332 karma · joined April 8, 2010
http://unboundformac.com/dropbox.html
I'm interested to see where they go with it and how they approach the problem differently.
Http://www.unboundformac.com/dropbox.html
All your photos on Dropbox and synced to all you iOS devices and macs.
Drop shadows and textures provide affordances and a visual language to communicate what a user can and should interact with on screen. They provide a visual hierarchy to the user so they can easily see what is content and what is interactive, etc.
Print has no interaction, so it's a bit naive to say we're going back to print aesthetics. We need a new way forward that provides both. Web apps have been experimenting with this for a while now. Some of these ideas work, some don't, but we can't just pretend print design has all the answers.
It's just seamless and you don't need to know how it works to use it.
The app: webalbumsapp.com
It's quite a vision for 1991:
Categories like this tend to support just two or three brands at the top of consumer mineshare. Think coke vs pepsi or BMW vs mercedes. The problem with android is it's not really a choice for a consumer. By picking android they really need to make a much more complex choice of which actual phone to get. The real choice the consumer is making is iPhone vs droid incredible or some other specific phone. In the end all the manufacturers under the android umbrella are competing with each other as well as the iPhone for mindshare.
I definitely agree that android will have more units out there than iPhone eventually, but I think the iPhone will easily be the brand with the much stronger mindshare in the category. Normal consumers will still see it as iPhone vs all those other phones. Apple will also have the biggest profit in the smart phone category as a result.
Remember, google is selling eyeballs to advertisers, not phones to consumers. They're playing a different game than apple.
Syncing is also a big deal. I'd love to use the simple note API as a back end if they ever open that up to me.
Its a pretty little city sitting between three rivers and each of its many boroughs have their own style and lots of little shops and restaurants to discover. That along with the super cheap cost to live there make it a very compelling place to live once you get to know it.
Both these marketing strategies work, the question is in android vs iPhone which strategies there are working. I see the droid brand being handled much better by verizon than the android brand is being handled by google. In the end the mind share may be droid vs iphone, but then it's not a software or hardware company that owns the brand, its a network.
I think the main reason this isn't pc vs Mac now is that with pcs the hardware plays a much smaller role in the user experience than with phones. Windows could present a more unified front on lots of different hardware than the current phone ecosystem can. Also in the early days of the windows vs Mac battle compatibility and workplace computers played a much bigger role in the choice. Those factors let windows get a very solid mind-share foothold even if the underlying ecosystem was just as fragmented.
That said, I think the more and more bloated nature of adobe's tools will become a huge weakness. Developers will be able to build tools for much more specific work-flows that feed directly into specific use cases. Sproutcore and this one seem to be aimed at the 'desktop feel' app development for html5, I'm guessing there will be other frameworks and tools for creating games, vector animations, silly interactive websites, etc. Each of tho uses should grow it's own tool/framework specific for the task
I don't think the pinch gesture specifically was the issue, but instead the "pinch to expand" meaning spreading out a stack of items with a pinch. We asked the reviewer to clarify what exactly constituted a "pinch to expand" but they just replied with the exact same wording, kinda frustrating.
We asked the reviewer to clarify and they just replied with the same unclear language but specific to our app. They did specifically ask us to remove the "tap and pinch to expand gesture." When we replaced it with just the tap they let it through.
One thing I have to say is after trying the gesture on the device and not just the simulator it's was a little slow but still usable. We've since fixed it so we'll see if it gets through in the future.