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What happens when you combine iOS gestures and UI conventions from Tweetie, Facebook, Twitter for iPad & Path? You get Sparrow, and that’s not a bad thing either. This mail app still feels rooted in iOS despite using a number of “3rd party” conventions.
No doubt using a lot of the tech from their successful desktop app this 1.0 release seems really stable. There’s clearly been some good beta testing. Push notifications are an obvious omission and they are hoping to implement them, but to be honest it’s quite nice not having constant notifications.
I’ll definitely give it a run as my default email client and for those that need it hope that a push solution can be implemented in the next or upcoming release.
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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.
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Bold: Crashing Down
Interesting point. I can still see success for Project Meteor if it extends to be a UI design app. Deisgning natively in the browser is one thing designing natively in Objective C and Java is another.
Lately there’s been a campaign for a better web design app. Photoshop and other editors just aren’t cutting it when the web is so flexible. Different screen sizes and mobile device orientations are difficult to design for in applications that are designed to handle a single image.
I think…
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Pictograms
Interesting article on the rise of pictograms within modern digital devices.
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What does 320dpi mean to designers?
Great first thoughts and proposed techniques on designing for the iPhone 4.
Thanks Tim, you’ve just saved me a whole bunch of time.
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Twitterific for iPad
I recently purchased Tweetie 2 for iPhone (just before the sale to Twitter I might add) and have found it better in many regards to Twitterific. However I do miss the bird chirping and the dark theme view of Twitterfic and I’ve been tempted back.
Now when I finally get my hands on an iPad I know exactly what client I’ll be using… unless Tweetie can top it!
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Slide Different
Not something I’d immediately picked up on but with so much visual noise in these apps today thanks to the myriad of options it’s good someone’s taken the time to point this out. Whether it leads to anything is another thing.
I did not mean to write an essay detailing all the ways in which slider controls in Photoshop CS4 reveal problems in the design, development, quality control, and management of the product; I really didn’t. I just pulled up the Smart Sharpen dialog one evening and, sighing at its hideousness for the nth time, decided to put together a little joke post. That was all.
Is there an Internet rule yet stating that even the most obviously indefensible mistake will eventually be defended by someone somewhere? Awful marketing efforts get explained as genius viral campaigns, broken features become solutions.
So, several people wrote to yours truly picking on one single item from my post: the sliders’ deviation from OS X’s standard. The defense being twofold, it seems:
- Photoshop’s sliders are different for a reason, and
- Hey, Apple does custom controls too, so it’s alright.
To which I say:
- No they’re not; not as a rule, anyway. There’s no reason for Memory Usage, Brightness, Pencil Width, Radius, and Scale to be different from each other. They all do the same exact thing: pick a single value from a range. (Needless clarification: yes, Scale has to be a bit smaller to fit comfortably in its window. Making well-fitting smaller versions of controls shouldn’t be rocket science.) These make up more than 50% of my examples. What’s the explanation for those?
As for the remaining custom controls, they do more than pick a single value, so they should be different. But… this different? Why are the Threshold and Color Balance sliders aliased when Layer Blending isn’t? Does anyone find these well-rendered? - When Apple deviates, they usually innovate. When they introduce a new slider (like the one in iTunes 9) it’s an improvement. It feels at home in its window.
However, Apple is sometimes wrong. Final Cut Pro - originally designed by Macromedia - is not Apple’s finest UI hour. Children learn at a young age that bad behavior isn’t excused by saying “Cathy did it too!”
(I have now written way too much about all this. Aren’t these flaws simply obvious?)
I’m not saying anyone at Adobe is evil or crazy. I thought it was, in fact, pretty clear why Photoshop’s sliders are an unappealing mess: they were designed by someone who shouldn’t have been designing, implemented by someone who should’ve been implementing better, skipped over by someone who should have been finding bugs, and approved by someone who should have had higher standards.
It’s not the end of the world that a thumb control is misplaced by one pixel. All software ships with bugs, or it doesn’t ship. But here we are, version 11 of the app, and one of the most-used standard controls in the app is broken.
And this is only sliders we’re talking about. If this dead horse needed any more beating, I’d put together a gallery of misaligned text labels, inconsistent popup buttons (often in the same window!), badly scaled controls, and nearly impenetrable UI bugs. (I mean, there’s a whole blog for these.) What’s the explanation there - is that innovation? Or is it simply the case that this doesn’t matter enough to Adobe?
I love Photoshop. It’s where I spend eight hours five times a week. I just wish that one of these days, instead of piling on more furniture, they’d clean up the place.
