is a blog about design, technology and culture written by Khoi Vinh, and has been more or less continuously published since December 2000 in New York City. Khoi is currently Principal Designer at Adobe. Previously, Khoi was co-founder and CEO of Mixel (acquired in 2013), Design Director of The New York Times Online, and co-founder of the design studio Behavior, LLC. He is the author of “How They Got There: Interviews with Digital Designers About Their Careers”and “Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design,” and was named one of Fast Company’s “fifty most influential designers in America.” Khoi lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn with his wife and three children.
Happy new year everybody! Here’s one last holiday gift: there’s a new build of Mixel, our social collage app for iPad, available right now in the App Store. Version 1.2 adds a few minor interface changes for existing users, but its main feature significantly improves the first-run experience for new users — and for those who have until now been reluctant to give it a try because of our Facebook login requirement: you can now open up the app and browse the entirety of the network without having to login at all.
Come on In
Previously, when you’d open up the app, what you’d see was a screen that said, essentially, “login or go home.” There was no way to sample Mixel’s great content or see all the terrific stuff people are doing with it every single day, much less try your hand at making a mixel yourself. Frankly, it was not a great experience at all, but there was so much for us to do to get Mixel out into the world that it was one of the unfortunate causalities of our limited resources.
Well we finally found the opportunity to fix this. With version 1.2, when you fire up the app, you’re free to browse around without logging in at all — in fact, you don’t need to identify yourself in any way. This version lets you browse any mixel, see how it was put together, follow its constituent pieces to any other mixels in which it might be used… you can even remix any mixel or start a new one of your own.
Right: What you used see when you opened up Mixel for the first time.
Right: …And what you see now. No registration required to have a look around.
What you can’t do, however, are all the operations that normally require you to identify yourself: comment on, like or love mixels, or post any mixels or remixes you make to the network for others to see. There’s just no way to let you do any of these things without attaching a name to them. However, any mixels that you do make can be saved to your Photos app (see the feature we enabled in version 1.1) so you’ll be able to save copies of your work. And, once you register or login (Facebook is still required), those mixels can then be posted to the network, of course.
We’re working on making Mixel as accessible and easy to try as possible, and we think this goes a long way towards doing that for new users. Download it today and give it a try.
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11 Comments
Chris Long
Congrats, Khoi.
This is a great first step away from the stinking plague that is Facebook. I now look forward to trying this fun-looking new app. Keep up the great work–I personally look forward to the day that Facebook is not required AT ALL to use Mixel.
Happy New Year!
Chris
Johnny
So strip the FB requirement when not enough people download you app?
I appreciate this move. I’m not interested in Facebook, though I am interested in Mixel. This move makes it easier for me to try. More importantly, it avoids the barrier that a “log in or quit” screen puts up, be it psychological or literal. The number of times I have deleted an app simply because it demanded a log in or some sort…
Anyway, thanks again.
MacUser
Great step forward. Now just needs to make Facebook optional (along with Twitter and Google+ handles) and alternatively allow login with email confirmation and a chosen username, like any other service. Until then, Mixel is still essentially a Facebook add-on, and as such we (@macusermagazine) won’t be covering it; once it’s independent we’ll be all over it 🙂
Scott Ostler
Johnny: It’s true we take user feedback into account, but we actually had planned this for the initial launch.
MacUser: We hear you. As Khoi wrote in a previous post, requiring Facebook was a compromise that wasn’t made casually. We hope to have good news for you soon.
Oh, I should say this too. I noticed a lot of the anti-facebook sign in sentiment in the app store comments, but one thing a appreciate about Mixel is the sign in. It doesn’t have to be Facebook necessarily, but I really like the lack of anonymity, because it makes people stand behind what they post. I like a full name and a picture to go along with it!
Chris Long
I agree with Tom Shillue, above. The problem is not that we want anonymity — it’s that we want to have nothing to do with Facebook. At all. Ever. Thanks!
Happy new year everybody! Here’s one last holiday gift: there’s a new build of 
Congrats, Khoi.
This is a great first step away from the stinking plague that is Facebook. I now look forward to trying this fun-looking new app. Keep up the great work–I personally look forward to the day that Facebook is not required AT ALL to use Mixel.
Happy New Year!
Chris
So strip the FB requirement when not enough people download you app?
Thank you.
I appreciate this move. I’m not interested in Facebook, though I am interested in Mixel. This move makes it easier for me to try. More importantly, it avoids the barrier that a “log in or quit” screen puts up, be it psychological or literal. The number of times I have deleted an app simply because it demanded a log in or some sort…
Anyway, thanks again.
Great step forward. Now just needs to make Facebook optional (along with Twitter and Google+ handles) and alternatively allow login with email confirmation and a chosen username, like any other service. Until then, Mixel is still essentially a Facebook add-on, and as such we (@macusermagazine) won’t be covering it; once it’s independent we’ll be all over it 🙂
Johnny: It’s true we take user feedback into account, but we actually had planned this for the initial launch.
MacUser: We hear you. As Khoi wrote in a previous post, requiring Facebook was a compromise that wasn’t made casually. We hope to have good news for you soon.
I love this app. I showed this to my 5-year old daughter and she took to it immediately. So we’re both kind of addicted.
Oh, I should say this too. I noticed a lot of the anti-facebook sign in sentiment in the app store comments, but one thing a appreciate about Mixel is the sign in. It doesn’t have to be Facebook necessarily, but I really like the lack of anonymity, because it makes people stand behind what they post. I like a full name and a picture to go along with it!
I agree with Tom Shillue, above. The problem is not that we want anonymity — it’s that we want to have nothing to do with Facebook. At all. Ever. Thanks!
> We want to have nothing to do with Facebook. At all. Ever. Thanks!
I second this comment.
That’s refreshing. When can I can use it without my iPad?
As a prolific Mixel user sharing my account with my son, I’d love to see a separate, safe place on Mixel for kids only.
The app lends itself to a level of creativity that children really gravitate too, and seeing them riffing of each other’s creations would be awesome.