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EdgeCase

Wed, 09 May 2012 13:16:54 GMT

EdgeCase is a nifty new utility for the Mac. Tons of features on the Mac rely on Fitts’s law. Notably, the Mac makes good use of the «infinite width» provided by screen edges. These «infinite width» edges allow you to quickly access the menubar, reveal a hidden Dock, or slam your mouse into a screen corner to activate Mission Control, Exposé, or another feature.

This stops working reliably once you have more than one monitor. Now, the edge between the two screens disappears. Instead of hitting the edge, the mouse moves to the other screen. EdgeCase solves this problem. With EdgeCase, the edge returns, and works as if you only had one monitor.

To move your mouse to the other monitor, hold down ctrl or ⌘, wait for half a second, or «bounce» the cursor on the edge.¹

Recommended.

This is also useful if you have a second monitor where you usually don’t want your mouse to go to at all, like a Wacom Cintiq.

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Chabudai Gaeshi

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 10:15:46 GMT

Sebastiaan de With:

I learned countless things at Apple, but the most important skill I acquired was the ability to simply take a set of extremely polished designs—sometimes designs I’d easily consider to be the best I’d made in my life—and throw them away, trash them entirely, and start over. It’s where truly great design is born. Since my time at Apple I’ve done this many, many times, and it has always resulted in incredible progress. You have to learn to kill your babies, mercilessly. They’re just pixels. You can do better.

It’s interesting that Nintendo does the same thing. At Nintendo, it even has a name; it’s called «Chabudai Gaeshi» («Upending The Tea Table»).

Nintendo is known for delaying the release of its games. This is largely due to the perfectionist tendency of Miyamoto who would go as far as scrapping the entire development if he did not find a game up to his standard.

For example:

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was supposed to be released immediately after the release of the Nintendo 64. Instead, Miyamoto, who was the producer, repeatedly ordered the game to be redone, resulting in numerous announcements of delays by Nintendo until the game’s eventual release on 11/21/1998.

It’s painful, hard, and often time-consuming to restart when you’re already done, but you can’t argue with the results. Both Apple and Nintendo create some of the best, most inspired design out there.

Completely redoing Ocarina of Time again and again and again may have been tough. But today, that game is widely considered to be one of the best and most influential videogames ever created.

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If you liked this, you'll love my book. It's called Designed for Use: Create Usable Interfaces for Applications and the Web. In it, I cover the whole design process, from user research and sketching to usability tests and A/B testing. But I don't just explain techniques, I also talk about concepts like discoverability, when and how to use animations, what we can learn from video games, and much more.

You can find out more about it (and order it directly, printed or as a DRM-free ebook) on the Pragmatic Programmers website.

Gmail's New Buttons

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 08:31:42 GMT

Jono Xia, writing about the recent Gmail redesign:

But these icons are particularly bad. Again with the cult of minimalism: the icons are so streamlined and featureless that they all look the same: a row of meaningless, square, grey objects. When I want to mark something as spam, I used to be able to click the “spam” button. Now I have to mouse over each square grey object one at a time, looking for the one that pops up a “Report Spam” tooltip. (It’s the stop sign. Why a stop sign? I don’t know. Years of using GUIs have trained me to interpret a stop sign as an error message.)

Update

Henning Hoefer notes that Google added a setting to revert back to the text labels. I don’t think this is the right way to improve a user interface.

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Twitter's "Innovator's Patent Agreement"

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 10:36:12 GMT

Marco Arment, writing about Twitter’s «Innovator’s Patent Agreement»:

A patented «invention», even when patented under these terms, is still patented. It’s not free for anyone to use, and willfully infringing upon it is still dangerous and unwise.

(…)

I didn’t patent [my] older inventions because I couldn’t afford to. I probably could have patented some of the newer ones, but I didn’t even look into it enough to do basic prior-art searches. I fundamentally disagree that software patents (and many other types of patents) are a net gain for society, and I can’t participate in that system in good conscience. That’s a stand that I’d like to see more companies adopt.

Agreed. I realize that Twitter might feel that they have no other choice than to get as many patents as possible. Given this, Twitter’s IPA is better than nothing. But it’s definitely not the solution to this mess.

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The Monochrome Trend

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 10:02:46 GMT

Literature & Latte’s Keith Blount makes an important point about using color in user interface design:

As Joni Mitchell sang, you don’t know what you’ve got till its gone (although in all fairness she was talking about trees rather than colours in icons, and I’d concede that trees might be a little more important). When Apple decided to drain the icons in these programs of their colour, I learned something about the way my brain works that I hadn’t hitherto ever had to think about: my brain is an awful lot faster at processing colours than it is at processing shapes.

I’ve written about the importance of color in my book:

From a usability perspective, using color is beneficial. Colors make things easier to perceive. Our brains are really good at doing tasks such as “find the green icon on this screen.” In [his book] Information Visualization, Colin Ware notes that color is “preattentively processed,” meaning that we identify color before we give it conscious attention. In other words, when we look at a user interface, we can find and identify user interface elements with a specific color really quickly and easily.

