Looking for a little help from my readers. We’re working on an iPhone Wireframing design toolkit. Can you please take 3min and answer just five questions.
Update: The poll is now closed. If you’re interested in being notified when the wireframe toolkit is released please sign up here.
Google recently announced their plan to remove H264 video support from chrome’s use of the HTML <video> tag. This caused a lot of people on the internet some anger, tirades of evilness and more. I however view this in a different light.
Google can do whatever it wants to in its browser and if I don’t like it I can use something else. Even if Google wanted to kill H264 it would likely have little luck without at least the cooperation of another large operating system player like Apple or Microsoft.
Ultimately search traffic is more important to Google then video standards. If this change causes a shift in the former I expect them to back peddel on the latter. Even if WebM is a better format the right way to gain adoption is not by trying to force the format on web developers and consumers. If it’s that good Google should convince the Firefox team and WebKit teams to support it.
I didn’t get the appeal then and I don’t get it now.
With the recent password failure of Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Gawker, etc. It’s should be painfully obvious to several million users that passwords suck and the various solutions for solving password hell are also pretty terrible.
Why are they so bad?
I’ll stop, perhaps you have your own reasons why you think passwords are bad. Let’s move on.
Every website that wants you to login:
The traditional approach has been to present UI on the screen to have you input this information and then ask you to re-enter this information anytime you want to login. Stupid waste of time. Don’t even get me started on Capchas.
The browser should know who I am. The browser should also know how much information I’ve agreed to share with any particular site. Yes, junior privacy is important. The website should never know my true password. Think of it like Facebook Connect. Perhaps “Browser Connect” where the browser will log you in.
Why is this better?
In technical terms this would likely be something like Oauth with the browser but I’d prefer that it be coined as NoAuth as the goal should be to make passwords suck less.
I’ve been working on iPhone apps for the past three years and more recently we’ve been exploring Android and iPad apps as well. These are my first impressions of a Blackberry Bold:
Operating system is very much file/folder based. Apps live in a folder, within folders. The interface has no labels unless you hover over an icon. This is particularly bad as most built in icons are mono-tone. This is a classic example of “Mystery Meat Navigation“What about the apps?
The apps that I explored were very inconsistent. Even across popular and built-in apps the UI was questionable and certainly not elegant. The developer strategy is confusing. If developers are worried about fragmentation the fear is much more real on BlackBerry then on Android. The platform actively sells multiple platforms, resolutions and capabilities:
Across these phones you’ll also find different capabilities across single lines of phones. This can make testing across devices to be challenging.
I think about BlackBerry in the same way that I think about Internet Explorer. You can’t ignore it as it has a non-trivial market share but part of you is rooting for them to go away.
Gravity pulls ink down. If you store your markers in a cup like I do you’ll always get squeaky markers that perpetually run out. A better way to store them is perhaps upside down, like new ketchup bottles, they working with gravity.
The problem then becomes that it’s harder to tell the colors apart.
A simple packaging re-design would probably encourage markers to be stored up-side down and whiteboards the world over would rejoice.
On a semi-related topic we released an update to our Whiteboard iPhone/iPad App.
The story of Android vs. iPhone reminds me a lot of the story of Microsoft Windows vs. Apple Macintosh. In this version the part of Microsoft will be played by Google.
The similarities are striking. Apple was first to market and wowed everyone. Google followed close behind with a competitive, less polished product. Now is where it get’s interesting. In the original story Microsoft had success with the OS but it wasn’t until Windows 3.1 when everything clicked. I believe Android could be at a similar tipping point. A large number of hardware OEM’s are on board with Android and with a small number of adjustments the OS is primed to take off.
What needs to change?
Fix those three things and Android will take off faster like a rocket.
Apple released a product that was decidedly un-magical when it released the Magic Trackpad. Despite the use of the word “Magic” the device was really just a big trackpad with nothing to amaze or delight the end-user. The battery charger that comes with it was more impressive.
The true trackpad of tomorrow would have the following characteristics:
- Web browser specific controls at your fingertips
- Formatting tools from your word processor at your fingertips
- Crop and resize photos with your fingers visually.
- When typing a number show a calculator keypad
- Many of the interface enhancments that are taking place on the iPad could be transposed to desktop apps.
A huge efficiency is in minimizing the number of times your hand has to move from the keyboard to the mouse and back. This is why there are so many keyboard shortcuts for things that can be done with a mouse. The mouse/trackpad can evolve to present visual ways to process input in a way that would be more efficient then either the keyboard or a mouse.
There’s an opportunity to create a true visual and magical input device that combines the best aspects of a trackpad the iPad and the mouse.
