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.
However, I don’t find it plausible to conclude that just because the iPad isn’t growing right now that that means it can’t grow again. For me, it’s a fallacy to think that the iPad we have today represents the peak expression of what an iPad can be. Yes, you could argue that the trend towards larger smartphones and thinner laptops has robbed the iPad of some of its distinctive qualities, but that would really only be true from a hardware perspective. There’s loads of untapped potential in iPad software.
I’ve talked in the past about decoupling development of iOS for iPhone from development of iOS for iPad, which would allow the former to take on more and more unique capabilities. Whether that step is necessary or not, Apple showed how interesting the platform could become when it started to introduce a handful of iPad-specific iOS features in 2015—slide over apps, split screen view, picture-in-picture and Apple Pencil support have all become indispensable. That hardly seems like the limit of what can be done; if we had a sustained burst of similar innovations on this platform, there’s no doubt in my mind that the devices would become much, much more compelling.
The reality of it all though is that Apple is moving on many different fronts at once, and each one requires massive effort. The iPad is both blessed and cursed by its provenance as an Apple product. On the one hand, no other company could have brought it to life. And on the other hand, it’s like a very, very talented child born into a very large family full of talented children, all clamoring for parental attention. Fans and true believers in the platform, and I count myself among them, can only hope that Apple loves it as much as we do.
When you have a young family, like I do, it’s pretty difficult to avoid paying money to The Walt Disney Company in some form or another. But as Disney has come to absorb more and more entertainment franchises, it’s become increasingly harder to avoid paying tribute to the Mouse even when seeking more “grown up” entertainment. Those quote marks around “grown up” are really appropriate too because many of the properties that they own—under the Marvel Comics and the Star Wars banners particularly—are ostensibly for kids, but everyone knows that Americans don’t really grow up anymore.
In December, as the year drew to a close, I got to wondering how much money I had paid to The Walt Disney Company over the previous twelve months in total. I went through my Amazon order history and my wife’a too, and also our Fandango tickets, credit card statements and whatever else I could think of, and tallied every Disney-related expenditure that as a family we incurred. I tried to stick to explicit purchases; I ignored “derivative” expenses like consumption of Disney-related properties within other services like Netflix, or even Disney-related gifts received from friends and extended family. The total was still just over US$1,000.
To be honest I’m not sure whether I expected this number to be higher or lower. On the one hand, for a family of five, it works out to be US$200 per person, which is not that outrageous, really. This is especially true given that 2016 was a particularly Disney-heavy year for us, as we went to Disneyland Park while visiting my mom in Southern California, which added significantly to the total. On the other hand, a thousand dollars is a lot of money to spend on entertainment. It’s certainly a lot of money to give to one company. In the end I think that’s what’s most surprising about this: the idea that all of this goes to a single corporate entity. Just multiply that by millions more families, and the genius—and fearsomeness—of Disney’s business model becomes much clearer to me than it ever had been before.
When debuting new logos, designers often share a supporting illustration that superimposes a grid on top of the logo forms, as if to demonstrate how structurally sound the design is. I’ve always viewed these skeptically, as they seem more fanciful than evidentiary. That is, I find it hard to believe that many such logos were truly designed with a grid in mind; if anything, it seems likely that once they were created, the designer went back and retrofitted their shapes to fit into some sort of master grid. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, of course, but for me it seems a bit like cheating. The grid is a framework for decision-making; it guides designers from start to finish. To go back and nip and tuck a design so that it conforms to a framework that suggests itself after most of the decisions are made seems somehow antithetical to what grids are truly intended for, at least in my view.
That’s probably too strict of an interpretation of how one should use grids, though. If a grid can be employed to help a designer at any point in the design process, then that constitutes a legitimate use. Grids are little more than just suggestions or guidelines, and at the end of the day they’re not ends in and of themselves, but tools to help designers produce an intended effect.
I won’t presume whether these examples from Tokyo-based designer Hiromi Maeo were done in what I regard as “the right way” or not, but they provide a useful look at the role grids can play in developing logo forms nevertheless. I recommend examining them closely in an app like Photoshop, where you’ll see that the regularities of the grids in use are not as straightforward as they may appear; there are slight tweaks here and there, and some unexpected nonuniformity of grid spaces that, at first glance, you’d expect to be uniform. The basic takeaway is: cheating is okay.
