Top Right Quadrant

John Gruber on Mountain Lion, OS X Development Schedule

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:19:00 +0000

So, today was clearly an embargo-release day, as the tech news sites and blogs burst aflame with long previews of Apple’s next iteration of OS X — 10.8, “Mountain Lion” — and about Apple’s new yearly iterations of their desktop and notebook operating system. But, of all that which has been published today, I think John Gruber’s assessment is the most masterful.

The words “Windows” and “Microsoft” are never mentioned, but the insinuation is clear: Apple sees a fundamental difference between software for the keyboard-and-mouse-pointer Mac and that for the touchscreen iPad. Mountain Lion is not a step towards a single OS that powers both the Mac and iPad, but rather another in a series of steps toward defining a set of shared concepts, styles, and principles between two fundamentally distinct OSes.

I’m tremendously excited. Not because I’m surprised, but because OS X seems to be going exactly the way I want it to.

Fuck Continuity

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 16:18:01 +0000

Have you ever noticed how the ‘hover’ state of bookmarked web page icons in Google Chrome are darkened when they are part of a folder, but unchanged when they are displayed straight in the bookmarks bar?

'Good Enough' is not Good Enough

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:37:24 +0000

My son, beware of “good enough,”
It isn’t made of sterling stuff;
It’s something any man can do,
It marks the many from the few,
It has no merit to the eye,
It’s something any man can buy,
It’s name is but a sham and bluff,
For it is never “good enough.”

— Edgar A. Guest

Rethinking NBA TV

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 01:27:00 +0000

The National Basketball Association is just about catching up with the wonders of the Internet. Thanks to the NBA offering access to its League Pass subscription package over the web, I can watch regular season and playoff NBA games live and on-demand, in fairly good quality, through a web browser and on an iOS or Android device.

The sport of basketball is energetic, gritty and full of finesse. Sadly, today’s NBA TV web player software is clunky, incoherent and frankly boring. The grey and murky blue palette reminds one of a golf trip ruined by rainclouds rather than the excitement of the NBA. Ugly alignment imperfections and dodgy type amplified by fiddly controls crammed into the void around the video player make using the UI an unpleasant experience - even when you’re not using it, as it distracts you. You have to trigger full-screen mode just to quiet the noise.

But it’s not all bad. Though the visual din prevents the content from becoming the focal point, the current incarnation of the NBA TV web app does place it front-and-center. Switching between games is just a click away and it does offer some innovative features like directly jumping to individual plays and displaying two (or more) games simultaneously.

Basketball is one of many sports that’s highly stat-focused. The NBA TV player allows the user to bring up the game’s box score at any time, which is nice — only it completely obscures the game you’re watching, a down-side to the big player. Statistic junkies wishing to follow the action and the stats in real time will find it impossible. Enter the new NBA TV interface, and with it a decidedly more consistent brand. Gone are the days of inconsistent branding, poor interface execution, the NBA League Pass Broadband distinction and dueling “NBA TV” (with and without the ‘dot’), “League Pass” messages. This is just NBA.TV, and it looks like this.

The airy blue and grey are gone, to be replaced by a deep, energetic red and iron scheme on a black background, offering some stark contrast and making the content - the action - the centerpiece.

The omnipresent game schedule bar has been untightened to allow each game to take more space and display more information. As less games to choose from are now shown at once, it is clear that the user may reveal more games to the right or left. The games are shown in chronological order with the earliest on the left. The default position along the “bandolier” of games is the game that started most recently, or will start next. Only games from the currently selected day are displayed.

A nice feature of the NBA TV player is the DVR-style functionality, allowing the user to arbitrarily jump to specific plays in both live and archived games, offering a kind of ‘personal instant-replay’. Anecdotally, however, it seems that hardly anybody actually uses this feature. I’m sure (I hope) the NBA have a better analysis of their users than me, but I’m probably right ¹. So why is this potentially screen-crowding feature enabled by default? In the current version, it effectively makes the video progress “scrubber” unusable while the play markers are enabled. In this version, they are tucked away under the ‘preferences’ option, available in what I call stats view.

Stats View and Game View

Though ugly, the availability of real-time stats (real-time for live games, anyway) at any point of watching a game is a nice feature. Sadly, as it stands now, if I want to pull up a box score, I have to obstruct the game’s video with a floating window that’s too big to place anywhere about the screen without covering an important part of the action. To remedy this, the new design offers two different viewing modes: stats view and game view.

