konch blog

So with almost no fanfare this app called Clear comes out and it...

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 16:52:21 +0000

So with almost no fanfare this app called Clear comes out and it doesn’t really do anything of note… well kind of.

For one there has been a load of hype and press around this app, someone even released a knock-off before the app hit the store! A lot of the talk has been around the interface, the rest its use of gestures. The general feeling is that this is a game changer, the start of a UX revolution where all apps will be super reduced and rely solely on gestures.

It feels kinda of foreign at first, like a new OS (*cough* Metro *cough*) has been strapped onto iOS but there’s nothing new here. They have taken the underlying gestures in iOS and brought them to the forefront rather than have them in a recessed supporting role. You’ll not find labelled buttons to close, add edit or delete. Instead you pinch, pull & swipe.

The apps feature set is also really really focussed. You can create lists and add items to those lists. That is it. It’s more like its pen and paper counterpart than any other app that uses skeuomorphism to make it feel like you are using a pen/paper/notepad.

But is that all it does?

Well no. It makes you think about what’s next, and what other apps will look like when you think different.

Hey it’s almost the weekend people!

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 23:15:14 +0000

Hey it’s almost the weekend people!

"Taking vacation at Red Frog is encouraged (and even celebrated). And it’s not abused. Ever. By..."

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 18:43:08 +0000

“Taking vacation at Red Frog is encouraged (and even celebrated). And it’s not abused. Ever. By anyone. Simply make sure your work is getting done and make sure you’re covered while you’re away and that’s it—no questions asked.”

- Give Your Employees Unlimited Vacation Days

Some look at business management techniques like this and think they are pipe dreams or flat out silly. I disagree: I think it’s a shift in our culture and a necessary one. Just as sales commissions train salespeople to focus on the wrong results, so do strict 9-5 environments and time-tracking. Productivity, skill, and value do not relate to minutes, hours, or days. One day I hope to lead an office with unrestricted vacation time, transparent salaries, and proper 15% time.

(via 9-bits)

We Are The 0.6%

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 11:24:38 +0000

We Are The 0.6%:

parislemon:

Hard to pick the most ridiculous element of these updated numbers.

Is it that just 0.6% of Android users have Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0) two months after it launched?

Is it that of the remaining 99.4%, only 55% are upgraded to Gingerbread (2.3), which came out over a year ago?

Is it that over 30% are stuck on Froyo (2.2) which is 20 months old?

Is it that 8.5% (something like 10 million devices) are stuck on Eclair (2.1), which came out two years ago?

Is it that only 3.3% are using Honeycomb (3.0), which means that all those highly-touted tablets last year are clearly huge flops?

I can’t decide. You choose.

BOOM! Numbers 9 & 10 are mental… wonkenstein: Wow,...

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 11:45:51 +0000

BOOM! Numbers 9 & 10 are mental…

wonkenstein:

Wow, some ridiculous table tennis shots!

the best table tennis shots of 2011

Via Guardian Sport

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2011-12-25)

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 03:26:27 +0000

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2011-12-25):

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2011-12-18)

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 14:20:39 +0000

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2011-12-18):

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz

need to invest in a coffee table first but I too am looking...

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 13:13:40 +0000

need to invest in a coffee table first but I too am looking forward to this.

buzz:

Really looking forward to having a copy of Jon Hicks’s fantastic looking “The Icon Handbook” on my coffee table.

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2011-12-11)

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 07:52:34 +0000

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2011-12-11):

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2011-11-27)

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 17:46:39 +0000

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2011-11-27):

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz

STAMPED! Woo Yay new App funz… but wait this is just...

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 14:32:00 +0000

STAMPED!

Woo Yay new App funz… but wait this is just likes/+1’s filtered by your friends right? So unless your friends are using it you have no point of reference. Sure you can Stamp stuff you think is awesome (like) but what about the new things you don’t own/haven’t been to?

