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Bounce – A fun and easy way to share ideas on a website

Just comment on this post with your new years resolution is going to be. We will choose 10 random comments and the winners will be picked Friday, January 8th, 2010.

I love it when everyone’s a winner!!!

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Ring in 2010 With a Google Wave Invite – Winners Announced!

THIS YEAR’S BIGGEST APP STORIES…

Location-Based Apps

Apple’s iPhone has opened up a whole new market for developers with location-based apps. So it’s really no surprise that 2009 gave us more than our share of these little gems from an end-user standpoint. But as developers, it’s given us an opportunity to become millionaires with the stroke of a pen. Gowalla, based in Austin, Texas is valued at nearly $30 million dollars, and when reading posts like this, where IAC CEO, Barry Diller is sitting on $2 billion (yes, that’s a b) looking for valuable web properties to purchase, we are very excited to see what the next year will bring.

User Experience

We don’t like hearing the word “trend” when it comes to User Experience as it makes it sound as if it will come and go, and UX is surely here to stay. User Experience, User-Centered Design, Interaction Design, or whatever term you prefer, 2009 helped those of us who may not have understood it’s importance, drink the proverbial kool-aid and embrace it as an early necessity when developing and designing.

In the book, “The Brand Gap” author, Marty Neumeier describes brand as, “…a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or organization.” User Experience Design uses this same type of philosophy, and in 2009, those of us not already riding the UX train, jumped on board.

Web Fonts, CSS3 and HTML5

Fonts on the web have been a thorn in the side of web designers and developers since the early days of the web. If you wanted to use typefaces other than Arial, Verdana, Times New Roman, etc., you were out of luck unless you wanted to create an image and use it in place of fonts. Then came font image replacement techniques like Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR) in 2005 and we’ve even seen some server-side dynamic image creation using ImageMagick in the early 2000s. In 2009 we saw a resurgence of this trend but now we are giving credit where credit is due by licensing the fonts. Sites like TypeKit and Typotheque offer these services and we hope to see a lot more sites embracing the concept.

Even though a final release still hasn’t been announced, we saw designers and developers taking advantage of CSS3 and HTML5.  Safari 4 and Chrome have the most feature support last I heard, with Firefox close behind.  The latest version of IE has a long way to go before they catch up. Most notable of the group is Safari Mobile, iPhone’s web browser, which makes iPhone App development pretty slick. When you can use CSS animations and transitions to mimic a native iPhone app and coupling that with the OpenSource PhoneGap, you can develop mobile applications that will run across multiple mobile platforms. The neat thing about using strictly browser-based technologies to develop your mobile applications (mostly iPhone) is that you can modify the browser elements of your application without having to go through Apples approval process when versioning, just update your mobile site.

1,000,000,000 Downloads

On April 23, 2009, Apple’s App Store reached 1 billion downloads, only having launched a mere nine months prior. This story could make a best of 09 list for the sheer shock value alone. But the reason it makes our list is because of Apple’s financial agreement with app developers and other potential income generating items like in-app advertising.

iPhone App developers earn 70% commission on every app sold which is really an amazing commission considering the App Store is the only place you can peddle your (iPhone) wares, and the massive amount of advertising Apple does to promote it’s store is a win-win.

In-app mobile advertising is a more slippery slope to consider. But if you’re offering your app for free, it’s certainly a revenue generating path to consider.

Social Networking

2009 saw an explosive surge of Social Networking apps, enhancements, and opportunities. From Facebook’s iPhone app and site enhancements, a gazillion Twitter apps from mobile, to browser to Adobe Air. It seemed as if there would be no end to how many ways we could share information between each other and even from one social medium to another. APIs, OpenID, OpenSocial, and OpenSource. These tools made 2009 an awesome year to be a developer.

Social Networking isn’t an app, it’s not even a technology. It’s a concept, and it dominated every aspect of our lives in 2009. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I say that we’re at, what Malcolm Gladwell would call, a “Tipping Point”. 2009 showed us as designers and developers that Social Networking is obviously here to stay and I can’t wait to see what 2010 will bring us.

PARTICIPATE

What did you think of our list? What do you think should have made the list? We want to hear from you!!

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Best of 2009 in the App Industry

I had the unique pleasure of beta testing this app and I am extremely excited this app is finally in the appstore and I can talk about it. Pastebot is a new way to command copy and paste on the iPhone. It allows you to save your clipboard history with images, text, emails, tweets, links or whatever else you desire. Both Mark & Paul did an extremely amazing job on Pastebot & I think its one of the most functional apps I have ever used on my iPhone to date.

