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Ideas and Discoveries

Pile of buttons. Photo by s.red@flickr.
buttons

With iOS Buttons, Know Your Right from Your Left

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.
Flatiron
history

Grids, Design Guidelines, Broken Rules, and the Streets of New York City

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

Mobile Isn't the Lite Version

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.”
iPhones
mobile

Designing for “Context” Is Tricky Business

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.
Teaching Touch
gestures

“Buttons Were an Inspired UI Hack, but Now We’ve Got Better Options”

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.
New iPad
apple

3.1 Million Pixels Are Heavy

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.
2428033729cbcfc377cdo
desknots

Desknots

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.
Corning closet mirror concept
ffly

A Day Made of Glass

The folks at Corning put together a heckuva concept video that peeks into the near future of touchscreen interfaces.
ralph-lauren-qr-code
advertising

QR Codes Are Footnotes, Not Ads

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

Gestures in #NewNewTwitter

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.
Eve's Wireless Phone
history

Eve's Wireless

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.
iPad basketball ad
apple

Making Stuff

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.
Chinese edition of Tapworthy - 2
books

Tapworthy in China (and Japan! and Spain!)

“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.
Skinvaders Josh
augmented reality

Augmented Unreality

Games are the best (and perhaps most commercially viable) flavor of augmented reality, painting an imaginative layer on everyday surroundings.
ios5

Newsstand Revisited

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s post about Newsstand, I had exchanges with a few folks whose work touches the publishing industry. A few themes kept coming back…
Newsstand screenshot
apple

Newsstand Is Promising, Yay! But Enough with Issue-Based Publishing

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.
Robots
bots

Chatterbot Chit-Chat: Siri vs Eliza

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

Icons for Teaching Touch

“Cue” is a clever set of icons for teaching touch. Designer P.J. Onori created the icons for mobile interfaces or wireframes to prompt touch interactions, and they take [a fresh point of view on the challenge]
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