alexfringes

Given that the Chase link asks for your Social Security Number, this page could be a good test of those Google phishing lessons from a post earlier today.

More constructively, though, I wouldn’t mind a service that does this for me in perpetuity. Has anyone heard of something along those lines?

In analyses like these, one thing often gets lost: interfaces are a product of their specific time, not just of a linear evolutionary process confined to the type of product being discussed. No product exists in a timeless state, yet retrospectives such as this one attempt to judge products as though they are this thing that’s frozen outside of the space-time-culture continuum.

So, for these “productive interfaces” let’s keep in mind the goal Microsoft had at the time, which was to get people and businesses to buy Windows machines in bulk for serious, office-centric work. The abilities of the new, less complicated graphical UI had to be rendered in a way that made it feel just as serious as the more complicated text-based interfaces ... or paper binders, even.

Moving forward to things like OS X or iOS, the goals of the encompassing products clearly are different. In these cases the interfaces are attempting to permeate the non-work lives of people otherwise not forced to “work” with computers, in ways they would enjoy using outside of a work context. The goal was to NOT feel like work.

Why is this contextual distinction important? Let’s assume people come to HN to learn. I certainly do. It’s a great place to learn about technology, science, and about building products and companies. From that perspective, it’s worthwhile that we develop some rigor in how we reason about designs and the way they were packaged into a sellable entity. When we judge products historically, statements of an absolute qualitative nature like this one are just fine ... but they are often the equivalent of latching on to one article about a single mouse study, never looking at previous work, not checking the references, ignoring available meta-analyses and so on. All the stuff that is rightfully frowned upon when it comes to scientific research. Clearly product quality is tremendously more subjective than science, but throwing all objective perspectives out of the window is a trend that won’t guide our discussions to the kinds of product insights the HN audience would benefit from the most.

It does seem like it is absent from Beta 3. In Beta 1, I had added it to Control Center but at some point in time since then (Beta 2/3) it was removed, it seems. Not exactly a promising sign.

Edit: it seems that the feature only appears when AirPods are in proximity. Seeing it in Beta 3 now that I’ve gone home and am close to the AirPods.

If one wanted to build a barebones SU replacement, what would be a good approach to get an index of random pages these days? (Or is there an underreported replacement out there somewhere?)

I’ve found that custom molded in-ear hearing protection combined with industrial ear muffs is the closest I can get to drowning out nearby conversations (including loud ones) without requiring a layer of music on top or bothering with headphones underneath the ear muffs.

What’s a good way to look at and explore this data? Where did you learn about the patterns you mention above?

In addition to what other people have mentioned, there is an interesting section half way into the article regarding the history that lead to this high density of quality in a comparatively small town. Apparently the owners of two competing hotels, over the course of generations, tried to outdo each other. So this plays nicely into some of the HN interest in competition as a positive, motivating factor in success. ;)

The article fails to mention that this significantly surpasses the most commonly repeated estimate of 6M (made by Piper Jaffray).

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57603553-37/apple-expected...

For what it's worth, I'm unable to replicate this on a 5s running 7.0.1.

Another step towards NFC being skipped as a truly impactful technology?

"24" News.

Nice attention to detail in this. By the way, it seems like the new view's shadow in the original actually loses opacity as that view leaves the screen. Did you look around for the blur effect at all? You mentioned it but any luck beyond that? I've seen some attempts but nothing useful.

Very interesting. I will give this a try. I've been a fan of Meteor for a while and have worked with both Ember and Angular. I usually end up longing for certain aspects of Meteor in both of those frameworks.

Unsure what the Chrome support is like for 10.6 but current Chrome has WebGL enabled by default. In Safari, you can manually enable it through Preferences>Advanced>Show develop menu in menu bar. Then check "Enable WebGL" in the Develop menu.

[EDIT: Also see wmil's comment below.]

I just woke up from a nap in 2009. I hope. Gonna go invent chatroulette now.

My thoughts exactly. And we see articles on this kind of strategy on HN all the time. Typically they get a bunch of positive, "I like this in the abstract realm/will try this in the future"-type feedback. So I am a little surprised by the disbelief this particular instance is receiving.

"Corporate and inviting" must have been the precursor to those fake processor plant campaigns they did back in the day. Those really made me feel like this company was a warm, loving bunch.

"Dumb" scaling and lack of flow have been painful for a while and it certainly can't hurt to hear some arguments against them. However, the skeuo-flat wars' inclusion is oversimplified and seems like it stems from a marketing decision rather than actual data points. Attack poor hierarchy, obliviousness to information architecture, lack of designers' restraint, or the absence of focus and rigor. With specific examples and counter-examples, attached to the data found in their research, these topics all seem like valuable information. Maybe this is all hidden behind the buy link. Using contrarianism in conjunction with buzzwords won't motivate me to find out.