Some of the features on Pastebot include:

• Save, organize, and edit text & image clippings with ease.
• Search capabilities and folders for organization.
• Apply text & image filters like “find & replace” on text or convert an image to black & white. 14 filters total with more on the way.
• Create new text clippings within the app.
• Create a new image clipping from your iPhone camera or import from your photo library.
• Useful metadata like image dimensions, character/word count and creation date.
• Copy items back to the iPhone/iPod clipboard with 1 tap.
• Send clippings as emails within the app or save images back to your photo library.
• Push text and images from your Mac to Pastebot instantly over wifi**
• Paste text and images to your Mac from your iPhone or iPod Touch instantly over wifi**

Hop over to the appstore and get yourself a copy of Pastebot because its an amazing little app that you are going to want to use again and again.

More Info:

Site | Twitter | iTunes

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Say Hello to: Pastebot

Resources:

Facebook Developer Wiki

The developer Wiki has everything you need for making a page with FBML. They have tons of resources, API’s, dev resources and more.

Facebook Starter Kit

This kit gives you a ‘hello world’ template for building ColdFusion applications for Facebook. It is very much a barebones project, enabling you to easily modify and add to it and use it in the way you like to build ColdFusion applications. This is deliberate; its purpose it to get you passed the first hurdle of dealing with facebook, leaving the application framework design up to you.

FBML – Facebook Markup Language

A nice little slide rocket presentation about FBML. A quick crash course or a good starting point.

Static FBML: Not Every Facebook Fan Page Needs an Application

An article about using Static FBML vs. Regular FBML which is also a great case study from the designer of the Sunkist soda facebook fanpage. It provides some really good content and some really good rules of thumb. Also, it

FBML Essentials

Do you have an idea for a Facebook application? With FBML Essentials, you’ll learn how to build it quickly using the Facebook Markup Language (FBML) and other easy-to-use tools in the site’s framework. This book not only gets you started with this toolkit, you also get a complete reference on every FBML tag Facebook has ever written, with advice on the best ways to use these tags in your code.

Comparing Flash iFrame and FBML Facebook applications

A table from adobe that summarizes the differences when creating your Flash Platform application as an iFrame or FBML Facebook application. The two most significant differences are the ability to control the embedding of a Flash object and the ability to access scripts.

Examples:

Sunkist Soda

Twilight

Southwest Airlines

Nissan

Mountain Dew

Honda

Harley Davidson

Dunkin’ Donuts

Coca Cola

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Facebook fanpage need more kick? Check out FBML

Another feature that is new is the new Twitter Retweet feature. It allows you to setup your RT style as the old version (manual) or the new version (auto). You can also tell Tweetdeck if you would like to keep the new or old version as standard and not bother you with annoying updates. There are several subtle (but nice) UI changes and it looks as if they have worked out it being such a ram hog. (running three accounts and about 12 columns and humming along at 218MB) I think the update is great and adds more functionality to some other twitter API’s.

Screencaps

Get It

I only listed a few of the updates about but you should checkout the full update right here.

Site | Twitter

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Lists, Retweets and Linked-In from Tweetdeck 32.0

I recently had the pleasure of sending Andy Hatkoff, the Vice President, OEM and Technology Licensing at PANTONE some questions about their iPhone app myPANTONE. myPANTONE is an awesome companion for designers and creatives alike. We are excited to bring this information from behind the app and a review of the app itself.

The iPhone is a perfect platform to carry a pocket PANTONE guide, what steps have you taken to make this be the easiest way to locate and use the PANTONE colors you need?

In the development of myPANTONE, one of the key fundamentals in the design of the app and its user interface was to make it easy for the user to find the desired PANTONE colors.  To that end we have taken advantage of the iPhone’s “touchablity” with the fanned out guide view and allowing the user to move about the guide until they locate the color range they wish and then by touching the page desired bringing up a close-up few of a numerous pages and scrolling through the colors in a page view.  The idea was find the general area of color and then “zoom in” to get a closer view of the colors.  I liken this to mapping solutions that let to zoom in closer for more detail once you have the area geographic area identified. Another approach is the SEARCH function that allows the user to simply type in the PANTONE number desired.  myPANTONE will then return the colors where  those numbers are used. myPANTONE also provides color sorting in two ways (1) the standard order used in the fan guides and (2) a sort in more of a chromatic type sequence.  This make chromatic type sequence makes it simple to find, for instance all the reds or blue,  etc.

