design

Inspiration vs. Imitation

Inspiration vs. Imitation:

1. It’s OK to copy people’s work.[GIANT ASTERISK!]

2. Not everything you make should be on the internet.

3. Diversify your inspirations.

4. History is important.

5. Train your eye.

6. Just because it’s not illegal doesn’t mean it’s ethical.

7. Everybody knows everybody.

Most of the time the offenders aren’t aware of how obvious their inspiration sources are. We’re all guilty of it when we’re starting out, but hopefully this article will remind some of you to keep that practice work out of your portfolio, which will keep the angry blog commenters off your back.

Always keep practicing (and practicing, and practicing), keep looking at beautiful work, keep researching others to look up to and be inspired by. In no time you’ll be making beautiful original work of your own.

[There’s a lot more to this piece. And the issues are often complicated. But no doubt there is value in being yourself. First and foremost is… no one can be a better you than you.]
Source: Jessica Hische

Adobe ends mobile Flash development

Adobe ends mobile Flash development:

If web developers must make non-Flash implementations of everything, why bother making the Flash versions at all? This isn’t just the death of mobile Flash: it’s a confirmation from Adobe that all Flash is on its way out.

Adobe’s management is also being pragmatic about its priorities. Rather than fight a losing battle for a particular runtime, Adobe can focus on what it does best: making tools for creative professionals.

Whether those tools build Flash or HTML apps shouldn’t matter: they should build what creative professionals need to build, and these days, that’s native mobile apps and HTML5 web apps.

[I, for one, will not miss it, though I suspect that it’s HTM5 brethren will visually clog pages just as badly. But maybe, some lessons have been learned…]
Source: Marco.org

iPad coding… hmmm.

Two iPad apps I just got:

I just bought Prompt by Panic. I was inspired by that guy who replaced his Macbook with an iPad. It occurred to me that I could ssh into my dev machine from anywhere in the house and write code using vim. And I’m just weird enough to want to do that. (By “anywhere in the house” I really mean “three feet away on my other desk.”)

Prompt is cool. Simple, good.

[I enjoyed Brett’s honesty here (3 ft away, heh.), and I think while I know some folks who are screen based text editor lovers I cannot count myself among them, mostly because I can never remember the key commands that I need to remember (other than the most basic ones). Give me that GUI any day. That said, there are a lot of times when I need to SSH into a VM somewhere and get something done, and Prompt has been there for a while allowing to ease concerns regardless of where I am. (Now, to convince people to allow me to be out about even more… but anyway…)

There was one time when a session like that went from just a quick thing to “seriously?” in a very short while. I remembered that I had a wireless keyboard in my bag, got it paired up to the phone and got back to work. Infinitely better. So I get how you could do the same thing only even betterer on an iPad with its much larger screen. And I now take a keyboard with me more than I should.

But in the end I don’t see a big difference between using an iPad and a keyboard and using a MacBook Air… at least for coding and operations work. I know they are actual and conceptual differences (everything from cost to OS etc.) I do love that folks are stretching the way they work to make things more pleasant. For those of us at the pointy end of the web, running tests, or compiling code can often cause sword fights to break out. So while the novelty is cool, and I love the idea of running tests etc. remotely as part of a workflow, and I think it bends people’s minds around how you can work, where, and with a very small footprint, make sure you’re not working hard at using cool tools if it doesn’t make sense.]
Source: inessential.com

Turning Hardware Into Software

Turning Hardware Into Software: We used to have the iPod app, which is now simply called “Music”. The previous app icon was a picture of an iPod, because that was the simplest way to explain what was going on with a single image. What was hardware is now software. With iOS 5, the gap has presumably been bridged, and the anachronistic iconography went away. On the other hand, I’d venture to guess that the Phone.app hardware handset icon isn’t going away for a while; the iPod was never an emergency device, and phones have been around a little longer than digital music players. I might not even know where to find a handset telephone in 2011, but the image as an icon is completely unambiguous.

