Path Design

Path Design:

This is the best thing I’ve read about Path, and it perfectly articulates something I’ve thought not only about Path, but also a lot of other exemplars of the fussy, post-Apple wave of “high design” in tech products.

Then Brent says:

Read both, and then the Khoi Vinh article article Buzz links to.

So I did:

It’s difficult to say exactly how much design is “too much,” but finding that middle ground may be the most important job that an interaction designer has. Negotiating an equilibrium between the user’s ability to roam free and the system’s desire to funnel activities into specific directions is tricky business. This is a challenge that requires not only imagination and skill, which the best designers always have, but also perseverance and insight — the ability and willingness to work in an iterative, responsive fashion, with the understanding that the job is never really done. Even among the best designers, that’s rare.

[But I don’t agree. There is no room to breathe in Facebook, or really in Flickr either. Flickr feels a bit more “mine” because in my use it’s mainly about me and people I know or know of. So it feels personal that way. Facebook, you’re thinking is as well. But I rarely really use Facebook per se. My tweets publish there for the sake of folks I know who inhabit that space. And I “like” a few things here and there. But that’s about it. So not only is my use limited, but I find the page jammed with alerts, ads, and junk about which I haven’t the slightest interest.

I think the “tricky” cases are where you want a clean and clear design for the main case, but make less used and more compacted flows available. to me that’s tricky. The other case for tricky smacks of trying to herd users into an action, or gaming. I’m not a fan of either tactic.

And while I’m railing about stuffs… notice how many sites have started demanding that you sign up before you can even see anything on it? I refuse to join any of them. If I visit a site with commerce on my mind, you darn well better be able to show a pretty picture and maybe some lovingly crafted text before I give you anything.]

Source: inessential.com

The Chef and the Critic

The Chef and the Critic:

We’re hoping to succeed; we’re okay with failure. We just don’t want to land in between. The app idea, which came first, was a way we were hoping to make TV without going through all the TV hoops. The magazine came later. Of course you want your peers and the public to engage with something like this, but I don’t have any idea of who the people are or what they really think of it. I’m always prepared for people to be like, “This is just f—ing too ridiculous,” and then it will all be over.

[snip -Ed.]

The first audience I think about is us: Can we make something we don’t hate? Then it’s my friends: Can I create something they will think is cool even though they have to listen to me bitch all the time? Then it’s people out in the world. And my secret hope is that a certain aspect of the magazine leads them down an unexpected alley—reading more Junichiro Tanizaki, or chasing down a Bill Orcutt record, or seeking out Kay & Ray’s potato chips.

I think Dave is incapable of stopping himself from following ideas that interest him. He doesn’t have a brand he’s worried about; he’s not worried about a message; he’s not interested in trying to create something that’s going to be a blockbuster. Failure is an option, but only when you’ve done something that says, “This is the most honest thing we can put out there.” So that allows us to make it as weird as we want because we believe in what we’re doing.

I can’t speak to how he runs his businesses, but he has just scores and scores of talented people, and he is creating scenarios where they run this restaurant and this restaurant—Dave Chang is not the chef of it. I’m probably in a much more stoney-baloney sort of way into that idea, but, also just creatively, that’s exciting to me. You find people and let them really go out on their own with it and then shape it as much as it needs to land on its feet.

[The bold bits (added by myself) are a model I’ve followed for years.]

Apple’s size is breathtaking.

Amazon determined to continue its assault on Apple or something – MacDailyNews – Welcome Home:

MacDailyNews Take: Elevating Amazon to the level of an equal with Apple is a joke. Apple could buy Amazon outright, with cash, and still have $15 billion left over. Apple’s market value is rapidly approaching 5 times that of Amazon’s. Five times. Amazon’s net income for calendar Q311 (they don’t report Q4 until tomorrow) was $63 million. Apple’s calendar Q311 net income was $6.62 billion. Apple made 105 times more than Amazon did last calendar Q3. Calendar Q4 will likely be a worse comparison for Amazon as Apple generated an astonishing net profit of $13.06 billion.