One last look at what I watched last year. First, between holidays and travel, I squeezed in eleven films in December and got out to the theaters three times. Most of my home viewing was spent binging on old Japanese films streamed from the new service Filmstruck; it’s basically a smorgasbord for cinema fans. Scroll down further to see them.
Some readers may recall that before the start of last year I resolved to stop watching television shows (more or less) and watch movies, exclusively. According to Letterboxd, where I keep a film diary, that allowed me to watch 185 films last year, averaging about three and a half per week. Looking back, I’m extremely happy with that choice because I saw so much good cinema last year—movies I’d always wanted to see but never got around to, movies I didn’t know anything about before discovering for the first time, and movies that I already cherished but hadn’t been able to revisit for years. Of course, it did mean that I missed out on “Game of Thrones,” “Stranger Things” and “Westworld,” but I’d take “The Duke of Burgundy,” “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie” and “The Handmaiden” over those any time.
Speaking of the latter, here is a quick rundown of the best films released in 2016 that I managed to see. Given how infrequently I get out to theaters, it’s hardly a comprehensive list, of course.
You can also see every 2016 movie that I saw last year and how I ranked them in this Letterboxd list. That site, which I’ve really come to adore in the past year, also compiles a year-end summary of patron members’ activity which offers more insight into how I spent my movie time in 2016; if you’re interested in that, have a look here. It includes this imposing graphic of all 185 of the movies I logged.
Whew. If you care to follow along, you can join me over at letterboxd.com.
For posterity’s sake, here is the complete rundown of all 185 films, along with the brief commentary I added for them as I blogged them here, month by month.
January
“Sicario” Rewatched at home after seeing it in theaters last year.
“The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” Really had a hard time finishing this one. Completely inessential.
“The Double” I was skeptical at first because it seemed very arch, but it’s full of inventive stuff.
“The Keep” Finally got to watch this rare early Michael Mann movie, transferred from a terrible print, via Amazon. Pretty flimsy, but still has some vintage Mann elements.
“The Dark Knight” Watched this again after several years; I was shocked by how much of it is really stiff and unconvincing, but its second half is still potent.
After a seven month design process that was conducted in the open, Mozilla this week unveiled their new branding. Tim Miller, who leads the organization’s Creative Team, writes in this announcement blog post:
At the core of this project is the need for Mozilla’s purpose and brand to be better understood by more people. We want to be known as the champions for a healthy Internet. An Internet where we are all free to explore and discover and create and innovate without barriers or limitations. Where power is in the hands of many, not held by few. An Internet where our safety, security and identity are respected…
Our logo with its nod to URL language reinforces that the Internet is at the heart of Mozilla. We are committed to the original intent of the link as the beginning of an unfiltered, unmediated experience into the rich content of the Internet.
The work was done by London’s Johnson Banks, who wrote some thoughts here. The typeface is a bespoke creation by Typotheque for this project; it’s called “Zilla” and it’s intended to be free for everyone to use, but in a cursory search I couldn’t find a way to download it yet.
My first impression was that this is a bit of a groaner—the visual pun struck me as the tech/design equivalent of dad humor (as a dad myself, I should know). But it didn’t take me long to warm up to it. I’m a fan of its utter lack of pretension, and how unabashedly it embraces the organization’s geeky legacy. Overall, thumbs up.
One of the more underappreciated reasons to own an iPad is that it can change your relationship with your “real” computer. The folks at Astropad have been plugging away at this for a few years now. Just last week they upped their game with the release of their new Astropad Studio, which pairs a Mac app that you download directly from astropad.com with an iPad app available through the App Store. It turns your iPad into a a Wacom-style graphics tablet, but because you can configure your own buttons, it actually presents an alternative interface to your favorite software. Not only can you create your own custom shortcuts with combinations of Apple Pencil gestures and touch, but you can also configure just the menu items you like, turning off the ones that you don’t find useful. For an app like Photoshop, it basically lets you pare back the experience to just what matters to you. These videos do a good job explaining the product:
Astropad Studio is clearly aimed at professionals, which explains its price—surprisingly hefty for your average iOS app, but entirely reasonable (cheap, even) for pros: US$8 per month or US$65 per year. Yes, it’s only available via subscription (the company still sells their original app for a one-time fee of US$30), but the reality is that that’s the model that works for professional software these days. Learn more at astropad.com or in their blog post announcement.