Texture-rich, literal UI isn’t merely an affectation, and it isn’t there to comfort us, exactly; the purpose is to connect. For those of us who have been playing with technology since we were small children, a list of books—or any other kind of data—is second nature. For the generations of people who aren’t so technologically immersed, a wooden bookshelf adds context and warmth to what is otherwise perceived as a cold machine. Apple’s strength is connecting technology to human beings, and skeuomorphic design acts as a bridge between what we already understand and what must now be learned.

With the iPhone, we started communicating with technology via touch in a meaningful way for the first time. Apple added more touch gestures in Lion, and it’s probably a safe guess that the trend will continue. Semi-realism and texture invite touch. They invite interaction. Laugh at the leather and torn paper, but it’s a hell of a lot more inviting to touch than a cold hunk of metal and glass.

[This might be a permadiscussion. I don’t mind per app branding, but the fiddly little pieces of parker hanging off of things that detest in real life, I can now detest without being to correct them in my digital life. harumph.]
Source: Better Elevation

Screen size

Size:

Marco Arment:

Android phones have been one-upping each other with screen size a lot recently. It’s an interesting tactic that seems to be working, at least relative to other Android phones. When comparing phones side-by-side in a store, the larger screens really do look more appealing, and I bet a lot of people don’t consider the practical downsides.

Apple generally tries to make it instantly obvious which of its products are better — what the trade-offs are. 16/32/64 GB: pay more, get more storage. iPhone 4S vs. 4: faster, better camera, Siri.

Bigger-screen iPhone proponents are telling me via email that they don’t necessarily want Apple to replace the 3.5-inch models with a 4-point-something inch one — just want a bigger screen model added to the lineup. But then which is “better”? I think it’s likely that many customers’ intuition would tell them that bigger must be better, and they’d make a choice they’d come to regret. What appeals to you in-store, side-by-side, isn’t necessarily what will appeal to you in long-term actual use.

 ★ 
[All true. But the point is subtle one. Many people may not care. It’s the same problem being complained about in other threads that the “4S” is not “5”. That somehow all new internals wasn’t exciting enough for the tech press. But here, tech guys are arguing over whether a 4 inch screen is better compromise than a 3.5 inch screen and whether an individual’s hand (specifically the person looking at this issue) can reach the entire screen as get it larger and is that a problem or not. For some, a larger phone with a bigger screen will be a better solution. For others, and I count myself among them, it wouldn’t be. At some point, a device stops being a “phone” a starts being something else. And with that you’ve now entered a very complex space of tradeoffs and design decisions. Size, weight, thinness, pocket sizes, cost, capability, battery life, experience all weigh in on what a device is… and worse yet, you have to live with the decision for a while before you’ll know whether it works or not and why. That is always an expensive proposition for users. It’s why reviewers who review a lot of “stuff” often seem more picayune than the rest of us… it’s not that they’re more opinionated and more demanding although many of them cultivate that belief. It’s that they’re forced to use many more designs. When you do that, you feel the failure in your hand. (“Man. That’s annoying!”). Yes, in the store a larger screen will have a positive impact, but carrying it in your pocket, not necessarily being able to reach across its surface and other issues may not be noticeable at first. It may feel like a cool drink of water in hell, or it may be one of those things that annoys you many times a day.. Hard to say from here. But that sucks.]
Source: Daring Fireball

A Pattern Language

"When I was a child, I thought
God was disappointed
whenever some distraction interrupted...
Now I know that God expects such interruptions,
for He knows our frailty.
It is completion that surprises Him."

--From the God Whispers of Han Qing-jao

Noah loves playing with patterns. Colors, shapes, letters, lego pieces, alternation, similarity… the whole gamut.

But he also gets upset when for one reason or another he can’t complete a pattern the way he’d like. Lack of resources, lack of concentration. What have you. He likes a nice tidy world from that perspective (although not from many others…)

There’s much yet to teach.