How accurate is the iPhone screen and what steps have you taken to make sure that the color displayed on screen are correct?

iPhone screens are not synonymous with color accuracy.  There are a number of limitations and issues that make accuracy of the display of colors on an iPhone a problematic.  ANY app on the iPhone that uses color to its benefit (including photo apps) suffers from the same issue – iPhones are not meant to be color accurate. There exist differences on the displays between the various versions of the iPhone. For example: the first iPhones were set to a cooler white point that made the screen whiter and bluer, while subsequent versions use a warmer color temperature and different white point.   From a developer’s point of view the Software Developer Kit (SDK) provided by Apple does not give us access to anything about the actual display except its size. At this point in time, the SDK does not offer the possibility to provide any control over the calibration of the display.  Additionally, issues such as ambient lighting and the angle from which the screen is held (and viewed) can affect the perception of color.

Because of these inherent limitations, we would caution users of myPANTONE (or any other color intensive app) should not be used to validate and approve color.  MyPANTONE is a creative tool and not a production tool. It allows users  to capture the idea of color with a wonderful mobile device  that is used broadly in the design community. The user of myPANTONE  can select a color and play with it, amend it and use it as inspiration in the design process. That’s what myPANTONE was developed for; and it is what you can expect of an iPhone app. A PANTONE Color guide should ALWAYS be used for an accurate representation of a color in a print environment, regardless of whether you used an app or a monitor in the design process.

Creatives are on the go more and more these days especially as mobile technology is getting faster and easier to use. This app allows you to share via email, post to the myPANTONE site & send to other devices. Why is sharing and integration the best possible outcome for an app like this?

It was important for us not only to provide a way to deliver a creative tool, but also to add significant utility and shareablitity.  By taking advantage of the iPhone’s  connectivity functionality, we can e-mail a palette as not only an HTML document, but also as enclosures whereby the user created palette can used within the Adobe Creative Suite and QuarkXPress.  Getting information into the iPhone was only one half of the equation for the user experience- the other half is getting the information out of the iPhone and a way to make it useful and usable.  Through support of the popular design and page layout apps it is now possible to create a palette in your iPhone with myPANTONE and then easily integrate and use the palette in the design process.

At what point did a PANTONE app seem like a logical step?

It was clear that the paradigm for creativity was rapidly shifting from the confines of the desktop (or laptop) to a mobile environment.  The device was there waiting to be populated with tools.  In the same way that the computer is rich environment that will only become useful if  it was populated with meaningful solutions, the mobile platform of the iPhone also offered a robust canvas waiting to be inhabited with solutions that provide a rich user experience.  In focus groups and discussions with our customers, it was apparent that their creativity is was not restricted to the time they spent in front of computer.  They were seeking the freedom to be creative wherever they are and wherever they go.  The iPhone represented a great platform to untether their creativity and give them the capabilities to work with a highly portable version of the PANTONE Color Systems.

How many different variations of the current app have there been before it went to the final version?

It is hard know exactly how many concepts, wireframes and prototypes were iterated before we decided upon the current implementation.  Needless to say we wanted to take full advantage of the iPhone user experience and provide a robust app that would be not only cool but have a high degree of utility.  Our team wanted to make sure the app deployed the touchable aspects of the iPhone to full advantage and at the same time provide a visually interesting environment for a creative audience.  Obviously dealing with the size of the screen and understanding that apps need to be focused and are not just a small desktop application were challenges we had to understand.  At the end of the process, we were delighted that we had successfully married the user interface and capabilities of the iPhone platform (touch, e-mail, GPS, voice functions) with an app that is not only fun, but useful.

Now that the app has launched, is this app finished or will there always been a constant refinement of the app and pushing it into new developments and integrations?

When we were designing the myPANTONE app, we had so many more features, functions and product ideas that, rest assured, there will be ongoing enhancements to the existing product, but also a series of the other apps.  The mobile platform is an exciting way to deliver tools to our audiences.  Also, the mobile environment is part of a larger strategy where the desktop, the web and mobile will all be tied into a large Pantone ecosystems that will have a high level of interoperability and synergy.  The key is providing access and usage of the PANTONE Systems regardless of whether you are on the go, on the web or on the desktop.

The app is listed at $9.99 how does pricing weigh in to the app? Did you think of other price-points and has this one worked for you thus far?

