Archives

The Wayback Machine for Apps

Mobile and tablet apps change all the time, but there is no public record of the way an app’s user interface evolves with each new revision. What we need is a version of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine for apps, but unfortunately because of the siloed nature of this class of software, it’s not possible to simply deploy bots to create one for us.

It occurred to me that one viable alternative would be to crowdsource something similar to the Wayback Machine by creating an app that would let any user upload screen grabs to a central archive on the Web. That sounds much more manual than the Internet Archive’s approach, l know, but in fact I think it could actually be fairly well automated.

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The End of Client Services

Last week, I marked a year since my departure from The New York Times by starting to talk a little bit about what I’ve been doing (see this blog post). Today, I’m going to talk a bit about why I decided to jump into a startup, one in which we’re building a product of our own, rather than starting another design consulting business.

Some longtime readers will remember that about ten years ago I co-founded a design studio of my own. In fact, until I went ‘in-house’ at the Times, I had spent the entirety of my career in the design services industry, working with all sorts of clients doing all sorts of projects, and generally enjoying the variety of challenges and the exposure to many different kinds of businesses. But in the long stretch of months leading up to the day I resigned my position at the Times, I came to the conclusion that I couldn’t return to that kind of work.

There were lots of reasons for this, but one of the main ones is that I think the design industry has undergone a significant and meaningful change, one that opens up opportunities that are not to be missed.

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Suddenly, One Year Later

Tomorrow is July 16th and it’ll be a year to the day since I left my job at The New York Times. (More about why I left in this blog post.) I can hardly believe it.

Lots of people ask what I’ve been up to in that time. I admit I’ve been rather cagey about the specifics, but the outlines are more or less public knowledge. I spent the first several months finishing my book, “Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design.” I also picked up a few freelance and part-time design consulting gigs, generating some transitional income while also spending a lot of time with my family.

What’s less well known is that I cleared away most of that freelance activity at the end of January, when I hunkered down to focus solely on a brand new venture that I started thinking about almost immediately after my tenure ended at The Times.

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An Unfinished Theme for Google Reader

As I wrote yesterday, I’m encouraged by the recent design improvements that Google has made in its products, especially its new Gmail theme. I’m assuming — hoping — that Google will apply this new sensibility to its many other products too.

Number one on my list would be a refresh of the interface for Google Reader. Yes, I’m one of the diminishing devotees of RSS. Every morning and many, many times throughout the day (and often in the middle of the night when besieged by insomnia, too) I check the copious feeds that I’ve collected over the years, devouring all manner of updates from all corners of the Interweb. They’re a critical source of news, information, education and entertainment for me.

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Does Google Get Design Now?

It’s only been a short while since Google co-founder Larry Page assumed the role of CEO but it’s safe to say that we now have a sense of what his vision of Google looks like. Apparently design is a key part of it.

The search giant’s recently launched, high profile social networking bid Google+ debuted with an unexpectedly thoughtful (though admittedly derivative) design, and evinces an attention to the finer details of typography, spacing and visual hierarchy that was previously absent across the vast majority of Google’s products. Similarly, the company has made additional refinements to its iconic home page that reflect a newfound respect for the intangible — the changes have been minor, but they’ve felt less beholden to the brutally analytical decision-making that has guided Google product design and aesthetics in the past.

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Pop Pilgrims and Primers

If you’re a fan of popular culture and you’re not regularly checking out the copious wares that The A.V. Club is turning out at a furious, daily pace, then you’re missing out. This (mostly) non-satirical sister publication to the satirical newspaper The Onion brings a smart, intensive, critical focus to television, film, music, books, games and all manner of pop culture, and it generates what is probably the most consistently high quality and wide-ranging coverage of its kind out there. Many people are familiar with The A.V. Club as an insert within the print edition of The Onion, but the publication produces significantly more content on its Web site. You could explore it for hours, or you could subscribe to its RSS feed and find yourself inundated with great stuff on a daily basis, like I do.

Here are two examples. First, the site recently published this fantastic Robert Altman primer, which goes into extensive yet expedient detail on the legendary director’s ouevre, including lots of embedded video clips of his movie trailers. For anyone unfamiliar with this master filmmaker’s work, this is probably the most efficient, thorough and enjoyable crash course you could ask for. Even for someone like me who’s seen most but not all of his films, this was enlightening.

