elastic rat

iOS 7

Posted by paul on June 13, 2013.

I’ll have more to write about iOS 7 once I’ve lived with it for a few weeks, but a lot of the commentary so far has been pretty knee-jerk.

If you approach a new thing that a lot of smart, dedicated designers have been slaving over with a different attitude, say one of curious respect, then it is much more interesting. What if instead of slagging the new design without thinking we actually explore it, play with it, and try to tease out the hidden meanings and motives it embodies.

The best of this kind of analysis that I’ve seen so far is in the Quora answer by David Cole. Please take the time to read and consider the entire thing, as there are too many great insights to quote just one.
You Could Have Done That… But You Didn’t

Posted by paul on May 5, 2013.

Life is short. Don’t waste your time being that bird who does nothing but poop on statues. It won’t be long until the rain washes all your poop away.

Michelle Lara Lin
Immutable URLs

Posted by paul on May 1, 2013.

I wrote a new article on Medium called Immutable URLs.

Medium is a great place to write. Check it out.
Your Job

Posted by paul on April 30, 2013.

Communicating with your users is your job.

Joel Hladecek
The Ridicule Cohort

Posted by paul on April 25, 2013.

I have found that return and ridicule are highly correlated over the years. We have made more money on things that were highly ridiculed than on any other cohort. When I see people laughing at ideas and companies we have backed, I smile. It means we are going to make a lot of money on that investment.

–Fred Wilson
Forecast.io – Weather UX done right

Posted by paul on April 6, 2013.

It’s funny how we accept mediocre user experiences for a long, long time in a certain category simply because we have never seen it done right. And then when someone steps up and says, “Hey this could be so much better.” we immediately recognize that, yup, it’s way better like this.

I remember that feeling the first time I used Google.

Well forecast.io is like that. not as momentous as Google likely, but still.
Hiring Designers

Posted by paul on March 17, 2013.

This has to be the most beautiful ‘We’re Hiring’ page ever….
Instruments UIAutomation 1 Second Delay

Posted by paul on March 13, 2013.

Test automation in iOS has always felt like a second class effort. A few years ago Apple introduced a way to automate your iOS GUI tests with Javascript and UIAutomation but it has a weird restriction that anytime you called UIAHost.performTaskWithPathArgumentsTimeout it would inject a 1 second delay before, you know, performTask.

This hack cleverly works around the delay by swizzling the ScriptAgent executable to remove the delay.
AE / AF Lock in the iPhone Camera and Feature Hiddenness

Posted by paul on February 19, 2013.

I’m fascinated by what is a really common UX problem – feature hiddenness – more commonly referred to by the scientific sounding term discoverability.

As software developers we toil away to add one great feature after another, but then to our surprise, many users never try our new features. Is it because they have no need for them? Sometimes. But I would wager that it’s usually because they never even knew those features were there.

As a product ages this happens more frequently because new features are added to an existing set and those people who were already using the app never seek out the new thing.

What got me thinking about this today was my very, very late discovery that the iOS camera has exposure and focus lock! I know, I know – you are thinking – wow this guy is slow.

I knew of course that you could touch anywhere on the camera view to focus and set exposure (and some 3rd party apps like Camera+ separate the two functions) but what I didn’t know until today is that if you tap and hold a point in the view for a few seconds then it will lock the AE/AF point to that spot and allow you to recompose.

I think this highlights the problem with gesture UI in general. Now that I know about this feature it’s very powerful and useful to me — I use the camera app daily. But until I heard about it in a blog or video I had no idea it was there and now way to discover it either.

‘Feature Hiddenness” and the feeling engendered when you unhide one is going to become such a thing that it needs it’s own new word for this generation. Suggestions?
Finding Vivian Maier

Posted by paul on February 17, 2013.

I really cannot wait to see Finding Vivian Maier, the Kickstarter funded documentary about the fascinating hidden world of what was almost the greatest never known street photographer of our time.

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