Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 20th Apr 2012 17:05 UTC
Tobias Bjerrome Ahlin, an interface designer at Spotify, is a big believer in skeuomorphism. Whereas Apple is a strong advocate of this design concept, Microsoft is clearly moving in the exact opposite direction, while Android is in the process of moving away from skeuomorphism entirely, to a more digital experience. As a passionate hater of skeuomorphism in UIs, I found Ahlin's examples to be a bit weak.
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Member since:2007-11-11
The problem with this crap is the same problem with Unity and wobbly windows or MSFT and adding all that stupid "shrink/grow" morphing crap on their UIs and that is for the vast majority they just want to do a task as quickly and easily as possible and all this crud does is slow you down!
You can tell the designers of all this extra fluffy crud think their stuff is so wonderful yet you talk to the users and they'll find it irritating, even if they don't know what it is exactly that is irritating them. Take clippy, I don't know of a single person that was actually helped by that stupid thing but i know a LOT of people that got the brakes put on what they were doing by el stupido popping up at the wrong time and breaking flow. Or all the UI effects, i don't know how many times people have complimented me when i'm done working on their PCs "I don't know what you did but its so fast now!" when in reality all I did was turn off all the stupid effects they were wasting time waiting to finish.
So any developers reading this...just stop okay? We don't want to be entertained by your stupid program, we are NOT gonna find it "fun" because that is what we have games for, okay? We just want to do our task as cleanly and quickly as possible with as little hassle as possible and I have yet to see any of this junk that keeps getting added everywhere do anything but slow everyone down.
Member since:2005-07-06
do a task as quickly and easily as possible
Yeah, dream on. For a while now it's quite certain we're long past Ballmer's developers x 3 point in time (regardlessof his state of mind
it really was a fairly good dev. period), and you can't be surprised to see almost all UIs targeting people who don't really do tasks, and if they do, their importance is hardly so high not to appreciate the "beauty" and "usability" of the wobbly magic of the new generation of useless and dysfunctional UIs.
Member since:2007-09-23
So any developers reading this...just stop okay? We don't want to be entertained by your stupid program, we are NOT gonna find it "fun" because that is what we have games for, okay? We just want to do our task as cleanly and quickly as possible with as little hassle as possible and I have yet to see any of this junk that keeps getting added everywhere do anything but slow everyone down.
You, sir, are spot on!
An interface should be pretty enough to not be noticed as ugly, but also simple enough to not be noticed either. In fact, the aim of an interface designer, much like the aim of a security admin, should be to have his/her work being noticed as little as possible.
I love it when my users' bug reports, comment, feature requests are about functionality and content, not about the interface itself; this means I've succeeded in my UI design.
On another note: "fun" is totally subjective, and this he uses as a base for his whole argument. Fail.
...making it infinitely easier and more intuitive to carry over knowledge of one application to the next.
This.
Proper UI design takes the memory of the user into serious consideration.
Oh, he worked for Spotify, btw? Not really a well designed application anyone. Not on my Windows 7 box at least. As bad as iTunes and Safari.
/rant
Member since:2008-08-27
that stupid "shrink/grow" morphing crap on their UIs
That's not really the same thing, though. I agree that fluff for the sake of fluff is a waste, but feedback on actions is not fluff. And animations, if quick and to the point, are a good method for giving feedback: They are fairly ignorable, while also hard to misunderstand. And if those few hundred ms of animation (that does not keep you from immediately using another window) slows you down, well...
Edited 2012-04-23 09:50 UTC
Member since:2005-08-26
Member since:2009-11-30
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 23:35 UTC, submitted by kragil
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
Linked by MOS6510 on 05/17/13 22:22 UTC
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 22:15 UTC, submitted by Tom
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 21:41 UTC
Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 17:04 UTC
"But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 13:17 UTC
"Android and iOS, the number one and number two ranked smartphone operating systems worldwide, combined for 92.3% of all smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2013 as Windows Phone crept past BlackBerry for 3rd place. According to the International Data Corporation Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Android smartphone vendors and Apple shipped a total of 199.5 million units worldwide during 1Q13, up 59.1% from the 125.4 million units shipped during 1Q12." Windows Phone doubles from a few to twice few, iOS loser market share as its growth is slower than that of the overall market. BlackBerry continues slide into irrelevance.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 12:06 UTC
"According to the latest research from our Wireless Smartphone Strategies service, global Android smartphone profits reached US$5 billion in total during the first quarter of 2013. Samsung dominated and captured an impressive 95 percent share of all Android smartphone profits." Wow.More News »
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Member since:
2012-02-15
This again?
http://homepage.mac.com/bradster/iarchitect/realcd.htm
http://homepage.mac.com/bradster/iarchitect/phone.htm
http://homepage.mac.com/bradster/iarchitect/qtime.htm
Nope, this hasn't suddenly become a better idea in the last 15 years. A computer is still not anything but a computer. While Microsoft is applying Metro inconsistently and poorly (in Windows 8), they at least got one thing right: don't try to make GUIs look like physical things. It's absolutely a dead end, and it's pitiful how Apple is embracing these ideas, as they have otherwise been holding the "consistent UI" flag fairly high for a long time (exceptions like Quicktime notwithstanding)