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Simple Ideas

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 22:16:11 GMT

Neven Mrgan:

Simple ideas like this will naturally occur to many people. A small percentage of those will have the ability to execute on them. A small percentage of those will then actually do so. And an even smaller group will combine it with an otherwise interesting product, thus making it into something.

People often assume that ideas are where value is created. In reality, ideas (even non-simple ones) are plentiful, easy, and often generated by more than one person at the same time. Ideas are essentially worthless. Value is only created when people actually make stuff.

See also: patents (which protect the worthless part of this equation, and thus make it harder to do the truly valuable part).

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The New iPad's Screen Under the Microscope

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 09:14:32 GMT

Like any self-respecting UI designer, I have a microscope¹ sitting on my desk.² Here are some pictures comparing a bunch of different screens. They’re all taken at approximately the same magnification.³ At the scale that the pictures were taken, the width of this bar equals about 1mm:

Note that not all screens are oriented the same way; sometimes, I had to turn the devices to take the picture.

Here’s the iPad 2’s screen:

And here’s what the third generation’s screen looks like:

It’s easy to conceptually understand the idea of quadrupling the pixel count, but once you actually see what this means, it’s frankly pretty astonishing. The iPad 2’s pixels look gargantuan next to the diminutive pixels from the third-gen iPad.

By the way, Apple’s PR makes it sound like there’s almost no space between individual pixels. While there’s much less space than on the old iPad, rows of pixels are still placed quite a bit apart from each other.

Similarly, here’s an iPod touch (2007):

Here’s an iPhone 4S:

Comparing the iPad 3 to the iPhone 4S shows the iPhone’s slightly higher resolution:

Let’s see some other recent devices. Here’s a BlackBerry PlayBook:

And its similar competitor from Amazon, the Kindle Fire:

There were some rumors that the two used similar hardware. Clearly, this doesn’t apply to the screen at all.

Moving on to some cell phones. First, the HP Veer:

Next, the Google Nexus One.⁴ It sports one of these horrible PenTile RGBG OLEDs:⁵

Let’s look at some recent gaming devices. This is a Nintendo 3DS:

Note how this screen doesn’t have square pixels; two pixels fill up one square. This is so the screen can send a different pixel to each eye, creating the 3D effect.

Here’s the PlayStation Vita:

For comparison, its predecessor, the PSP:

And Sony’s «other» portable console, the Xperia Play:

And finally, here’s the OpenPandora:

This screen looks a bit blurry under the microscope because it has an anti-glare coating. In real life, the screen looks great, especially in situations where the other screens show distracting reflections.

Update

Somebody asked for an e-paper Kindle. Here’s the Kindle Keyboard (third generation), at the same magnification:

Update 2

Somebody asked for a more recent Android device. Here’s a Sony Tablet S:

Update 3

Here’s the HP TouchPad:

Update 4

This is a picture of the Galaxy Nexus’s screen that should be roughly at the same scale:

It was taken by Keyan Mobli (via imahotdoglol). It’s another PenTile RGBG OLED, so it only has two subpixels per pixel.

Update 5

Dr. Drang has some more pictures, taken using a better microscope. Also, on a completely unrelated note, I agree with him that iPhoto on iOS isn’t necessarily a beginner’s program, but I don’t think pro users are happy about having to read a manual or watch an Apple Keynote, merely to figure out how to do the most basic things in the application. Mystery meat gestures may have the worst effect on casual users, but they’re bad for everybody.

Update 6

Via mefi, a Commodore 1702 Color Monitor, an NEC 33090WQXi, and an IBM T221. Also, StickyCarpet notes that «This is starting to sound like an evaluation of MP3 bit rates made through $3 ear buds.» Well, yes. If I haven’t been clear enough, let me repeat that this isn’t a scientific evaluation of these screens. It’s really just a bunch of interesting pictures. And finally, my microscope is really cheap, but I am in fact able to turn off its LED lights :-)

It’s a very cheap USB microscope from Bresser. I wouldn’t recommend it; as you can see, the images aren’t particularly good. You can probably get much better pictures by investing just a bit more money.
In all seriousness, as displays with super-high resolutions start to be more widely used, this might become a more common sight.
At «80x», although what exactly that means depends on how you’re viewing this post.
I would have like to include some more recent Android or WP7 phones, but I just don’t have access to any, sorry! This isn’t so much meant as a comparison, as it is an interesting look under the hood of these devices.
The Samsung Omnia 7 has a very similar screen. I’d include a picture, but I can’t. I sent my Omnia 7 to Samsung’s support for repair back in June 2011 (they shipped some Omnia 7s with a broken firmware). Samsung’s support acknowledged receiving it, and that’s the last I heard about that.

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You can find out more about it (and order it directly, printed or as a DRM-free ebook) on the Pragmatic Programmers website.

Mystery Meat

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 08:41:11 GMT

The world’s first gesture based calculator, via Steven Troughton-Smith.

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