Opening up just.me app for the first time.
Big usability and UX no no… Don’t ask me for permission to use the address book right on launch!! This makes me feel like you wanna suck all my contacts very badly.
Why don’t you explain to me how this app works and explains to me the permission to use my address book is legit (for the purpose of the app)?
As titled, why?
My guess is… swipe up kinda infers discarding something versus swiping things down means more like “you are putting it back”.
Read the post – UI and Capability by Ryan Singer from 37signals.
Love it!
It’s easy to get overwhelmed with details when you’re designing a UI. That’s why I try to keep hold of which things “really matter” and continually come back to them. In a software tool, the important things are the capabilities you give your users.
The first paragraph is beautifully said. This is what I, often times, make things with good intention. I previously quoted, “We must make things with great hope and faith, for there is joy and fulfillment in creation” from George Nakashima’s book – The Soul of a Tree. This reinforces my belief. Great products are built with good intention.
Something I want to write here to remind myself though.
In Ryan’s article, he laid his belief that styling serves 2 purposes – revealing a feature and aesthetic purpose. He prefers to focus on building on capabilities and interface in early project stage while only do enough styling. Don’t linger too much on styling.
I agree. But we should remind ourselves that, I guess, he mainly states this base on his experience with 37signals products. Their products are mostly productivity applications. Users definitely look for productivity applications largely for their capabilities.
When we work on applications in other categories, priority changes. When we work on an application in a different time, priority also changes.
Say, Facebook can ignore design when they first started. Back then, their major competitor was Friendster. The bar was low.
Or, say, Instagram. iOS comes with camera and photo applications. What are the incentives to get user to download another app? Design (visual appearance), capabilities (features), price, peer influence… Many factors play a role. The developer needs to make their own judgement.
Guess Ryan will not deny my point of view. Quote:
I’m not religious about it — I do some rough styling to feel good about what I’m working on. But I don’t allow myself to linger or circle around it.
In my case, Atttach is a productivity app. I am basically doing exactly what he recommends. 
Yesterday, President Obama delivered his first State of Union Address in his 2nd term.
Politics, to many people, including me, is boring. It’s built on skepticism and distrust. But Obama, besides Noam Chomsky, is the only one who make it inspiring and hopeful.
But, hey, what does it have to do with me – Hong Kong people?
I wanna quote his closing remark -
“We may do different jobs, and wear different uniforms, and hold different views than the person beside us. But as Americans, we all share the same proud title: We are citizens.
It’s a word that doesn’t just describe our nationality or legal status. It describes the way we’re made. It describes what we believe. It captures the enduring idea that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations; that our rights are wrapped up in the rights of others; and that well into our third century as a nation, it remains the task of us all, as citizens of these United States, to be the authors of the next great chapter in our American story.”
I wish all leaders of Hong Kong have this capacity to challenge its own people. And, I wish all Hong Kong people really think about what it means to be a Hong Kong citizen – what should we give instead of what we can get.
It’s time for change. Stop living on China’s economic benefits. Earn every dollar by legit hard work. We need to rebuild our values. This won’t be easy but we have no choice.
“We were sent here to make what difference we can, to secure this nation, expand opportunity, and uphold our ideals through the hard, often frustrating, but absolutely necessary work of self-government.” – President Obama
Silicon is supposed to be tech heaven. But, people seem to forget that, in order to support an ecosystem, we need a huge food chain. Lions (Apple, Google, Facebook, Intel…) are on top. Insects are in the bottom. Inbetween billions of insect and a lion tribe, there are countless of creatures around counting millions.
People around me, there are mighty handy man, brave firefighters, dreamers, storytellers… There are also bozos.
I feel bad that some much hard work were undermined by bozos. It’s unfair to those who work hard because their great work is not as great when combining bozos’ work together.
The fact that I can’t move around freely suffocates me. Reality bends my ego. I have to waste part of my life with bozos. There’s no way, for now, for me to spend all my time doing what I’m proud of. But I’m spending my controllable chunk on something that I will be proud of. Reality can’t bend my dream.
I need to see this as life’s challenging my true grit of making great product.
Without researching any well-known Apple bloggers, this is my wish list for features in iOS 7.
Updating apps is pain in the butt. Why do I have to bother to go to App Store app, go to “Updates” tab, wait for the view to load, tab “Update All”?
This gets worse the month where a new iOS is released. One of the first thing you do with the new OS is… update the apps! Should it be use some apps instead? Almost every app you installed need to be updated in various time over that period.
I know there are legit reasons why you don’t want some apps to be updated. But that shouldn’t be the reason for not having anything better than what it is done right now.
No more “new year” related bug, please. Some time ago there’s the alarm clock not alarming. Now there’s the “Do not disturb” never turns off for 7 days.
It’s not a huge deal. But it’s obvious and affect to many users. What do users think when they hear that from the press and, at the same time, experience that personally? They probably think Apple’s own claim of superior quality is, just like Samsung, marketing.