The setting of price points provided many interesting internal discussions.  I think the market is in the formative stages whereby developers are trying to balance the original concept whereby a vast majority of apps were free.  But as the mobile platform evolves to serve as not only a delivery vehicle that is beyond games, social networking and other similar apps, there is a realization that developers can provide highly useful tools that can be monetized.  We have been extremely pleased with the response to myPANTONE.  In less than 2 months since it was launched we have over 27,000 downloads.  It is a learning experience and the customers ultimately will tell us what is working (and what is not).

The Review

myPANTONE gives you the ability to have several PANTONE colorbooks in your hand at any given place in the world. This is a perfect app for designers, Art Directors, Creative Directors, Interior Designers or anyone that has to deal with PANTONEs. myPANTONE is an amazing app to use. The app has a simple and clean user interface that is both intuitive and consistent with normal iPhone standard applications. The beautiful thing about myPANTONE is it operates like a PANTONE swatch book and you can rotates and flick through colors. This is extremely enticing if you have ever needed to leaf through a PANTONE book while you were on the go and needed something. However, this is not just for people that use PANTONE’s anyone could enjoy this app and learn new things about colors, hues and how to make a color palette.

The fundamentals are simple and the app gives you access to big and bulky swatch books with just a few flicks of your fingers. Some other awesome features are the fact that you can share your colors between your machines (that will open the colors in In-Design or Quark or CorelDraw) or to your friends. You can email the colors which is great if someone in the office is asking for a color palette or a client wants to know their PANTONE color.

myPANTONE also allows you to pull colors from a photo which is great if you are trying build a color palette from a photo for a room or a design. This feature works flawlessly. I used a very complex image and this app was able to handle it with relative ease.The only minus that I found with the app is the fact that there is not a way to see the CMYK value for a PANTONE chip. This seems a bit off to me as color books give the CMYK value. It gives the RGB but not the CMYK. Aside from that being the only feature that I could see the app was lacking, this app surpassed my expectations.

Some other features include:

• You can capture and extract colors from photos and snap to the closest PANTONE Color.

• Automatically generates harmonious color combinations

• cross-reference PANTONE colors to other PANTONE color libraries

• Email an HTML image of your palette

• Email color palettes that can be used in Adobe Creative Suite and QuarkXPress & CorelDraw

• Text & Voice annotations of palettes.

• Post notifications of new palettes to twitter and facebook

• GPS tagging of palettes

Conclusion

myPANTONE is the perfect companion for any designer/creative that needs a simple and effective mobile solution. The pricepoint of the app is $9.99 which at first seemed high to me however, if you have used any PANTONE product you know that they are not low dollar and being able to have several swatch books in one application is more than ideal instead of ordering swatch books in paper form. The app has a robust enough feature list to be listed at $9.99  and more importantly is an app that anyone can use and get a grasp on quickly and easily.

Screenshots

More Info

iTunes | Twitter | Site

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myPANTONE: Questions, Answers and a Review

Delibar is a full featured Delicious.com Mac client. Delibar focuses on giving Mac OS X users an easy and quick tool for searching, managing and sharing their Delicious bookmarks. Delibar will be your best friend while using Delicious!

Delibar is a beautiful Mac App by Shiny Frog that solves the problem of being able to share your bookmarks to delicious simply and easily. I know what you’re thinking, “Oh good grief Charlie Brown! Another delicious application that I will never use?!?!” Lets stop that train of thought there. If you don’t know Delicious is a social bookmarking platform that has been around since 2003. In 2006 Yahoo acquired what was then del.icio.us now known as delicious. Delicious provides a way for you to bookmark your sites  and share them with your friends, co-workers or anyone who has access to the site. Delicious allows you to “tag” your websites so that other people searching on delicious can find specific resources and sites based on your “tags”.

So which app is right for you? A plugin? A Standalone? But if I get a standalone I can’t update it from the site! Not true. Delibar has all of this covered in a small and neat package. I think I have tried every for of delicious app or plugin at some point and could never get anything that worked just right. Delibar has solved that and  I am can undoubtedly say that “Delibar brought the fun back to delicious”. No, that was not a paid plug. The reason that Delibar makes this so easy is because it utilizes  a bookmarklet to upload the URL which is great because you can click, tag and then go do something else. A really big asset to the app is that if  other people have already tagged this site, in the right column it shows you what they have already tagged so you too, can tag the site with the same tags (with a few clicks) or add your own.