[Apple’s current size is mind boggling.]

d: Suffering we mutually endure

You can often a read a line like this

“Get on my wheel, buddy,” I urged. He gurgled something, latched on, and I dragged him over the top.

And every time a read a line like this I think “Really?” because I’ve been offered wheels as I hack my way up a climb, and I never feel latched on, and I never feel like I’ve been dragged over the top. For the times where I’ve been the stronger rider (Um, ok, let it pass.) and offered my wheel… I don’t feel any additional resistance if they do grab on. Where does this language come from?

I once thought this must be the difference between the racers and pros and us recreational types. Maybe they climb the hills fast enough for these words to have meaning? Maybe you can feel the reduction in effort created by the aerodynamic suction of the rider in front? Yeah. I’ll bet it doesn’t feel that way to those riders either. As Greg Lemond famously said “It doesn’t get easier, you get faster.”

To understand we must remember the essence of cycling as a sport. The suffering we mutually endure, regardless of level, when we point our bikes upward. It is a gesture of hope, commiseration and understanding. It is an act of kindness. An offer to share the pain and misery. I see you. I feel you pain. Do not quit. Do not give the hill your soul. Join with me and we will climb this together. A contract that eases the grade—sooner or later we all are on the front or the back. And it is the respect for this that brings us the language.

Value | The Cynical Musician

Value | The Cynical Musician:

Google’s greatest fear, however, is that the content that draws the biggest audiences might be placed beyond its reach. It has seen this happen with Facebook. That’s why Google lobbies against copyright enforcement and for and “open internet” – with the special Googley meaning that “open” has here. It doesn’t mean open, as in “open market”(where anyone can set up shop, for fun or profit), it means open as in “you cannot shut Google out”.

[snip -Ed]

Apple, on the other hand, as Andrew points out: “hasn’t spent one cent on lobbying against intellectual property”.

Apple doesn’t need other people’s property to make money. For Apple, consumers aren’t the means to an end. They are the end. Apple creates valuable consumer products and charges a pretty penny for them. Guess what? People are buying. Not just the “atoms” (devices) either; the iTunes Music and App stores are doing pretty well, too. Apple sees value in intellectual property and is prepared to pay for it in order to sell it to its customers, increasing the value of its devices in the process. Apple’s thoughts are for the consumer and how it can provide the greatest value, that it will then charge for. Unlike Google, it has no interest in decreasing the perception of value, because that would mean that it would need to charge less. To Google, the value of what it provides is simply in how many eyeballs it gets. It doesn’t need to be great, just good enough.

[I don’t agree with everything here but there are lots of good points and even more in the comments. You can argue the various monitory theories, and for example Apple does make a fortune by owning its markets (iTunes, App Stores, iBooks, etc.) which do you require other people’s property. The bottom line, is that it is not easy to convince a large group of people that your art is valuable. It’s gonna take hard work and not a small amount of luck.]

Tweets still must flow

Tweets still must flow:

Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world. We have also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld, and why.

We haven’t yet used this ability, but if and when we are required to withhold a Tweet in a specific country, we will attempt to let the user know, and we will clearly mark when the content has been withheld. As part of that transparency, we’ve expanded our partnership with Chilling Effects to share this new page, http://chillingeffects.org/twitter, which makes it easier to find notices related to Twitter.

Source: Twitter Blog

Sandi Metz: SOLID Design Principles – Dependency Injection

Sandi Metz: SOLID Design Principles – Dependency Injection:

Because of the style of coding in Job, it contains dependencies that effect my ability to refactor and reuse it in the future.

[An excellent example of something that was hard to think through in the last significant codebase I worked on. There are always tradeoffs in style, testing, and time spent. We managed as best we could, but I think we should have done more of this (easy to say now.)]

Source: brynary