Give me useful built-in apps. I am a iOS developer. I know why you dumped all Google apps. But normal people out there don’t. They just think iPhone is less good than it was.
If you are taking away some useful apps (YouTube and Google Maps), give me something back as compensation so that the total is still a gain to the users. Let’s make iLife suit free!
Please take away Compass app!
Samsung marketing is stupid. They should mock Apple for shipping Compass app. (BTW, phone touching phone is also stupid.)
Sharing spontaneous small chunk of information with iOS device is still difficult. There are a bunch of 3rd-party apps like Pastebot. To me, this should be OS provided feature.
Maybe Apple wanna solve the problem solely with iCloud sync. If so, it will take forever before I can do so.
The springboard is dated. This grid of app icons do not work for me anymore. If Apple expect people to install lots of apps, the current state of springboard is pretty much like bookmark in Safari. Who bothers to tidy up their bookmarks? How many bookmarked sites you can recall?
Android home screen is kinda like Palm Pilot, Windows CE and Newton which is more a dashboard of “what’s going on”.
I’m very sure during the development of iOS. Some design teams were assigned to design a launcher with this traditional dashboard approach. Somehow this current approach was adopted. But I really want Apple to innovate in this part of UX.
Dashboard approach can be boring and get tired easily. People have been complaining about the rainy cloud in HTC Sense UI. It’s pretty, iconic. But, having been so for so many years, it also represents boredom and stagnancy.
What if Apple make something not-dashboard and not-springboard? I think Apple can do it!
Lastly, and slightly off topic, please open App Store for browser access. It’s such a drag browsing App Store in iTunes in desktop.
Facebook ads recently has started to bother me. They just look overwhelming to me. Feeling like living reading classified post.
I did a simple analysis with my news feed – the first page.
This is my Facebook news feed Safari. My screen resolution is 1920 x 1200 (WUXGA). The screen capture is showing Safari rendering the page in full screen height minus Safari address bar and tab bar.
Ad area highlighted in red.
Not everyone view web pages at WUXGA resolution. Let’s switch to a more common resolution 1440 x 900 (WXGA+).
Ads seem to occupy way more of your browser window.
Let’s check the numbers for a more objective measure.
At 1920×1200 (WUXGA) resolution:
At 1440×900 (WXGA+) resolution:
(Pixel with and height are doubled since screens are captured in Retina display)
Over 40% of the first page of my news feed is covered with ads. With lower screen resolution, the percentage should get higher. Imagine if it’s a sucky PC laptop screen at 1366 x 768 (HD), probably over 50% of the first page is covered by ads.
Good job, Facebook!
That’s worse than respected content sites such as NYTimes, the Verge and WSJ home page. In these examples, they do not usually put an ad in the center of the page. Unlike, here, in Facebook, the ad is always carefully dubbed as a news feed.
That’s annoying to user! Who wants to see ads disgusted as useful content in the center of the screen?
But, hey, good news if you are holder or advertiser!
Tried iPad mini for my first time at the Apple Store in San Francisco.
First impressions:
)I can see why John Gruber or Jim Dalrymple all are saying that they found themselves using the iPad mini in more situations than its bigger brother. True. I imagine it can replace my Kindle or do random Internet surfing in a cafe. It’s so light yet still powerful enough for these tasks.
My 2 major problems are screen reflections and font quality. The first problem, I can’t comment since I haven’t tried one in conditions like a bus or cafe. The font issue, I do miss the retina display. Fonts are so crisp on the retina display. Given that my 2-year old iPhone 4 and MacBook Pro and just obsoleted iPad 3 all bear retina display, it’s impossible to buy a device at this price for this level of font clarity.
Will I pay $329 dollars of my own money plus tax to enjoy the lighter experience? Nope. Not until there’s retina display in it.
I still feel burnt by Apple as an iPad 3rd generation owner. Awesome screen but at an expense of heat and extra weight (on top of a not-light-at-all iPad 2).
):
First time in Portland, Oregon.
It’s very different from San Francisco. The moment I landed the airport. It reminds me of Montreal. So far, things here are “Montreal good”. Bus and train (TriMet) == super clean and tidy. So good that Wired has a review on it. City landscape == greens and spacious. The city is modern yet mellow. People are nice yet not San Franciscan.
Things here seem to close early though. People seem to start their day early as well. A casual search for coffee places in Yelp shows most coffee shop opens at 7 or 8am and close at 6 or 7 pm.
Strangely, the people I talked to. I mean those who would engage in surreptitious conversation with me are all originally from northern California. Hm… that tells something.
I can’t believe how easy it is to reset “Furtherest Page Read” of your Kindle book. Thanks Techhive.
Go to your Amazon account page. Click “Manage your Kindle”. Go to your book – hover on “Action” From the menu, click “Clear furtherest page read…”
Problem solved!
Bill So - iPhone / Mac Developer in Hong Kong. His products include Clip It! and Finger and Numbric. They are distributed under his company Headnix. Bill is also the host of CocoaHeads Hong Kong. You can hire him for programming, consultancy and training.
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