Delibars integration is very good it allows you to share via email, twitter, shorten the URL, share with MarsEdit or send to Facebook all from its nice little compact interface. A benefit of Delibar is that you can run it in menubar icon only so you can that precious dock space for apps that you run on a daily basis and let your Delicious network only be a click away. The UI of Delibar is amazingly simple, clean and beautiful. Its not overpowering nor weak and puny. It is also is very easy to setup and use on a daily basis.

Delibar is definitely the last delicious app you will ever need. The app is updated regularly which is a great sign that this app will receive some awesome features in the next version. We can only hope that the second released will be as feature packed and successful as the first.

More Info

Site | Twitter | ShinyFrog Home

What is Shiny Frog?

Shiny frog is a small software and design company based in Italy.  Since 2005 they have been dealing with web design and development of high quality applications for Mac and iPhone. Their mission is creating applications that combine nice look-and-feel and usability with a great set of features, both for Mac and Web.

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The last delicious app you’ll ever need?

Dropbox is a very sound system for file sharing, syncing my macs and keeping everything I need in check. I have used dropbox before and only lightly to share files between myself and some friends but the vast capabilities this app has because of its sheer speed and simplicity is something that I overlooked. I am now learning all the tips and tricks of Dropbox and going to share them with you as I shift my cloud computing from MobileMe to Dropbox.  I have had MobileMe since the service was released. I was on the beta for the app and was a little let down by its performance. I didn’t realize how much money I was throwing away a year for slow syncs, a bad backup resource and overall a sluggish service. My MobileMe account is set to renew at the end of this month. Long story short I am not renewing. I figured out how to couple Dropbox with some free apps or apps you already have and turn it into a cheaper/equal price version of MobileMe.

Why Dropbox? The straws that broke the camels back

MobleMe’s iDisk

First of all, have you ever uploaded anything to an iDisk? Did you go to the grocery store and come back and it still has not finished uploading? This has been my typical experience and one of the main reasons I am cancelling. Speed. That alone is a reason for change. I was so frustrated with sharing files, images or anything of the like that took my entire day to do so.

Sync

The sync feature that resides on Apple’s computers is a joke. This app is visible in the menubar and eats your system resources like you wouldn’t believe. The program syncs contacts and emails so why should it eat 99% of my CPU? It shouldn’t.  I am one of the biggest mac fanatics/fanboys you will find and I am thoroughly disappointed with MobileMe. When you “sync” your computer is rendered un-usable. This is not on a computer running Tiger with one gig of ram here either. This a fast Macbook Pro that turns into a Brickbook Pro when MobileMe is syncing my iCal and some contacts.

Dropbox – Salvation at last?

Files

The first time you sync a file to your dropbox account you will smile. Its really silly how something so simple can draw a smile on your face. The reason you smile? It just works. Its fast, easy, and gives you Growl Notifications when a transfer is completed or a file has been altered. What’s better than that when you are sharing across multiple computers? Speed and notifications when something has been changed.

Sync

Now, on the surface it looks like you can just sync some files with dropbox. Not true. With a little bit of thought and some Terminal trickery we can adjust Dropbox to be something that syncs not only files, but apps, contacts and a slew of other interesting things.

Other Thoughts

All in all I am pretty excited about this change and the fact that I get to share it with you and maybe help a few people make a more educated decision on what to do and spend there money on. I am not trying to take down Apple or MobileMe. I love both and have just found a better alternative for MobileMe as some before me have found. Be sure to keep an eye out for part two when we get into the nitty-gritty and maybe you can turn dropbox in your next cloud computing solution.

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Dropbox vs. MobileMe Part 1 – The Switch

How To: Dark Background with Noise

This is a simple tutorial to show how many sites now are using a “noise” background to add a nice texture. This is very simple tutorial that requires Photoshop. The source files are not for download because this tut is only a few steps long to show you, the idea of making a noise background.

1. Open a new document. For this tut I am using a 600×200px doc. Make sure your color space is setup for RGB.

2. Fill the canvas with your select color. For this tut we are using #343434 which is a nice dark grey that would show up well in a browser.

3. Go to Edit > Fill or Shift + F5 to fill the canvas. This just filled the canvas with the color that we had chosen in the step before.

4. We are now going to go to Filter > Add Noise This will pull up a dialog box which then you can send the amount of noise you want.

5. The point of adding noise is not to go overboard but give it a nice subtle pattern where, we can make a nice background image. The amount is very small set at 99%. Make sure the distribution is Gaussian and also make sure Monochromatic is checked. If it is not the noise will be in color and will overpower your backgound instead  of being in the black and white.