Stats view reduces the video player to a width two-thirds of the window’s. The rightmost third includes a familiar tabbed interface, where the user can switch through the information that would otherwise have obscured the action with its floating panels, along with an improved chat interface which now incorporates Twitter chatter about the game at hand. Due to the smaller viewport, multi-game viewing is not available in stats view.

Game view is a highly simplified viewing experience that most users will stick to. With no play markers or stats, it’s just the video, but stats view is just a click away. Game view’s larger video player facilitates picture-in-picture and multi-game viewing. Full screen viewing is available in both modes.

The Vision

Clearly, the three themes present throughout my redesign were the user, simplicity and polish. The two viewing modes represent the two extreme fan archetypes: the analytical, stat-junkie fan and the laid-back just-hit-play-and-relax fan — switching between the two modes is easy enough to sate those somewhere in the middle. I’ve cut a lot of cruft, and in doing so introduced an edgy, energetic look-and-feel that’s a lot more pro basketball and a lot less day at the office.

I’ll be providing the raw source files for this redesign soon. You may change it, remix it or do whatever you like to it. Except call it your own — that’s a douchebag thing to do. All I ask is that you send me any improvements you make, so I can learn and become a better designer.

This redesign project wasn’t endorsed by the NBA. All intellectual property that is theirs remains theirs, including their logo and whatnot. For fuck’s sake, just don’t sue me.

Unfortunately, I do use the play markers myself purely as a workaround to the broken ‘skip advertisements’ button on non-live games. ↩

Going Full Circle

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 16:24:45 +0000

Going Full Circle:

Ars reports on an Android UI enhancement that clearly doesn’t get it.

The user experience module includes an implementation of an Android windowing system, which offers a more desktop-like approach to multitasking with overlapping windows.

Moderat

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 16:45:16 +0000

Moderat:

It’s a little old now, but Moderat’s eponymous album may still be my favourite of all time. Put on this album, and stare out your window at the cold winter weather for an hour. That shit’s cathartic.

You’re welcome.

Texture and Soul

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 11:26:41 +0000

Justin Williams:

It was certainly extra work for their millions of designers and the engineering team to craft experiences that felt unique on both platforms, but the end result is something that delights both Android and iOS users alike. With these apps that offer a completely platform-agnostic user experience and color palette, the bean counters may win by keeping a project under budget, but the users ultimately are offered a much less enjoyable experience.

Phenomenal article about use of Texture in UI design. Needless to say, I completely agree. I’ve been mentally drafting an article about how some of my preference for iOS comes from the design conventions relating a certain soul that other platforms lack (which Windows Phone actively discourages with its cold modernism; and which Android doesn’t seem to even have an opinion about, further to it’s detriment).

Some say shoe-horning concepts from the real world into software is misguided (for example, the tabular layout calendar applications maintain from their paper counterparts or the faux-leather style that’s creeping into OS X and iOS), and there’s some truth to that. Though, there’s no denying that it’s a great way to engage your users. The value of the emotional attachment is underestimated.

(No, I don’t even stop thinking about this shit for Christmas.)

Surprisingly awesome cover.

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 15:01:00 +0000

Surprisingly awesome cover.

Steve Jobs

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 15:38:24 +0100

I am in no position to eulogise. As much as I feel like I understood Steve, as close as I feel to his passion, genius and enthusiasm when I use his products, I didn’t know the man. Still, I feel like I need to say goodbye in my own way.

It’s the combined impact of many people that has inspired me to get into the fields of technology and design. There are lots who have informed my views on philosophy, politics and religion. As shallow as they may be, my tastes in music, literature and art have been shaped by generations of individuals.

But, no-one has impacted my life, my ambition to be insanely great at everything I set out to do, as much as Steve Jobs. In my eyes, the most important product he has sold to me is not an iPod or Mac, it’s not a piece of software, it doesn’t even cost money. It’s the drive to create things that are fucking out-of-this-world awesome, and that’s timeless.

Thank you, Steve. And goodbye.

Mac OS X 10.7 Lion: the Ars Technica review

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 20:58:56 +0100

Apple appears tired of dragging people kicking and screaming into the future; with Lion, it has simply decided to leave without us.

Right on cue, John Siracusa’s epic 27,000-word review of Mac OS X Lion at Ars — premium subscription recommended.

iPad 2 Plus+ Pro Series 7 Extreme

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 20:49:09 +0100

This new high-end model will be called iPad Pro, not iPad 2 Plus. Why? Well, first Apple isn’t Samsung. The company doesn’t add prefixes and suffixes except for ‘i’ and ‘Pro’.