Asking Google Home or Amazon Echo to play any song you like from the Spotify catalog is extremely liberating—but until there is support for the Spotify Connect feature, these devices can only play back music on their own speakers, or on speakers to which they’re directly connected. I have AirPlay speakers all over the house and I would like to be able to tell Alexa or Google Assistant to play a given song in my living room or my kitchen or in my office—or any combination of those locations—but that’s just not possible today. This was the biggest of the complaints I wrote about last week in my comparison of Echo and Home.
Persistence and hackery can overcome almost any tech roadblock though. Over the weekend I strung together a series of tools that allow me to issue voice commands to Google Home (which I prefer slightly) to select music on Spotify, then switch the playback to the Mac mini that sits at the heart of my home theater setup, and from there pipe music to the various AirPlay speakers in the house.
What’s more interesting is that the basics of this solution could theoretically allow you to control almost anything on your Mac via voice—and it’s incredibly easy to set up. It starts with the invaluable IFTTT service, which supports both Google Assistant and Alexa. You can define your own custom phrases to serve as IFTTT triggers, which can then generate simple text files on a cloud storage service like Dropbox, which can kick off automated routines on your Mac. This is what it looks like to set up the IFTTT component:
When you set Dropbox to sync the resulting text files to your Mac’s hard drive, the key is to do so to directories that you’ve loaded with macOS’s Folder Actions feature. Basically, when the text files are added to these folders, they act as triggers for Automator actions, which can do tons of stuff, including run AppleScript code—which in turn can do even more stuff. Once Automator is done, it can even clean up after itself by trashing the text file it used as a trigger, if you need.
This is the basic approach I use to enable Google Home to play music throughout my house, though there are more steps involved, and some janky workarounds. Using the Home’s built-in voice commands I search for and play the songs I want, just as you would normally do. Then I speak a custom phrase like “Switch tunes to home theater” (most music playback-related phrases are reserved by Google Home so you can’t just say “Ok Google, play music on my home theater”) to kick off an IFTTT applet. The applet saves a text file in Dropbox, which syncs to my Mac to a directory with a folder action attached to it. That action runs a bit of AppleScript to open Spotify and, through the brute force of repeating pre-recorded mouse locations and clicks (courtesy of an extremely unsexy app called Mac Auto Mouse Click), it opens the Spotify Connect menu and switches the playback device from Google Home to the Mac mini. Then finally (whew), Automator also tells AirFoil to redirect that music to a pre-defined set of AirPlay speakers. All of a sudden, the music I asked for in the kitchen is playing all over the house.
Granted, the setup is hardly elegant, to say the least. The beauty of it is that it’s incredibly simple to set up, easy enough that I’ve created a series of similar commands to play and pause the music, jump back and forward, etc. As I’ve said in the past, I’m not a programmer by any means—before this weekend I had never spent more than a few minutes in Automator or writing AppleScript—so the learning curve is shallow.
This kind of rudimentary but highly engaging automation is sure to become more and more central to consumers as voice-powered interfaces gain ground. So it’s all the more concerning that Apple parted ways with its longtime champion of automation products last fall, though perhaps there are other plans afoot to continuing evolving the automation of Apple’s devices and software. Looking ahead at a future filled with these kinds of devices, as users we are only going to want the apps and services that we use to be more scriptable, more responsive to integrations. And we’ll want that ability to automate to be simple enough that we can put together the missing flows and actions that we want ourselves.
You can read about it in books as much as you want, but in parenting there are thresholds of knowledge you can only acquire by experiencing them firsthand. One of them is having twins. Ours turn four years old today—four years of craziness I never thought I had it in me to survive. But it’s been worth it, every day. When the boys were first born and my wife and I were basically in shock from the relentless grind of caring for two infants, another parent of twins told us, “At some point the clouds part and you can’t imagine it any other way.” That turned out to be so true. I can’t imagine life without this pair of irrepressible, unbelievable, unstoppable, wonderful little tykes. Happy birthday Lafayette and Thiebaud.
