Having a 6 month old means waking up at 7am on New Year’s day. Happy 2009 to everyone.
Happy New Year
January 1st, 2009Just do it
December 15th, 2008
Google to kill the desktop app
December 8th, 2008The death of the desktop application has been greatly exaggerated. Even a web-application zealot like myself will admit that.
The one example always given against its death is Photoshop. Web-browsers are too slow to replicate Photoshop. It is unlikely that improving JavaScript and DOM rendering, super-fast/low-latency broadband or Flash/Silverlight plugins are going to cut the mustard either.
So when Google Chrome came out I thought it was a nice improvement in the performance and stability departments but I didn’t think it was going to change software as we know it. Maybe, just maybe, it would be good enough to really replace Word or Excel. But never Photoshop.
I may have been wrong.
Google announced Native Client this evening; run native-code in the browser on the client-side. Simple as that.
Google Chrome + Native Client could potentially replicate Photoshop in the browser. I say this without seeing much of Native Client and with it being very early days. But the signs are clear. Chrome’s independent processes are perfect for this. I’d say they built it that way knowing they were going to release Native Client down the line.
Throw in Google Gears and you have offline plus, potentially, the secure local-resource (files, webcam, USB, GPS etc.) access Native Client needs.
Security will be a huge challenge for Native Client but it can be done.
So here we are. Web-application deployment nirvana and desktop-application power. The next version of Photoshop could be delivered via www.photoshop.com.
UI: Songbird vs. Spotify
December 3rd, 2008In user interface design it is the overall feel created by many small details that matters. You must pay attention to the small things while not loosing sight of the big things. Tiny bits can overwhelm the overall user experience. Compare and contrast Songbird and Spotify, two music applications.
Spotify:
Songbird:
(I tried to get a black/dark theme (Feather) for Songbird but the two I tried were unusable.)
Which do you prefer? Which scans easily and lets you get to the heart of the application? For me, it is Spotify, hands down. It is cleaner and simpler. Smarter choices have been made and attention has been paid to the details without cluttering up the bigger picture.
A simple example is how Songbird defines edges between panels. Spotify has a smooth, unbroken, graded bar from the top of the application down to the list of songs. This includes the window controls and the back/forward buttons and a search box. Songbird on the other hand has a dividing line between the window controls and the back/forward buttons and search box. Between the left-hand playlist panel and the main song listing panel there is one dividing line in Spotify and three in Songbird. Seems like a small detail but this “insert a dividing line” design choice is everywhere in Songbird. Every time it is used it adds clutter to the user interface.
There are many other small details; Spotify uses text-shadowing, Songbird doesn’t. Spotify’s font rendering is superior. Songbird uses tiny, odd custom scrollbars, Spotify sticks with what works. Inputs in Songbird have a deep, dark inner-shadow that makes them far more prominent than they need to be. Spotify favours smart choices over giving you buttons to tweak everything as Songbird does.
The bottom line is Spotify follows Mac OS X design conventions and it makes a difference. Songbird 1.0 is vastly improved over beta versions and does a lot more than Spotify but when I want to play music I would choose a Spotify user interface to a Songbird user interface.
* I am aware that Songbird is cross-platform and incorporates a browser and does 50 million other things. Possibly these are its main problems.
Rumba roomba, cat
November 20th, 2008This cat sitting on top of a roomba vacuum robot is pretty funny. A colleague was telling us how awesome his roomba is and now we can see it for ourselves. As a caption contest I came up with these, all highly original and diverse:
- “WTF? The sign said rumba lessons!”
- “Buddy, are you sure this is the rumba? Seems more like robot to me.”
- “No, no, its left then right then back then back then forward. Rumba not robot!
- “You suck at the rumba.”
Stephen Fry and #oddsox
November 17th, 2008I woke up this morning, 6am on a dark 17th of November, to find Twitter had been taken over by “oddsox” and Stephen Fry (@stephenfry). He has been tweeting from Madagascar. Did you know Barack Obama (@barackobama) and Al Gore (@algore) are on twitter too? I assume there are other notables but those are three luminaries, so much so that I find it fascinating to find them on Twitter.
Here is what I woke up to:
Yes We Did
November 5th, 2008
News as it happens, before it finishes
November 4th, 2008Roger Ebert has an interesting post on the instantaneous nature of modern news. In the olden days, 2007, you went an hour or six between news bulletins. Flip-floppers evened out their flip-flopping between the bulletins. If they didn’t, then it was news. Train smashes came to a rest before you heard about it. You saw Paris Hilton’s knickers after she had put them on, not as she put them on.
In these modern days, 2008, you can follow every single flip-flop as it happens, in real time, right now. Sometimes before it happens. We watch every train and the slightest wobble focuses us on a possible train smash. If it doesn’t smash it was “a close one” and if it does smash we are thankful we saw it happen as it happened. I’m guessing some people are developing super-hero powers that will allow them to stop a train smash they see happening on Twitter. Otherwise they are just necro-train-spotters.
In all seriousness there is a problem here. Some stories only become stories at their conclusions. You can watch an event and see all the twists and turns and at the end come out exactly where you were when you started.
It’s true that only reading the ending can leave you misinformed, left standing in the shallow end of knowledge. But you can’t and shouldn’t be trying to swim in every stream. You’ll likely just drown and come round to David Hasselhoff giving you CPR and asking you what happened; No idea David, I blacked out trying to swallow the ocean.
The news team are there to aggregate events over time. Distill the twisted path of the crooked politician into an arrow pointing straight at the corruption.
Different events do play out over different periods but you still should be picking an aggregated view. Otherwise go and become a reporter. Maybe only for just one story that is really important to you, the one you want to know “how did it come to be.” When the reporter becomes simply a relay of Here & Now you don’t get much value out of following her. You might as well be there yourself instead of clicking Follow on 900 Twitter users.
ColorZilla the palette leech
November 3rd, 2008
ColorZilla has long been a tool in the web developer/designer chest. Even if you have tried and discarded it before you should check out the new version. It includes a DOM Color Analyzer. This traverses the DOM of the current page and returns a palette of used colours. This is useful for learning from well designed sites and also useful on your own sites. You can check colour consistency, simplify your palette and quickly get at colours you’d normally have to hunt through a CSS file for.
Nice feature guys.