Example two: The A.V. Club’s recently inaugurated Pop Pilgrims video podcast is a great idea very entertainingly executed: A.V. Club hosts travel around the continental United States (in a sponsored Fiat, apparently) logging video essays on real world locations made famous by pop cultural milestones. The first episode, which won me over to the series immediately, took a look at the actual building that stood in for Nakatomi Plaza in the 1988 action masterpiece “Die Hard.” I mean, come on, that’s brilliant. Subsequent installments visited the diner from “Reservoir Dogs,” the Initech building from “Office Space,” the hotel from “The Shining,” the headquarters of Fantagraphics Comics, and others. See them all here.

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Consolidating Email Updates

By 11:00a this morning there were already over a dozen examples of what email professionals call bacn (pronounced like bacon) in my inbox. Bacn is the euphemistic term for subscribed email, automated mailings that a user has opted into, as opposed to the more commonly known spam, which is generally, but not always, unsolicited email. It’s not as valued as personal email written by real humans, but it’s better than junk mail.

Bacn includes newsletters, alerts, daily deals and assorted marketing messages from companies that I’ve transacted with in some form before. Most of these messages I ignore and some I will peruse occasionally, but the bacn that I pay the most attention to is the kind that updates me on activity from my social networks; notifications automatically generated when someone has liked or favorited one of my posts, when someone has tagged me in a photo or mentioned me in a tweet, when someone has added me to a group or list, etc.

Basically, the stuff that’s about me specifically is what interests me. But even then, the volume of these emails is too much to handle. I’ve already turned off bacn-generating settings in Twitter, Flickr, Foursquare and others — and those are the networks that I actually use.

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The Making of Avatars

I’m designing a social app right now and I need lots of avatars to use in the mock-ups. Designing social interfaces is a bit like trying to visualize a party, attendees and all, which is to say the designer is challenged with representing something full of life using tools that are inherently static.

Insofar as avatars give the impression of lots of people using the system, they’re a helpful design detail. I could use one or two ‘generic’ avatars across all of the various interfaces I’m designing, but the more that the hypothetical users in my mock-ups look like they could be actual, real-life users — and the more of them there are — then the better my chances for communicating a convincing design to collaborators.

Picking up a random selection of avatars from Twitter or Flickr, which is what I’m doing now, presents several problems. First, it’s laborious. Second, the users from whom I’m ‘borrowing’ these assets haven’t granted usage permissions of any kind. And third, they’re not a great cross-section of a wide user base.

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What It’s Like As a Dad

This morning I was putting my shoes on to run outdoors for a quick five-minute errand. From across the apartment my daughter Thuy saw me preparing to leave and started waving and wishing me an energetic “G’bye! G’bye!” She’s just a few days shy of twenty-two months old now, and so her mother and I still find this relatively new level of articulateness and situational acuity impressive and adorable.

I assured her I’d be back quickly, then opened the front door and started stepping out of the apartment, but just then she ran over to me with a sudden urgency and said “Kiss!” She tugged on my hand to get me to kneel down, and then gave me a tiny peck on the cheek before saying “G’bye!” again.

It was a wonderful little Father’s Day moment, but more than that it helped crystallize for me what this feeling of having this little girl in my life is like. Before parenthood I was preoccupied with escaping mundanity; in my relationships, in my work, in my ambitions of all kinds, I labored to free myself of daily trivialities and strive for bigger and better things. Now the world looks very different. When a quotidian non-event like walking out the front door can become something to cherish for a lifetime, it makes me realize that there is grand import hidden in every little detail of every day, and that in fact the mundane can be unspeakably amazing. Being a parent does this to you.

Happy Father’s Day, everybody.

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Gagosian on iPad

There’s good news for publishers of iPad magazine apps, which in the past I’ve criticized for being needlessly complicated, difficult to use and poorly realized. The good news is they’re no longer the worst offenders when it comes to presenting wonderful, valuable content within burdensome and user-unfriendly interfaces. The new champion is the Gagosian app for iPad, from the storied Gagosian Gallery. That gallery represents some of the most important contemporary artists of the past several decades, and the Gagosian brand is responsible for some wonderful contributions to modern culture. Sadly this app should not be counted among them.

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