I’m sure I’m not the only person who got both an Amazon Echo and a Google Home over the holidays and is putting both of them through their paces. But I’m definitely the only person who got both and who writes on this blog, so here are my thoughts about the two.
My wife gave her parents an Amazon Echo for Christmas and the whole extended family played with it last week when we were visiting. What I saw was that, for both adults and kids encountering this kind of technology for the first time, it’s a blast to learn, play and explore the device’s capabilities. So much so that the Echo’s novelty just about eclipses how rough Alexa’s natural language processing still is.
Alexa is clearly able to understand your commands—and act on them—better than Siri is able to, but it doesn’t feel leagues better. In practice, it’s not uncommon to have to issue commands three, four, five or more times before Alexa understands what you’re trying to say—or until you learn the way Alexa wants you to say it. In fact, I found that the mere act of listening to other people of varying tech savviness negotiate with Alexa to get things done can be a frustrating experience. I bit my tongue several times as family members wrestled with slight variations on phrasing, emphasis and syntax—and then I went ahead and encountered exactly the same problems when uttering my own commands. Nevertheless, none of this dissuaded people from continuing to talk to Alexa. In the pantheon of this past Christmas season’s gifts, it was a hit.
At home we also received an Echo Dot as a present, a product which I think could be a home run. For just US$50, you get everything that the Echo does except for the higher quality speaker (which means Amazon is basically charging you US$130 for the full fledged version’s speaker, when you think about it). At that price point, I could easily imagine having a Dot in each room of the house, which would make for a really powerful system.
After we got back to Brooklyn, I hooked up the Dot to my Todoist account. Task management has always been my top priority for any kind of A.I.-based assistant; one of my biggest complaints about technology is that it still hasn’t solved the use case in which a task occurs to me and, somewhere between having that thought and pulling out my phone, unlocking it and opening up Todoist, I’ve somehow forgotten entirely what it was I was trying to record. Fewer things are more frustrating.
Technically, Alexa does solve that problem, but not very elegantly. You can certainly ask it to record items for you, and if it understands what you’re saying (again, phrasing, emphasis and syntax are important, and assigning dates via voice can be a frustrating challenge) it will add them to both its Alexa-based to-do list and to Todoist itself. But it often misinterprets dates, and it’s difficult to edit or correct what it records. The end result is something less than a well-formed task, as it may require editing and/or tagging and filing on a screen. A friend of mine says he uses Alexa-plus-Todoist to merely capture what he said and then massages the data later; to me, that’s just one step up from a voice memo.
By comparison Google Home and Todoist make for a moderately better pair. For one, Home lets you “talk” directly with Todoist—literally, a different voice takes over (that’s a meaningful change in the user interface that has the effect of making you feel that you’re interacting directly with the service, instead of through a middleman)—where Alexa merely syncs its tasks to the third-party app. Additionally, you can mark items as completed, add labels and move items to different projects. On the whole, this is a step up from Alexa and so I find it much more useful. But what I also discovered was that it’s relatively difficult to navigate a to-do list by voice; I have lots of items on my list at any given moment, and it’s time-consuming to go through them via audio. I also felt gun shy about editing them or marking them completed, afraid that I would inadvertently mess up my tasks somehow. Maybe more experience with these systems will bring a greater level of confidence. As it stands, I don’t yet feel proficient getting things done by voice.
On the other hand, both systems do relatively well with lower stakes tasks, like playing music. In fact, having a virtually unlimited catalog of music, as you get with Spotify, that can be controlled by voice will probably, for most people, be the single most useful aspect of these devices. In the case of my in-laws, when we added a Spotify account to their Echo and they realized that you could ask for just about anything and the Echo would give it to them, the device seemed to become much more useful.
However, here I still have a complaint. Neither Echo nor Home are able to play music via Spotify Connect. Which is to say, as of today, they’re only capable of playing music through their own speakers (or the ones that they’re directly linked up to). I have a network of AirPlay speakers set up in my house, and what I would like to do is to tell Alexa or Google Assistant to play music on, say, the living room speaker, or in the kitchen and in my office at the same time. That’s currently not possible, though this capability will come to Sonos speakers sometime in 2017. Hopefully Spotify is not deferring a solution to this problem entirely to Sonos, as I’m on record for having no real use for Sonos in my house.
