578 karma · joined January 13, 2012
What I can also see now is how utterly piss poor most if not all the current flat designs are at even beginning to approximate the effects that you are alluding to.
I totally buy your version of FD but I have yet to see it implemented. Do you have any examples perhaps?
"Make the call to assume some technical debt..." More like: "Build shit I know will be expensive in the long term because I won't have to deal with the fallout."
It's at I'm afraid to say what I want to say about the topic online.
Personally I don't like the 'bubblegum' of the iOS7 previews I have seen so far. I'm sure my daughter will love it but as a William Gibson loving tech nut it leaves me feeling a little left out in the cold... Be that as it may, this is what I wanted to say to you: people seem to think of jeweled buttons and gradients as skeumorphism but I find that to be something of a narrow view.
Example: my favorite skeumorph in OSX - type in an incorrect password at the lock screen and the little thing 'shakes it head' as if to say: "uh-uh, try again" such a light touch and so playful and benign at just that moment that the user is feeling a tad aggravated. How much better is that than a giant red 'X' an an ominous warning gong?
Skeumorphism in today's design circles is pretty much the definition of the phrase: don't throw out the baby with the bath water.
In my defense: I tend to see the established frameworks more as best practice design patterns than odious threats to originality.
Maybe that's just a rationalization but we need to work on what's come before us, what's been built us for us. We can't still be running round with piles of punch-cards if you get my meaning.
The work of our predecessors in both science and technology is a valuable gift and the digitisation thereof has ensured that this gift will constantly accumulate and be available (as long as good humans will risk their own liberty for a principled stance on digital freedom) so there is a point at which we take the title 'developer' literally and literally develop further on what has been achieved so far.
Innovation and originality are precious things and we should certainly value their rarity and value but you don't just stop at the wheel. You build a car.
It is very important to be thoughtful but we must also be cunning with our directions.
Focusing releases of energy on variations of the 'top menu; hero section; columns of content' layout might be less efficient than focusing on how better to interface to these things via those patterns, solutions that are transferable between contexts, adding more affordance across devices, etc.
Just like we've seen layers of metaphor removed in the journey from mouse and pointer to touch of the finger - I imagine interfaces that leap a similar gap, interfaces that more directly represent the underlying data structures they are built upon.
Imagine a volume control for instance, but without a silly virtual silver knob controlling it, instead of that: a visual representation of the value the volume is set to much like a graphic equalizer but you directly control the graphic, without a proxy like a pointer and mouse or a proxy on top of a proxy like a pointer and a mouse controlling a virtual knob that then controls the volume.
That's what I mean about layers of metaphor. It's built up like cruft around the modern interface. That's why it's correct to look at skeumorphism with renewed skepticism but wrong to simply ape off into the opposite direction.
A lot of time is spent taking the data resultant of great number of interfaces, quantifying them and then presenting them in some way, often visually... I am saying that those visualisations and those interfaces needn't live on either side of an invisible fence, that they should commune to form something intuitive and elegant and modern.
It really is not clear what is content and what is interface.
I like to imagine that we'll see a time when there is a tighter integration, that the future of interface is essentially data visualisation but intil that time it remains a challenge to explain to users (and even sometimes technical folk) the distinction between data and interface and flat design really feels like a step backwards in this regard.
It seems (to me at least) like very little thought goes into these designs apart from 'it must be flat.'
There also seems to be very little variation in the final products. The examples linked in the OP are indistinguishable from say, Microsoft's Technet : http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki
...I dont want everything to look the same. It's confusing and boring... Am I alone in this?
Lots happening in Excel/PowerPivot/Data Explorer land.
I was hoping that some UX issues would be addressed in 7 but alas, it's fonts and colours that seem most important to I've and co.
I'm literally shopping round for an Android after using only iPhones since 2007.
Experia Z seems like the front runner at the moment.
More technically minded folk hate this but for less powerful users it is wonderful. Wtf do I need a file system browser with a bunch of .epub files in it if I can simply have iBooks?
iOS handling of the hand off between apps is nothing short of an embarrassment. The constant ->into this app->out to homescreen->into that app->out to homescreen is a joke at this stage of the game and something needs to be done about it - desperately. there are other issues here and there too but this is a daily embuggerance.
Squawking about stitching and torn pages, etc. frankly makes little sense when the actual affordances of the UI are shamefully out of date.
I pray that Ive is focusing on UX and not just on flat vs skeumorphic design.
iOS is in poor shape at the moment, IMO.
The developers could quite easily have implemented a counter of some kind should they wish to implement a limit and I certainly would feel no ill will were they to do that at some stage.
I, for one, given my circumstances, am very glad they they have left it open as they have - had I 70$ to chuck at it, I certainly would. When I do, I will.
To put that in perspective: R650 is a basic grocery shop for my small family for a week.
I have a day job, a baby under a year old, another kid reaching teenagerdom and a bootstrapped startup. My wife works part time.
I wish more startups and even more mature companies would build in some sort of currency sensitive sliding scale for their pricing models. I know what a ball ache pricing is and how much time we tend to spend on it already but I'd love to be able to support and often times the reality is that I simply cannot afford to... Because of the exchange rate.
I take issue with your suggestion that people like myself piss off and use OSS though and I take issue with it for one simple reason: I personally use the 'nag screen version' of Sublime. I'm crazy about the product and when I have a row of developers working on a product that's paying the bills then rest assured - I'll be buying those licenses. In the mean time people see me using it, I evangelize the app fairly regularly, etc.
I know the Sublime guys are trying to earn a living, we all are, and I think that having more users of any kind will ultimately lead to more users of the paying kind.
I mean, either you develop on Twitters API or you have a gaping hole in your social media analysis product... Game over?
Hawking has said that we need only look at the history of inter-species relationships on our planet (let alone race relationships) to get a hint of what exopolitics might look like. He goes on to mention that in terms of the search for alien life, we'd do best to keep our heads low.
Personally, I'd not be that mind-blown, more like vindicated for years of conjecture and lively debate.
Is it perhaps the more comfortable of the two possibilities?
Swipebright is my poison.
World's a weird place at times. The Internet kind of dilates the portal into those spaces.
I do have sort of a wife's account vector but tbh: she also starts feeling shit and creeped out after being in there.
It's ok, as the apologists are wont to point out, there is a choice.
Mine is made.