design

Can I ask Siri if any alarms will ring in the next two hours?

[The short answer is no, at least for now. It’s not as simple as looking at your schedule, because you can set reminders to ring hours or days before an event. It needs to be calculated. Siri could be given the power to do this and would make it easy to know if you should shut off your phone during a performance, or just mute it or add a “Siri, mute alarms for the next three hours.” command.]

★ On the Behavior of the iPhone Mute Switch:

Daniel J. Wakin, reporting for the NYT:

The unmistakably jarring sound of an iPhone marimba ring
interrupted the soft and spiritual final measures of Mahler’s
Symphony No. 9 at the New York Philharmonic on Tuesday night. The
conductor, Alan Gilbert, did something almost unheard-of in a
concert hall: He stopped the performance. But the ringing kept on
going, prompting increasingly angry shouts in the audience
directed at the malefactor.

[Snippage -Ed]

I think the current behavior of the iPhone mute switch is correct. You can’t design around every single edge case, and a new iPhone user who makes the reasonable but mistaken assumption that the mute switch silences everything, with an alarm set that he wasn’t aware of, and who is sitting in the front row of the New York Philharmonic when the accidental alarm goes off, is a pretty good example of an edge case.

Whereas if the mute switch silenced everything, there’d be thousands of people oversleeping every single day because they went to bed the night before unaware that the phone was still in silent mode.

[Part of the problem here was that the marimba sound was apparently the culprit which would cause a lot of performers and conductors to pull up short. But also, while I agree that the phone does the right thing (tricky though that is) it makes me wonder how many people know that the alarms are not silenced when you mute the phone? I’d bet a lot.

Plus check this:

If this is not possible, you’ll want to set the ringer to mute, set the system audio to zero, launch Siri and lower the volume to zero, disable all alarms, and review the Settings > Notifications items in the Notification Center to switch off audio. There’s probably some items Auntie is missing here, but she trusts her nieces and nephews will refine this list in the comments.

[snippage -Ed.]

For those rare occasions where you really need to bypass these design choices, powering the iPhone down will keep it from embarrassing faux pas.

A suggestion I can get behind.]

Source: Daring Fireball

Espresso machine art

Kees van der Westen:

Kees van der Westen Speedster
From 1995 till 2004 we built the Mistral series of espresso machines, using boilers and groups from La Marzocco. During those days we also were the official importer of La Marzocco machines for the Netherlands. Through the years we acquired some of the old type paddle-groups from the GS machines. As we could not bring ourselves to dump these we eventually decided to use these in a fun-project: building a small series of one-group machines, especially designed to use these groups for their proper purpose. This machine was called Speedster. A total of six were built in 2001 and sold remarkably quick to friends and relatives.

[Fortunately, I don’t drink the stuff… but wow for the design, and apparently it is beloved by the people who care.]

Resolve to design

Matt Chase as part of the To Resolve Project

clean up my language

TO RESOLVE PROJECT is something that came about last year when I started talking new years resolutions with my girlfriend Fiancé Amy Kirby. You create a list, stuff it away in a drawer and it never sees the light of day till the year has passed. I decided to ask as many talented designers I knew (or didn’t know) to create a resolution for the new year as an iPhone background.

Dolling up an Jaguar XK

jaguar xk 140
Dolling up an XK 150 S Jaguar:

I’d have to say that Jag XK’s are right near the top of my favorite old sports cars from the UK. Probably a XK140 roadster would top that list just because they look the best to me

[The picture is of a XK 140, but either one is scrumptious. Possibly my favorite looking car. There’s the strongest chance I’ll never own one or anything that looks similar. Shame, really.]

Source: Porter Bicycles- Made in New Mexico, USA

Rob Walker: Swoosh. Repeat.

Rob Walker: Swoosh. Repeat. : Observers Room: Design Observer:

The other thought is maybe a little less upbeat: It involves a paper (PDF) published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2007, titled “Inferring the popularity of an opinion from its familiarity.” The underlying study built on the intuitive and well-established notion that if a lot of people express belief in some idea or point of view, we tend to figure there is likely some legitimacy to it. In this set of experiments, researchers presented subjects with homeowners’ opinions about a land-use proposal. As expected, those exposed to more positive opinions had a more positive assessment. More surprisingly, that turned out to be true even when the positive bias came by way of the same homeowner expressing the same favorable opinion multiple times. And it wasn’t a case of mistaking the source of the repetitive voice; indeed, the effect even held up when a statement was repeated merely by way of what looked to subjects like a software glitch. The paper’s subtitle sums up the implication: “A repetitive voice can sound like a chorus.”

Obviously I don’t mean to suggest that either of these comparison points can be carried directly into the realm of a repeated graphic mark. But something about the success of the Swoosh, and the way the brain apparently relates to repetition, does seem relevant to logo design. After all, we’re constantly hearing about this or that brand hoping to boost “awareness,” thus sales, by freshening up, tweaking, or flat-out re-inventing its logo. Maybe they lesson of the mighty Swoosh is: Just don’t do it.

[It’s been around for 40 years? Sheesh.]

A hundred little things

A hundred little things:

Sure, you can copy one or two or even three of their competitive advantages and unique remarkable attributes, but no, it’s going to be really difficult to recreate the magic of countless little decisions. The scarcity happens because so many businesses don’t care enough or are too scared to invest the energy in so many seemingly meaningless little bits of being extraordinary.

[It’s really hard to do this even when you plan to create more than one store, shop, restaurant from the outset.]

Source: Seth’s Blog

Wunda’s World: Clarifying purpose

Wunda’s World: Clarifying purpose:

How can we do this? By understanding and buying into what we are creating and how we see it experienced. We can create a mission, vision and values to clarify and create distinction.

The mission statement is all about purpose. Its about the problem you are trying to solve, the information you are trying to share and/or the service you are trying to provide. Its about the long term goals.

On the other side, the vision statement is an abstraction of the experience. It can include words like fun, simple, quality, quickly, stable, reliable, responsive, etc. It does not include ideas like color schemes, mechanics, technology specifics or other implementation details.

Time can also be spent on value statements (users own their information, we strive to directly connect with and respond to user feedback, all user feedback is valid, etc)

Continue drilling down into these ideas until everyone knows what they are doing, are excited to work towards the goals and know in their hearts they are working on an effort they accept fully.

For new teams, taking time to manifest an understanding of team dynamics, quality and creativity with as much openness and honesty as possible can help ensure the best “good-enough” software gets created in a way that is enjoyable, sustainable and collaborative.

Finally, read these statements every morning. When discussions become long, unclear or hostile, refer back to them. Use them as a method to stay detached to what is no longer serving and focused on the underlying issues.

[Well said!]