Ideas and Discoveries

Back! Done! Cancel! Save! Mobile apps sport a bevy of buttons to dismiss a view, but their proper placement isn’t always obvious. Here are the general rules to follow.

The history of New York City’s aggressive grid of city streets offers plenty of lessons for digital designers.

Jakob Nielsen’s dubious mobile website guidelines make the mistake of assuming that there’s such a thing as “this is mobile content, and this is not.”

Designers often conflate device context with user context—or worse, with user intent. “This is mobile, so they’ll never want to do that.” ”This is mobile, so it’s aimed only at users on the go.” Friends, this is hooey.

The good folks at O’Reilly interviewed me this week about how new technologies change how we should think about interface design as both consumers and designers.

If you want to take advantage of the new iPad’s gorgeous screen (and of course you do), every image you push down the wire is about to put on a ton of weight. That has implications in lots of places and for lots of people.

More and more, when we refer to mobile, what we really mean is “non-traditional computing devices and environments,” a stodgy mouthful that really boils down to not the desktop. We need a new term for our sprawling landscape of devices.

The folks at Corning put together a heckuva concept video that peeks into the near future of touchscreen interfaces.

Go figure, but pulling someone through a QR code means we have to give people information they actually want or need.

Big changes are afoot in the new Twitter app for iPhone, with both good and bad things happening with the app’s gesture interactions. Here’s a hard look.

A 1922 silent movie shows off perhaps the first mobile phone, “Eve’s Wireless,” a contraption that required a fire hydrant and an umbrella to work.

The iPad is a device suited for sitting or reclining, which certainly makes it a device of contemplation, and yep, that’s the perfect state of mind for reading or watching a movie. But it’s a mistake to think of it as “only” a new-fangled book or tv screen. Contemplation is not the same as passivity.

“Touch People’s Hearts” is the translated title of the Chinese edition of my book Tapworthy (触动人心), and I couldn’t be more tickled.

Games are the best (and perhaps most commercially viable) flavor of augmented reality, painting an imaginative layer on everyday surroundings.

Newsstand is a read-all-about-it moment for publishers, as readers seem to love it so far. But we can’t let this recent success distract us from real problems with the issue-based publishing model Newsstand supports.

Jordan Mechner had the inspired idea of introducing Apple superbot Siri to classic chatterbot Eliza.