I am curious what apps you guys think are examples of great design… ones that not only look great, but are highly functional and joyful to use. The type of app you open for the first time and things just seem to make sense.
To start things off, here are a few of my favorites:
Snagit: Screen capture for Windows
I love this app. I don’t have to use it very often, but when I do I can always figure it out right away and it does exactly what I need.
The great folks over at the Yahoo have a TERRIFIC set of stencils for UI design. They cover the following topics:
* Ad Units
* Calendars
* Carousels
* Charts and Tables
* UI Controls
* Form Elements
* Grids
* Menus and Buttons
* Mobile – General
* Mobile – iPhone
* Navigation and Pagination
* OS Elements
* Placeholder Text
* Screen Resolutions
* Tabs
* Windows and Containers
They are available in Omnigraffle, Visio and PNG format, so
go get them at the yahoo developer site
Norman Richards talked about his experience programming the iPhone app for the web site funmobility.com . What he discovered is that things that seem trivial to do in a UI (setting the background color of a table for example) are immensely huge problems to code… The golden rule for designers for now is to stick with what you can do in UI Builder.
A non-techie asked me the difference between iPhone web-apps and the new app-store apps. Seeing as how the Facebook web-app and native-app look so similar, the question is a good one.
The main difference is that native-apps can access all the cool features of the iPhone (GPS, acceleromoter, address book, camera, etc) while web-apps cannot.
I was at the iPhone dev camp all day Saturday. After sitting through an hour of pitches from the event sponsors (funny, only one company seemed to give away schwag) we worked through a Cocoa tutorial.
My first impression of Cocoa programming is that it is a computer science major’s dream, full of references back to Smalltalk and C. They even talked about preprocessing in the tutorial. Ouch. What is exceptionally different about Cocoa is that MVC is built into the language itself. Java and Rails implement MVC in frameworks, but MVC is not built into the language itself. This was a very strange concept for me and made it hard for me to truly understand what was going on during the tutorial.
We spent some time with the Interface Builder tool, and that was awesome. This tool allows you to build desktop and iphone apps visually. It was extremely easy to use, but to bind data to the controls was really difficult. This was again most likely due to me not understanding Cocoa.
We then saw a demo by Norman Richards about how to take the tutorial application from desktop to iPhone, and that looked pretty straightforward (if you know Cocoa). He even put the app on the phone itself, which was very cool.
Overall I am impressed with what Apple has created for iPhone development. For web developers who are thinking about getting into this, I have to say that the learning curve for Cocoa looks pretty steep, so be prepared.
When I used to run cross country in high school, one of the things our coach taught us was to “run past the finish line”. What this meant was that we were to picture the finish line 10 yards past the real finish line. As a matter of fact, she would always stand there at the revised finish line and scream at us until we bolted past her . The reason for this was that she wanted us to finish the race strong and to not slow down before the finish line.
I worked with Phil a long time ago at Metacreations. He was the main interface designer (along with Kai Krause). Here is an interview with him about what brought him to Adobe – and what he learned from his time at MetaCreations designing rule-bending interfaces for software like Bryce and Kai’s PhotoSoap. He also gives some hints at some possible directions of the Lightroom UI, and his philosophy around the evolution of user interfaces in general.
I know we call work “work” for a reason, but a lack of play in the design process can lead to less-than-stellar software.
Most large software companies follow a strict waterfall methodology:
Requirements > Design > Code > Test.
In my experience, designing and coding cannot not be totally separated.
The idea that designers can design something in wireframes or high-fidelity comps completely is just wrong.
This guy recreates childrens paintings in photographs. Just beautiful.
I actually did some design for the HP touchscreen computer while at Frog Design… great to see its finally coming out!
As a side note, its cool to see that Gizmodo is giving props to Frog for its role in the product. I hope that in the future people buy digital products based not only on the brand name, but also on the interface and industrial design companies involved.