A few more comparison notes: both devices include prominently placed buttons that allow you to turn off their listening capabilities instantly. As a somewhat privacy-minded tech consumer, this was important to me, but it didn’t take me long to realize that the buttons are essentially useless if you want to use the smart speaker, and the smart speaker is essentially useless if you want to use the button. It seems pretty unlikely that I’ll ever have the wherewithal to use this feature if I keep these devices in my home; it’s just not practical to try to remember to turn off the mic and also remember to turn it on later. The end result is that, like it or not, these devices are always listening. In fact, this always-on user experience is why these machines succeed where Siri doesn’t; they save a click, which is all people really want out of technology innovation.
And finally, design. The Google Home comes in a nicer package, is a much nicer form factor, and is just gorgeous. It’s a very handsome expression of impressive technology. That said, the Amazon Echo, and the Echo Dot, look like they’re gadgets that you would buy at Bed, Bath & Beyond and are packaged exactly that way—and I don’t mean that pejoratively. An Echo looks like it belongs in your home, alongside your Kitchen-Aid and your fancy coffee maker. An Echo is not a miniature totem of technological achievement, it’s an appliance that makes your life easier. That says a lot about the difference between these two.
Among other things, the holidays afford time for indulgences masquerading as productivity. For instance, I spent an inordinate amount of time playing around with Workflow, the surprisingly powerful automation app for iOS. It’s an elegant, easy to learn scripting platform that makes iOS’s famously buttoned-up ecosystem of native apps feel sufficiently pliable to just about any whim that might occur to you.
A few examples: I built a workflow (the app’s confusingly self-referential terminology for a script) to move screenshots from my iPad to Dropbox and delete them from my camera roll; one to scan my calendar for events on a specific day and share my availability with coworkers; and another to generate PDFs of just about anything and store them in a designated folder. All of these can be triggered with just a tap or two from a Workflow widget in my device’s Notifications Center.
I found Workflow to be particularly effective for blogging from my iPad. This is something I do regularly because I often travel only with a tablet. Before Workflow it required jumping through more hoops than doing the same task on my desktop or laptop. So I created workflows to resize the canvas of images I post (like the one above) and another to upload it to my WordPress install while also saving a backup to Dropbox, again all with just a couple of taps.
It’s true that none of my time-saving scripts amount to mind-bending breakthroughs in computing, but that doesn’t change the fact that Workflow can remove considerable friction from productivity routines on iOS. One notable added bonus is that after building the kind of complex and powerful workflows that you really need the larger screen real estate of an iPad to properly piece together and test, that work can be synced instantly to your iPhone, giving you that same complexity and power in the palm of your hand, on the go.
To be honest, I spent more time constructing these scripts than I’ll probably save in practice, at least measured in real minutes. But these were my first projects in Workflow so they were useful for learning how to use the app. More to the point, it was fun to do, too; Workflow makes experimentation (mostly) easy and straightforward, a huge selling point for non-programmers like myself.
For all its power though, Workflow is actually a curious mix of the polished and the raw. Its creators have delivered an incredibly well-considered scripting platform in terms of under-the-hood thinking and simplifying assumptions that make it a real pleasure to use. On the other hand, the app leaves you somewhat on your own as you explore it. There’s no undo, so an errant swipe could change parameters in your work before you know it, and you have to be conscientious about saving backup copies as your workflows evolve.
The app is also conspicuously missing robust, canonical documentation of its many concepts and capabilities. There are tips built into the interface but they’re rudimentary, and if you need more depth the developer directs you to a Subreddit. (You can also refer to a series of excellent episodes of Federico Viticci and Fraser Speirs’s Canvas podcast, which are an excellent introduction to Workflow.) While you don’t need to have an engineering background to learn Workflow, those with even a passing grasp of how scripting works, along with a willingness to Google for answers when you’re stuck, will have a much easier time than true novices.
Ultimately t’s probably most accurate to say that Workflow is just a very young scripting environment, one that is off to a great start but has much growing to do. All other things being equal, I’d much rather have it in its current, somewhat threadbare state when it’s a bit of a challenge but still tremendously useful than to be without it. It’s already an indispensable tool if you’re interested in going iPad-first or even iPad-only.