You have no clue what to do, which means you have to sit at home or wander around aimlessly and stare at a blank (albeit well designed) UI ***cough*** Color ***cough** or you could just use the iPhone in your hands and well, call your friends and ask their opinion…

It’ll be interesting to see how this evolves and whether it overtakes Oink which seems to be the same thing but with more features and not quite as refined UI. There was a lot of hype for Oink (and I presume there will be for Stamped) and I’ve seen some usage in my Twitter feed but I’ve yet to be convinced.

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2011-11-20)

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 07:11:49 +0000

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2011-11-20):

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz

tougherthanyouknow: HAHAHAHAHA! An effective actor. lol

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 10:33:21 +0000

tougherthanyouknow:

HAHAHAHAHA! An effective actor. lol

"The Facebook app fuck ups seem to be because they’re more interested in dicking around with HTML5..."

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 10:32:57 +0000

“The Facebook app fuck ups seem to be because they’re more interested in dicking around with HTML5 even though anyone with any taste knows building a fully native app is 100% better. One part of Google’s app fuck ups are similar. But at least I get that. These guys want to cut corners. Why spend time crafting a beautiful app when you can just add a nice layer of polish to a turd and shove it out the door?”

- parislemon: Speaking Of Shoddy iOS Apps…

Believe me, I’m usually the last to defend Facebook or Google, and I completely agree that the Gmail app is a half-assed disappointment, but I think this is a pretty glib take on “web vs. native.” I’ve been a Cocoa developer for a long time now, and my sympathies are very much with Apple, but I am increasingly convinced that we’ll someday look back at these early days of the iOS as a kind of bubble for old-school native software development.

This is not to say that iOS won’t continue to be successful as a platform, or that developers will abandon the App Store en masse. I just think that the current situation—in which many companies whose engineering efforts have traditionally not extended far beyond basic web technologies are suddenly expected to maintain complex native development projects for multiple platforms—seems a tad untenable. I feel pretty confident in asserting this because, for whatever perceived benefits native apps offer, they also presents a lot of very significant challenges—many of which are likely to be quite surprising to anyone who is accustomed to web programming.

To me, one of the textbook examples of something the web is made for but is practically rocket science on iOS is text rendering. While users are accustomed to thinking of iOS apps as exceptionally beautiful and visually sophisticated, UIKit’s text rendering capabilities turn out to be frustratingly primitive, making it quite a challenge for even expert iOS developers to match the advanced page layout and text formatting capabilities of web browsers. This is less of a problem for a utilitarian service like Twitter, where content is uniform, unformatted, and basically free of inline media. But when you start attempting to replicate something like the Tumblr Dashboard or Facebook News Feed in native code, you’re faced with a formidable engineering challenge.

Many of the, shall we say, least experienced iOS shops (read: content companies) have solved this problem by essentially shipping 200 MB InDesign layouts masquerading as general purpose software. Other, more sophisticated companies have attempted to get around this problem, at great development cost, by building rich text rendering and CSS-like styling facilities into megalomaniacal frameworks like Facebook’s three20. The problem with that approach, in my experience, is that you don’t have to go very far down the path of text rendering before you’re basically reinventing HTML and CSS. Considering that, as I said, the web is designed for media, content, and rich text, I don’t think a decision to rely on a web view for something the web is exceptionally good at is a sign of laziness—in fact, it may be a sign of prudence. I suspect this realization, not mere half-assedness, is behind Facebook’s decision to back away from their fully native, three20 based approach and instead focus on building a hybrid mobile platform.

None of this is to say that I think native apps are bad or that I’m trying to discourage companies from investing in them—far from it. Developing iOS apps is what I love, and I hope to continue doing it for some time. I just think that most companies could use a bit more nuance in their mobile strategy than the current “native is king” thinking usually implies. I’d personally prefer to see more companies develop a great baseline mobile web (or hybrid) product rather than feeling obligated to slavishly (and often poorly) recreate their entire product in native code.

(via buzz)