Except for ‘touch’. Or ‘nano’. Or ‘classic’. Or ‘Air’.

I like the sound of ‘iPad Shuffle’.

An open letter to RIM

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 12:13:59 +0100

An open letter to RIM:

Let’s start an internal innovation revival with teams focused on what users will love instead of chasing “feature parity” and feature differentiation for no good reason (Adobe Flash being a major example). When was the last time we pushed out a significant new experience or feature that wasn’t already on other platforms?

An anonymous RIM employee calling out all that is wrong with the company’s strategy in an open letter published at BGR. Although intended as a call-to-arms, it honestly reads more like a eulogy.

Wireless, dual-screen gaming with iOS 5

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 17:02:00 +0100

Wireless, dual-screen gaming with iOS 5:

WiiU must be Japanese for “dead on arrival”.

On a related note, this use example kind of scatters the rumours about the Apple TV (which runs an iOS variant) getting any native app support in the near future. This is clearly how Apple wants this particular fork of its ecosystem to work together, with the TV simply being another presentation medium for the handheld devices, facilitated by AirPlay and screen mirroring.

Hype

Fri, 20 May 2011 19:14:00 +0100

Hype, from Tumult software, is an app that helps you create complicated HTML5 animations.

Using Hype, you can create beautiful HTML5 web content. Animations and interactive content made with Hype work on desktops, smartphones and iPads. No coding required.

Nobody wants HTML5 to fully replace Flash more than I (and by ‘HTML5’, I mean the entire “next generation” of web technologies, including CSS3, native video,

Then I take a look at the gallery of web pages created with Hype, and I die a little inside. They’re all just splash animations and superfluous element animations whose trendiness subsided with the term ‘DHTML’. It was a grim reminder of why Flash is horrible, but jarring proof that bad design transcends technologies.

I instantly made my mind up that HTML5 animations should be used sparingly, and if you’re conjuring an animation that is so complex you require an IDE to do it, then… well… you should not be.

Three down; five letters; white and fluffy, lives in the sky

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 23:56:00 +0100

If you consult any number of technology news sites, you’ll be told that updates to Apple’s meagre cloud computing offering are likely to be on the horizon. Hopefully, they’re right. MobileMe woefully lags behind Google’s and even Microsoft’s cloud-sync packages in features, price and — frankly — usability (the MobileMe web apps have been highly unresponsive and sluggish as of late, to the point that I’d rather pick up my iPad than point my browser to me.com). Sure, as is standard with anything Apple, the sync experience within their own ecosystem is fine. The realisation grows, however, that it’s simply not enough.

I have no idea what iOS 5 will bring to the table. I’m no expert pundit or industry analyst (although, let’s be honest, neither are most actual analysts). But I know what I want as a consumer, and I’m not averse to telling other consumers what they want, either.

So what do I want out of MobileMe? I want it to be free. I want it to store my media. But perhaps most importantly, I want it to be open to developers.

Let’s ignore the inevitable move to a cloud-based iTunes for a minute (although having an unreliable DSL connection has presented me with a great argument against cloud reliance) and let’s not discuss the logistics of ‘free’ yet. I want to focus on the developer possibilities, and with WWDC coming up, with iOS 5 and Mac OS 10.7 taking centre stage, there’s no better time.

It’s been almost a year since Joshua Topolsky, former editor-in-chief of Engadget, penned his popular editorial in which he prayed for something he called a ‘continuous client’ — that is, the idea that you could be using your smartphone, tablet, laptop or desktop computer, step away from it, and resume whatever it was you were doing on another smartphone, tablet, laptop or desktop computer, seamlessly. Not an unreasonable bit of futurism.

Now, as successful as the App Store is and has been for many developers, it is one area where the inter-Apple product ecosystem has been frustratingly decoupled. There is this wonderful notion of a ‘universal’ iOS binary, which allows me to buy an app once and install and run that same binary on my iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad (and, one would assume, my Mac eventually. Maybe even my Apple TV, as the rumours persist). It’s the convenience behind device-independent¹ iOS apps that’s staving off the hurt the Android platform feels from its fragmentation problem.

Yet, when I buy an app that’s capable of running on all members of my iOS device family, to an extent I feel like I’m running two completely different apps because the instances of the application refuse to talk to each other. I submit to you, as an example, an app I use both on my iPad and my iPhone very often: Crosswords.