6. I then like to add a tiny bit of gaussian blur. This makes the noise a bit “blended” into the background color. I do this so you can’t focus on the edges of the pixels because its pretty distracting if left 100% in focus.

That wraps up how to make a dark noise background. You can experiment with different colors, blurs and noise levels.

**NOTE: **I also would recommend putting a dark gradient or a nice layer mask that makes the noise layer fade in from one side to another. This again makes another subtle background statement. You can also try making a repeating background by making a square pattern and then defining that pattern and using fill again to “fill with pattern” instead of just filling with color.

Examples:

Scraplr

Spiffing Apps

Flowchat

Eddit – Snow Report

Simply Tweet

Tweetie

iPhone App Template Site

Go Squared

Parking App

Birdbrain App

Teehanlax Labs

Beak – Twitter Client

JQTouch

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App Trends: Dark App Site Design

Noteworthy Articles

Google Navigation video hands-on: you want this

We apologize for being fanish, but Google has pulled off something with its new Navigation elements in Google Maps (or is it Google Maps in a Navigation app? It’s hard to tell) that has serious ramifications for a navigation device industry used to charging money for functionality. The introduction of satellite view, a tasteful touch of street view (peep a still of your next turn, or see your destination), and of course regular stuff like spoken directions and street names…

The Droid vs. the iPhone: Let’s count the apps

In the flurry of quickie reviews that appeared overnight after Wednesday’s unveiling of Motorola’s (MOT) Droid — Google (GOOG) and Verizon’s (VZ) latest answer to Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone — little has been said about how the two platforms stack up in terms of apps.

iPhone Apps That Bloggers Need

Gadget Lab’s friends at WP Beginner, a WordPress enthusiast blog, has compiled a list of 10 must-have iPhone apps for bloggers: mobile software that could help bloggers while they’re on the run, or on an everyday basis in general. The list includes a blogging app, a Twitter client, note-taking utilities and others.

WordPress for iPhone 2 now available in the App Store

We’ve just received word that WordPress for iPhone 2 is now available on the App Store. Woohoo!

A quick note about installation: WordPress for iPhone 2 is a new app, and the previous version won’t automatically update to 2.0. Installing it won’t overwrite any previous version you have installed. When you launch the new app, you’ll immediately see “Version 2.0″ at the bottom of the screen. When you’re no longer using it, you can safely remove the previous version from your device.

Inspiration

Little Pixels

Just Notes

Pickin’ Time

Weather Maps

Cellar

Delibar

Live Preview

Internode Usage Meter

Resources

Disambiguity

This blog is where I share what I’m passionate about and what’s currently got my attention in the realm of User Experience (UX), User Centred Design (UCD), Information Architecture (IA), Interaction Design (IxD), and Usability.

Eddit – Icon Shop

iPhone App Site Design Trends

To compete with thousands of iPhone apps in the App Store, having a good app icon is not enough. A nicely designed website for the app is very important. A beautiful website helps to drive traffic in and also makes your app stand out from the crowd.

10 hot Growl styles to make your pop-up alerts really pop

Growl provides customizable pop-up alerts for hundreds of Mac apps, making sure you never miss an important chat message or completed download. You can use Growl to set an alert for just about anything, and you can also make Growl notifications look practically any way you want.

Twitter Followers

Seven people following us chosen every week at random.

@_mark

@MikeWRogers

@iamGarth

@enestanriover

@VM_DesigNut

@iPhone_Develop

@AJCates

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Monday Recap, Resources, Apps & Random Follows

Throughout my career as a user experience designer, I have continually asked myself three questions:

• What should my deliverables be?
• Will my deliverables provide clarity to me and their audience?
• Where do my deliverables and other efforts fit within the spectrum of UX design?

Useful Glossaries For Web Designers and Developers

In a day in age where there are just as many freelancers as there are university educated designers, developers, and all around web gurus, it is amazing to me how much many of us don’t know or have forgot about our trade. As a self-taught designer, I will admit to you upfront that there is a lot I don’t know when it comes to official jargon or certain aspects of things like typography and graphic design. It is these reasons that I call upon glossaries from time to time.

Quick Usability Checklist

After reviewing websites for a few months, I’ve begun to see general patterns emerge that make a site more or less usable. In this post, I’d like to highlight some of the more common problems designers should address on their own sites in a Usability checklist of sorts.

