The dollar sign of the ads in tumblr app is designed in a way that it animates only when scrolled, drawing just enough attention when using the app regularly while not distracting the content when user stopped.
The assumption driving these kinds of design speculations is that if you embed the interface–the control surface for a technology–into our own bodily envelope, that interface will “disappear”: the technology will cease to be a separate “thing” and simply become part of that envelope. The trouble is that unlike technology, your body isn’t something you “interface” with in the first place. You’re not a little homunculus “in” your body, “driving” it around, looking out Terminator-style “through” your eyes. Your body isn’t a tool for delivering your experience: it is your experience. Merging the body with a technological control surface doesn’t magically transform the act of manipulating that surface into bodily experience. I’m not a cyborg (yet) so I can’t be sure, but I suspect the effect is more the opposite: alienating you from the direct bodily experiences you already have by turning them into technological interfaces to be manipulated.
I love the simplistic, beautiful onboarding experiences that betaworks creates for its apps. The screenshots above are from the first time you open the new Dots game betaworks released. The intro experience for Tapestry was really enjoyable too.
Credit for the beauty+joy of Dots and Tapestry should go to Patrick Moberg
The new norm in dealing with modal image view on mobile apps.
Image expands seamlessly from a thumbnail into a modal full-screen view while the main view shrinks slightly into background, and the new view can be dismissed by flicking the full-screen image up or down.
While the image is being dragged up/down, the background fades in relation to the drag amount, revealing the previous view ever so slightly.
Sample images:
Facebook app for iOS: the first example of such fluid modal view as far as I’m aware. Likely to be one of the direct influences of Mike Matas joining the Facebook team.
Tweetbot: update from 23 Apr 2013.
tumblr for iOS: update from 24 Apr 2013.
The beauty of this new form of interaction is that it doesn’t break the default UI behaviour laid out by Apple for iOS but extends it elegantly.
Full screen image display behaviour is pretty much defined by the default Photos.app on iOS. User taps on the image to toggle UI elements one of which offers a way to go back (close), swipes to go to next/previous image, pinch to zoom in/out. All of them are still available on this new form of interaction so it is less likely to confuse new users, yet additional behaviour is non-destructive, easily discoverable and has very low cost of learning.
I expect this to become another defacto standard practice in many iOS apps to come.
You don’t design something like Facebook Home using Photoshop.
I touched on this point earlier in How to Survive in Design (and in a Zombie Apocalypse), but something like Facebook Home is completely beyond the abilities of Photoshop as a design tool. How can we talk about physics-based UIs and panels and bubbles that can be flung across the screen if we’re sitting around looking at static mocks? (Hint: we can’t.) It’s no secret that many of us on the Facebook Design team are avid users of QuartzComposer, a visual prototyping tool that lets you create hi-fidelity demos that look and feel like exactly what you want the end product to be. We’ve given a few talks on QC in the past, and its presence at Facebook (introduced by Mike Matas a few years back) has changed the way we design. Not only does QC make working with engineers much easier, it’s also incredibly effective at telling the story of a design. When you see a live, polished, interactable demo, you can instantly understand how something is meant to work and feel, in a way that words or long descriptions or wireframes will never be able to achieve. And that leads to better feedback, and better iterations, and ultimately a better end product. When you are working on something for which the interactions matter so greatly—in this case, a gesture-rich, heavily physics-based ui—anything less simply will not do.
Conditions that allow such practice like average climate in Thailand, dress code of the citizens, sense of safety/security to theft, willingness to walk bear feet.
SplitSpiral is an exterior wall-mounted sculpture that consists of a metal armature of curved stainless steel pipes and holographic glass discs arranged in criss-crossing Fibonacci spiral pattern that wraps the South East corner of the façade of the USTAR Innovation Science Center. The visual transformation of light into color represents a dialogue or communication between the artwork and the power of the sun.
Dimensions: 33’ h x 33’ w x 1’ d / 10m x 10m x .3m Material: Holographic Glass, Stainless Steel
We all know that the stressors of exercise are necessary for good health, but people don’t translate this insight into other domains of physical and mental well-being. We also benefit, it turns out, from occasional and intermittent hunger, short-term protein deprivation, physical discomfort and exposure to extreme cold or heat. Newspapers discuss post-traumatic stress disorder, but nobody seems to account for post-traumatic growth. Walking on smooth surfaces with “comfortable” shoes injures our feet and back musculature: We need variations in terrain. Modernity has been obsessed with comfort and cosmetic stability, but by making ourselves too comfortable and eliminating all volatility from our lives, we do to our bodies and souls what Mr. Greenspan did to the U.S. economy: We make them fragile. We must instead learn to gain from disorder.
The great names of the golden years of English science were hobbyists, not academics: Charles Darwin, Henry Cavendish, William Parsons, the Rev. Thomas Bayes. Britain saw its decline when it switched to the model of bureaucracy-driven science.