I haven't actually seen any decent benchmarks between those systems as a whole. Most comparisons seem to shy away from that (between some candidates it probably doesn't make sense to benchmark anyways). But if you've seen anything interesting on that front, I'd be thankful if you could post it. And, you're right, so far Angular hasn't let me down regarding speed.

I get this state for a while on a speedy connection and current machine: http://cl.ly/QbEs

Chrome dev tools show a bunch of other images being loaded before the one that matters gets taken care of. (at 10s I get the image for the initial timeline point: http://cl.ly/QbZx and here is what's happening beforehand: http://cl.ly/Qbee)

Looks like this is partially thumbnails (which take a while despite their small size - not sure what's going on here) plus some larger images that aren't the first timeline point's image.

Nice use of imageLens! I like this a lot. Seems like somebody should add an intelligent lazyload to timelineJS or jerusalem_maps at some point. Your project really tests the limits on that front.

Almost rolled my own D3 timeline before adopting TimelineJS. Saved a bunch of time and still got a look that matched the rest of the project: http://bulger.wbur.org/story/1977/?location=44444 Can only recommend this. Caveat: getting it to be responsive down to the phone will require some work on your end.

Marco Arment seems to think that this fall will be as close as we can get back to 08/09 for a while: http://www.marco.org/2013/06/11/fertile-ground

Regarding the iPhone's role in all this: in the early 2000s, Apple's OS X HIG used to make the distinction somewhat clear when to use the "more" skeumorphic/realist brushed metal style and when to stick to the core Aqua interface with its realist textures, yet abstract meaning. The developer was supposed to ask herself/himself the question that this post is invoking as well: is this specific interaction more easily understood if it maps to a physical object? They used QuickTime as an example, since it related to a real world object: a VHS deck/DVD player.

Then Apple started breaking with its own HIG. The Finder was the prime example, once it adopted brushed metal.

The main shift, however, came not with the iPhone but two years earlier: Dashboard widgets were encouraged to have extreme visual richness, independent of whether there was a real world equivalent or not. Take the Weather widget, for instance. Previous to the slight adjustments in iOS6, the Weather app spoke the exact same visual language as the 2005 widget. You even got the grey linen when you flipped widgets to get to their settings.

Of course, iOS devices were the factor with enough impact to proliferate this style into so many designers' visual language, but this distinction in the timeline slightly takes apart the nice logic behind Apple's decision to push this type of design. Mobile devices had less to do with it than Apple's desire to create a wow factor in their UI. The touch target argument doesn't apply to widgets, neither does the "device becomes the software" point, and of course Apple was completely fine with having 100% inconsistent, heavily colored, heavily textured interfaces be on screen side-by-side, since that was the whole point of putting these widgets together on a Dashboard: they all came and went at once.

Now, I am actually not saying this to criticize the style. In my opinion, it showed guts, curiosity, and showmanship. And it worked. Nor do I want to attack the article - lots of great points in there. However, I thought it would be interesting to underline the typical Apple manner in which this stuff came to be.

(Of course, if anyone really wanted to stick to their guns, they could point out that Cupertino was already working on the iPhone at the time Dashboard came around. Maybe they were just giving the style a test run with full knowledge of its role in their future. The timelines only overlap sparsely from all we can tell, but it's possible. Still. That doesn't invalidate the wow-focus its implementation in Dashboard implies.)

There is a value in social services "smoothing out the details" for a user. Naturally, this step requires the user to feel comfortable about entrusting those decisions to an app and it remains to be seen if people want to do this with dates.

The horror stories (which are always smirkingly relayed - nothing tragic) I hear from girls about OKC messages don't exactly give me confidence in this part of the company's hypothesis. I would be happy to be proven wrong, however. In the end, even ChatRouelette attracted a wide variety of people (for a very short time). Maybe there is an opportunity to use a Chat Roulette/Airtime interaction as the precursor to a (not-so-blind) date.

True. Surprisingly enough, they also use the Android style connect-the-dots unlocking UI for some of them.

I agree. Although the format has its drawbacks, the effort will get attention if the startup's culture is right. If it isn't, somebody like Margot probably would not be interested in working there anyways.

Initially, I was under the impression that this tool generates an image. Then I realized that it uses Google's Fonts–which makes it infinitely more useful for super fast logo prototypes. I would Make this more obvious. Don't hide the final "copy-and-pastable" CSS behind a link; it's the best feature.

It could also find more varied use if you allowed the user to input more text at smaller sizes in order to generate Google Font based CSS for other elements of a layout (or to preview how a logo would look at a more realistic size).

I would suggest a slight redesign of the controls on the left so that it is clear which elements affect the font and which are purely for the shadow. Similarly, the "submission" of a shadow to the list of shadows needs a more obvious description (both verbally and visually) of how this process functions.

Overall, I think this is an excellent way of getting a (placeholder) logo up and running in 20 seconds and I'd love to see how you expand on its current state.