Optimizing Conversion Rates: It’s All About Usability

In eCommerce usability improvements usually have a huge impact on conversion rates. However, usability doesn’t only mean better visual guide or better site hierarchy. It also means a better communication with potential customers using a professional, trustworthy design, delivering the right information at the right time and communicating with users instead of throwing ad-slogans at them.

10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines

Everyone would agree that usability is an important aspect of Web design. Whether you’re working on a portfolio website, online store or Web app, making your pages easy and enjoyable for your visitors to use is key. Many studies have been done over the years on various aspects of Web and interface design, and the findings are valuable in helping us improve our work. Here are 10 useful usability findings and guidelines that may help you improve the user experience on your websites.

iPhone Needs a New Home

The guys over at Teehan + Lax seriously made some awesomerness for the iPhone home-screen. This is a proposed home screen design that I think would work better then what the iPhone has now, which in turn, give you a more seamless experience.

Confirming Passwords is Annoying: Is here a better way?

The defining characteristic of a password field is that it abstracts text as dots. While the intention of this behavior is understandable (it makes users feel secure and protects from prying eyes), the unintended effect is that it creates a usability problem. Users can’t tell if they’ve entered a password incorrectly until after the site’s validation informs them. It’s like typing with your eyes closed.

Convert and the Evolution of a User Interface

An awesome post about the usability design of Convert. Just a constant reminder that experience design is always changing and the finished product is not going to the be the first.

Testled – Usable Usability Testing

See where your users spent their time, what they missed, and where they had problems. Analyse what they typed, where their mouse moved, and even what they are saying and feeling, with data straight from their webcam.

Off the Desktop and Into the World

Great post that “makes you think”. Dane Peterson talks about how Experience Design isn’t just “on a computer” and there are experiences everywhere.

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10 User Experience Related Resources & Findings

Dan Rubin @danrubin | Site | Some Work Samples

designer, singer, photographer, philosopher, polymath in training; improving the world through design. also, half-English by birth.

I use a combination of Textmate and CSSEdit, and couldn’t be happier with the two. I used to use BBEdit back in the days before editors were cool, but I left it behind the day I first encountered Textmate. For me, using an app is as much about features and functionality as it is about “feel” — I need to enjoy using it, and looking at it for hours on end. BBEdit never quite reached that level, Textmate did the first time I launched it.
CSSEdit is likely the most underrated application on the Mac for front-end developers — it does one thing (CSS), and it does it incredibly well. I’m constantly giving demos of it to people, and they all end up falling in love with it (a similar reaction to people really using a Mac for the first time). My favorite feature is the ability to view a live site, extract its stylesheets and edit them, seeing the effects in real-time on the live site.

I’ve tried Coda and Espresso, and though I love Panic for Transmit (it’s all I’ve used for FTP/SFTP since at least the OS 9 days) and MacRabbit for CSSEdit, the attempt both developers have made to squeeze so many different apps into one interface falls short. The features of CSSEdit haven’t made it into Espresso (and it feels like CSSEdit has been forgotten as well, though I hope that isn’t the case), and Coda’s file transfer feels nothing like Transmit — if both all-in-one apps incorporated the full feature set of their publisher’s exceptional standalone apps, I would be more inclined to fall for them…

The theme for me is simplicity: Textmate and CSSEdit both focus on allowing a limited set of tasks to be performed as easily as possible, and because of that they both succeed.

Niki Brown @nikibrown | Site | Some Work Samples

I’ve been designing since I was a little kid – drawing cartoons, making fake newspapers, and planning my plot to take over the world. (Just kidding). My early interests in design were heightened when I got my first computer, it was love at first sight! I made my first website in 1996, with the help of geocities and word-art.

I use dreamweaver mostly for the instant visual feedback. I tend to use the split view (code & design) since I’m 2 parts designer 1 part coder. I know that the Dreamweaver design view isn’t completely accurate (I still check designs in safari, FF, chrome, and satan…i mean IE) , but it gives me the fastest feedback on how my design looks as I code. I’m also a fan of the auto complete feature and the source formating.

I have also been using Espresso which i got with the most recent Macheist bundle, and have tried Textmate and coda. When I’m on the go with my EEEPC I use Notepad++ mostly because its free and was easy to figure out.

Chris Spooner @chrisspooner | Site | Some Work Samples

I’m a creative Designer, avid Blogger and I’m generally crazy about pretty colours and shapes.

