several low-end devices to test your work on might be a better investment.
  • Hiding content and showing it on mouseover was considered to be a decent design pattern
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  • When you hover over a menu item, a submenu appears. But apart from hovering over an item, you can also simply click on it to follow the link. Now, what should happen when you tap on the item with a touch device? Should the submenus appear, or should the link activate? Or both? Or should something else happen? On iOS, something else happens. The first time you tap a link like that, the submenu appears; in other words, the hover event fires. You have to tap a second time to actually follow the link. This is confusing, and not many people will tap a second time. On Android, the submenu appears and the link is followed simultaneously. I don’t have to explain to you that this is confusing.
  • It’s very well possible to think of complex solutions11 whereby you define different interactions for different input devices. But the better solution, I think, is to make sure that the default interaction, the activate event, just works for everybody. If you really need to, you could choose to enhance this default experience for certain users.
  • The same principle that we follow for interactions — whereby we design the activate event first and enhance it later — applies to graphic design. We should start designing the things that we know everyone will see. That’s the content. No matter how big or small a screen is and no matter how minimal the feature set of a browser, it will be able to show letters.
  • rather than pollute the page with all kinds of links to get people out of there, we should really focus on that thing in the middle. Make sure it works. Make sure it looks good. Make sure it’s readable.
  • you start by designing the relationship between the different font sizes.
  • When the typography is done, you would start designing the layout for bigger screens; you can think of this as an enhancement for people with bigger screens. And after that, when the different layouts are done, you could add the paint. And by paint, I mean color, gradients, borders, etc.
  • When I say to start with typography, I don’t mean that you aren’t allowed to think about paint at the same time. Rather, I’m trying to find the things that all of these different devices, with all of their different screen sizes and all of their different features, have in common. It just seems logical to first design this shared core thoroughly. The strange thing is that this core is often overlooked: Web professionals tend to view their own creations with top-of-the-line devices with up-to-date browsers. They see only the enhancements. The shared core with the basic experience is often invisible.
  • All of the things we created first — the navigation, the widgets, the footer — they all helped the visitor to leave the page. But the visitor probably wanted to be there! That was weird.
  • To build a responsive website that works on all kinds of screens, designing for a small screen first is easiest. It forces you to focus on what’s really important: if it doesn’t fit in this small square, it is probably not terribly important. It forces you to think better about hierarchy, about the right order of components on the page.
  • Once you’re done with the content, you can start to ask yourself whether this content needs a header. Or a logo. Or subnavigation. Does it need navigation at all? And does it really need all of those widgets? The answer to that last question is “No.” I’ve never understood what those widgets are for. I have never seen a useful widget. I have never seen a widget that’s better than white space.
  • does the logo really need to be at the top16 of every page? It could very well go in the footer on many websites
  • the option to add extra luggage to a flight booking might be most effective right there in the overview of the flight, instead of in the middle of a list of links somewhere on the left of the page.
  • does the main navigation look more important than the main content? Most of the time it shouldn’t be, and I usually consider the navigation to be footer content.
Pedro Gonçalves

Experience Design Will Rule in the Post-PC Era | Forrester Blogs - 0 views

  • 77% of mobile searches take place in the home or at work where a PC is readily available. Whether you call it lazy or convenient, the simple fact is smartphones and tablets are quickly becoming the go-to computing devices for consumers.
  • In the post-PC era, customers expect companies to provide experiences aligned with their needs and abilities, in the right context, and at their moment of need.
  • Today, content is the interface and navigation is performed directly through gestures and voice commands. As a result, interactions are becoming multi-modal, engaging users through multiple senses.
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  • Adaptive. As customer interactions fragment across devices, experiences must perform reliably across an expanding interface landscape that includes PCs, laptops, smartphones, tablets, and, increasingly, TVs and cars. But just having a presence on these devices is not enough. Experiences must persist across these devices
  • Further, they need to become polymorphic, taking advantage of the connected devices that surround us to delivernew multi-device experiences that were not possible before.
  • As consumers adjust to post-PC realities, they expect companies to provide the right mix of content and functionality at the right time and right place.
  • design and customer understanding, not technology, will rule the post-PC era. In a time when you can hire a handful of engineers to build just about anything you want, value shifts from what is possible to what is desirable. 
Pedro Gonçalves