I’m on the bus one morning. I finish The Independent’s crossword for today - hooray for me! That’s a great big satisfying check mark beside that one. I get home, have some dinner. Maybe I’ll complete another before going to bed, so I grab my iPad and… wait, what’s this? The Independent’s crossword for today is ‘new’? But I did it this morning!

Sure, the creators of this particular Crosswords app have taken it upon themselves to offer a sync platform of their own. This is the best they can offer me in terms of keeping my puzzle completions up-to-date, but this is still an unacceptable solution. Am I to remember a user name and password for every single universal app² that I own?

My iPhone, iPad and Mac are already tied to a MobileMe login. Let’s open that up to developers in iOS 5. I’m not prepared to stream my music over 3G from the cloud, and neither are the mobile networks. But I would savour the ability for my Prompt server list (hell, even my sessions, why not?) to persist across devices, to retain my favourite Epicurious recipes, automatically set up my Twitter accounts when I get a new device, or to just keep track of my humble crossword completions when I get home.

To quote something Steve Jobs said on-stage at the D5 conference:

The marriage of some really great client apps with some really great cloud services is incredibly powerful.

Giving developers access to MobileMe would be one small step for word-puzzle lovers like myself, but a giant leap closer to Topolsky’s continuous client.

Almost device-independent, as older iOS devices do not sport some features of video-recording, gyroscope-toting current-gen models. ↩
I don’t necessarily mean universal in the sense that the same binary runs on all devices. Plants vs. Zombies and Plants vs. Zombies HD are two separate apps, but I still have to concede all my progress and unlocks whenever I switch between the devices. ↩

Audio

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 14:44:00 +0100

How did dinosaurs have sex? - Slate Magazine

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 13:51:56 +0100

How did dinosaurs have sex? - Slate Magazine:

Safe for work. Unfortunately.

Berners-Lee says Internet access is a 'human right'

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 17:28:00 +0100

Quoth Tim Berners-Lee:

“Access to the Web is now a human right. It’s possible to live without the Web. It’s not possible to live without water. But if you’ve got water, then the difference between somebody who is connected to the Web and is part of the information society, and someone who (is not) is growing bigger and bigger.”

Putting aside his haphazard reasoning, relating whether or not you have water to the size of whatever he means by ‘difference’ (read that quote carefully, see if you can parse it in a way that actually makes any sense), this train of thought is very dangerous.

Let’s not throw around the term ‘human right’ as if anyone - even the great Tim Berners-Lee, whom I respect - can define what our human rights are. Our human rights are innately existent and unrepentantly constant. As codified in the United States Declaration of Independence they are the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” (although I find that third item to be somewhat nebulous, so I prefer the more succinct “life, liberty and prosperity”).

You may not take my life. You may not take my liberty. You may not take my property. These are the principles governments are formed to uphold, and the conservation of them is the measure to which governments should exist (it can be argued that the very presence of a government is in violation of all three human rights, but that’s a high-horse I shall ride another time). They are passive protections of the self. To no extent do these principles charge me (or ISPs) with providing anyone else with free Internet access, electricity, clothing or even water for crying out loud. They simply protect the things I am born with, the things that are intrinsically mine, the things that I earn during my life.

The above quote demonstrates a major misunderstanding of the nature of the things to which you are entitled, as per your human rights. The (erroneous) belief is that if you do not have something, someone else ought to give you theirs. This is not the case. Human rights are what you are born with, what is yours by default. It is when these things are taken away from you that issue is to be taken.

Go ahead, Mr. Berners-Lee, donate your time and your money to making ubiquitous Internet access a reality. But, pretty please, don’t presume to make “free access to the web” one of my human rights - my rights that condemn such a thing in the first place, by the way.

And let’s be honest: who wants a government-controlled Internet?

Webstock '11: John Gruber - The Gap Theory of UI Design

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 19:22:19 +0100

Webstock '11: John Gruber - The Gap Theory of UI Design:

Great talk from John Gruber - I wish my DSL line would stay active long enough for me to watch it in its entirety, though. (BT Broadband, at least in my area, is a great case against cloud computing.)

Parsons The New School for Design

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 14:17:00 +0100

Parsons The New School for Design:

Run your mouse over the boundary for their solid red header. It’s simple, it’s flash, but it’s fucking beautiful.

Now if only they could implement that with HTML5.