Flurry: U.S. App Audience Now Roughly Equal To Internet Users On Laptops & Desktops | T... - 0 views

  • During “primetime,” which for apps also includes those “after-work” hours of around 7 to 10 p.m., app usage among the top 250 iOS and Android applications spikes to a peak of 52 million consumers, the company found.
  • App usage tends to drop off overnight, and weekends see higher daytime app usage through the day (9-5). During the normal workday, people use apps at least 75 percent as much as on weekends
  • reaching the key 18 to 49-year-old demographic using traditional media will become increasingly difficult as they turn towards digital media more. Flurry cited a report from Morgan Stanley, which showed that there has been a 50 percent decline in TV audience ratings since 2002
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  • a couple of important things about the app audience: first that it has reached critical mass, and second that it is still highly fragmented relative to more traditional forms of media
  • During February, for example, Flurry saw 224 million monthly actives using mobile apps in the U.S. That same month, comScore reported 221 million desktop and laptop users of the top 50 U.S. digital properties.
  • though the app audience is fragmented, it’s roughly equal to the (non-mobile) online audience in the U.S. today.
Pedro Gonçalves

Mozilla's First Peak Of Firefox OS Smartphones - ReadWrite - 0 views

  • Firefox OS is of the Web, for the Web. There is no such thing as a “native” app to Firefox OS. If an object exists as a web page, it can easily be turned into an app for Firefox OS by essentially turning it into a shortcut for the browser-based operating system to access. Instead of having to develop specifically for mobile platforms like iOS, Android or Windows Phone, the Web is the platform for Firefox OS. 
  • If you are a developer, you can build an app for Firefox OS by making some small changes to your website. You can then test the app by downloading the Aurora Marketplace onto your Android or using the browser-based Firefox OS Simulator. 
Pedro Gonçalves

Know Your Place! Where to Put Ads on Facebook | Social Media Statistics & Metrics | Soc... - 0 views

  • Currently, there are six different ad placements available to advertisers: Homepage All Facebook News Feed (desktop, mobile) Typeahead Logout Page (available only through Facebook IO)
  • Selecting “Homepage” as a placement will display your ads on the News Feed on desktop, right-hand side on homepage, and on News Feed for mobile.
  • Ads under the “All Facebook” place option may be shown on the right-hand side of Facebook, the desktop News Feed, or the Mobile News Feed. Facebook will decide exactly where to display your ad in order to drive the most clicks and actions, according to your budget.
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  • By selecting “News Feed” as a placement option, your ads will be displayed on both desktop and mobile.
  • Typeahead This is one of the most used features on Facebook. It gives advertisers the ability to target searches.
Pedro Gonçalves

Fanboy Targeting: Facebook Advertisers Can Now Choose What Mobile Devices Their Ads App... - 0 views

  • Facebook confirmed to me it quietly unlocked the new device and OS mobile ad placement options when it officially launched its new mobile app install ads two weeks ago. These ads let developers pay to show links to their App Store or Google Play apps in the Facebook mobile news feed. Facebook needed a way to make sure devs were reaching users on the devices they build apps for.
  • Device and OS placements are somewhat similar to Facebook’s “broad category” device targeting that lets advertisers reach people with specific makes and models of phones like LG Androids or iPhone 5s. However, these ads can show up on both desktop and mobile. Placement targeting lets advertisers choose where they show up, not just to who.
  • there’s also the Android vs iOS socio-economic divide. A recent Forrester study found that iPhone-using households had an average yearly income about $16,000 higher than Android households. That means operating system and device type could augment data like biographical info, interests, and work and education history for targeting high or low-end products via Facebook ads.
Pedro Gonçalves

Survey: Tablet Owners Prefer Browsers to Native Apps - 0 views

  • Among tablet owners, at least, reading on the mobile Web is preferable to using native apps, according to a recent survey from the Online Publishers Association. 
  • Forty-one percent of tablet-bound readers prefer reading on the Web, compared to the 30% who would rather launch a standalone app from a specific publisher. Aggregated news-reading apps like Flipboard and Zite rated surprisingly low on the list. 
  • Last month, Jason Pontin, editor of MIT Technology Review, wrote a widely read takedown of native apps, citing Apple's steep revenue share and the technical and design challenges associated with producing such apps.  "But the real problem with apps was more profound," Pontin wrote. "When people read news and features on electronic media, they expect stories to possess the linky-ness of the Web, but stories in apps didn’t really link."
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  • Apple's infamous 30% subscription revenue cut prompted the Financial Times to abandon its iOS apps and instead focus on developing a cross-platform Web app written in HTML5. 
  • Evidently, the native-app approach is not working for readers, either - at least, not as well as the Web. FT has seen an increase in readership and paid subscriptions since going the HTML5 route, Grimshaw said. 
  • Native apps do offer potential advantages in terms of the reader's experience. They can be more immersive and lack some of the design limitations of the Web. Still, in far too many cases, apps created by publishers end up being little more than digital reproductions of the print product with a few bells and whistles tacked on. 
  • From the reader's standpoint, it makes sense that the Web would be a popular option for tablet reading. After all, there's much more content there, and it's intricately linked together. A digital magazine can offer a refreshing escape from the anarchy of the Web, but it's only a matter of time before readers find it necessary to return to a browser. 
Pedro Gonçalves

Behavior-Based Anticipatory Computing Coming To Social Networks - ReadWrite - 0 views

  • By aggregating personal data and preferences based on your check-ins, applications can begin to tailor suggestions for you, effectively driving decision-making and transactions. 
  • With Foursquare’s latest iOS update, the company is continuing its vision of telling you where to go next, not just where you are.
  • Foursquare is rolling out push notification recommendations and an application redesign that makes it easier for users to find out what’s happening around them.
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  • Foursquare will only provide notifications that are relevant to you personally. The application learns your behavior based on previous check-ins and recommendations. You won’t get notifications everywhere you go; rather, when you’re at a restaurant, Foursquare will crawl the tips and if there is one that fits your profile, you will be notified. Additionally, a new swipeable carousel of suggestions at the top of the application’s home page will show location-based suggestions, such as deals around the corner or something saved to your to-do list nearby. 
Pedro Gonçalves

No--You Don't Need To Learn To Code ⚙ Co.Labs ⚙ code + community - 0 views

  • If you still want to work in the tech world but are reconsidering coding, designer Nick Marsh suggests doing something coders find useful. Brilliant as great developers are, there are plenty of things that they hate doing or are just no good at. Coding requires a level of focus bordering on tunnel vision, and if there’s one thing developers hate, it’s distractions. For a coder “distractions” mean dealing with business people, management, customers or, in fact, anyone outside the engineering team. If you want to get popular with developers, spare them from some of these interactions, which they often see as a shocking waste of their time. A great product manager, for example, is as crucial to success as a competent coder. It doesn’t matter how clear the code is, if nobody wants the product. Translate the language of the developers into that of the users and vice versa. Promote the product. All makers of creative work want their work to be used. Marsh concludes that it’s much more important to understand coders than to understand code
Pedro Gonçalves

No One Uses The Mobile Web Anymore - 0 views

  • A new chart from Flurry, a mobile analytics company, shows that over 86% of the time spent in iOS and Android apps is taking place inside applications. That’s up 6% from just last year.
Pedro Gonçalves

In 2014, The Mobile Web Will Die-And Other Mobile Predictions - ReadWrite - 0 views

  • In 2014, the mobile Web will die. That’s right, that bastardized version of the normal Web will crawl into a shallow grave and leave us all in peace. No more websites crippled with horrible “mobile.yourawfulwebsite.com” URLs. No more reading janky websites that display way too much fine print or omit crucial features when viewed on your smartphone or tablet. 
  • The mobile Web will die because the companies that make the engines it ran upon are killing their mobile browsers and replacing them with fully functional versions that run on any device. In 2014, these browsers will be updated to put the final nail in its coffin. In turn, developers will continue to build websites that can work across any screen size. Responsive design (what we do at ReadWrite to make the site look pretty everywhere) will continue to grow in 2014 as people realize that their old websites are losing them a lot of traffic from mobile devices.
  • Location-based consumer apps didn't let me down; as predicted, they remained stagnant this year. Foursquare and its kindred just are not hot anymore, even if Foursquare did just raise a funding round this week.
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  • HTML5 Takes Over The Mobile Web
  • Combined with CSS and JavaScript, HTML5 is what the Web will be built on in the future. And it will just be the Web, mobile or otherwise.
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