Nowadays I tend to use Coda for all my XHTML, CSS and the odd snippet of PHP. Previously I’d been a Dreamweaver user simply because it’s the app that introduced me to web design so I simple stuck with it out of comfort. It wasn’t until I switched over to Mac that there was a selection of great looking coding apps such as Coda, Textmate and Espresso that took my fancy. I tried out all the demo versions but always went back to Dreamweaver because I’d got used to the workflow and shortcuts. I hated how Dreamweaver took years to boot up, but I also couldn’t get used to an app automatically closing my tags for me right after I’d written it after being used to DWs ‘bracket, slash’ way of working.

Nevertheless, I was still determined to switch to an alternative, so I went ahead and bought Coda on one of their discount days and stuck it out over the first week or so. Now I’m happily typing away on a swish looking app that loads at light speed, I’m also enjoying a whole new collection of features that I’d certainly miss should I migrate again!

Adii Rockstar @adii | Site | Some Work Samples

Entrepreneur, co-founder of WooThemes and general creator of Rockstar Awesomeness!

First thing you’ve got to note, is that I’m not a natural coder and that what I know, I’ve taught myself. So when it comes to choosing a development app, I use whatever works for me, because of convenience; and not necessarily because it’s a hardcore development app. Anyway… When I switched from PC to Mac 2 years ago, I had to find a replacement for Dreamweaver and my best available option at the stage was Coda, which I continue to use to this day. I love the fact that’s it’s simple and uncluttered, as I don’t need much else from my development app. I’ve tried Espresso a few times, but I think I’ve just become to used to Coda.

Chris Coyier @chriscoyier | Site | Some Work Samples

Lead cascader. Head tag closer.

TextMate is the code editor of choice on the Mac. It’s incredibly simple to add in commands that do simple things. For example, I set up command-L to wrap selected text in <li> tags. I write a lot of HTML, so that type of stuff is awesome. But yet, I end up using Coda more than any other editor. I work live right on servers most of the time and having it all integrated with FTP is priceless. I’ve been trying to switch to the ExpanDrive / TextMate combo, which I think will be the winner. What I really want is a merging of the code editing powers of TextMate with the integrated awesomeness of Coda. And to be fair, I haven’t really given Espresso a fair shake yet. I did a little Beta testing but it wasn’t compelling enough at the time to make a big impression for me.

Jeff Croft @JCroft | Site | Some Work Samples

Knowin’ nothing in life, but to be legit. Don’t quote me boy, cuz I ain’t said shit.

For pretty much all of my coding, I use TextMate on Mac OS X. When TextMate first came out, it quickly became my favorite text editor, and the bundle approach to extensibility ensured that it continued to serve my needs, even as I explored different languages. I still think it’s the best overall app for my needs today. However, I do admit that I’ve grown frustrated with the lack of a significant update to the app since it’s original release. It’s still very good, but enough time has passed that it’s time for a refresh. I will note that I’m a big fan of Panic’s software and have considered switching to Coda, especially now that there are Django and Python plug-ins for it, but I have a certain inertia causing me to stick with TextMate — sometimes familiarity rules.

Tim Van Damme @MaxVoltar | Site | Some Work Samples

Designer at Made by Elephant, blogger at Maxvoltar. Will design for a warm bed.

A bit of history: I started with Microsoft Frontpage. As I learned that writing HTML manually was the way to go, I switched to Dreamweaver. After I said goodbye to Windows and started using a Mac, Dreamweaver was terrible slow. I did some research and ended up with a combination of Textmate, CSSEdit and Transmit. When Espresso launched, I didn’t like it at first. Maybe it was because it’s a Belgian product, but I forced myself to use it for an entire week. It just clicked. It combined the simplicity of Textpattern with the sexiness (and a lot of features) of CSSEdit. Another important aspect was the workflow, a reason why I never used Coda (it looks great, and a lot of people say some really positive stuff about it, but it just isn’t for me I guess).

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Web Dev App Reviews from the Pros – Part 1, Mac

How to Understand Your Users with Personas

Personas are a powerful tool for helping you to better understand the needs of your users. In this comic, drawn exclusively for Think Vitamin, you’ll learn more about Personas and how they’ll revolutionize the way you design and build web sites.

App Store Heresies: Higher Price, Better Ratings. Don’t Discount Your App At Launch.

Lower your price, lower your ratings. Lower ratings, lower social proof. Lower social proof, lower sales. That’s my theory, and I’ve got data to support it.”

The Exploded View Shirt

Originally I’d printed a small series of my WWDC shirt while I was in San Francisco, but after almost a hundred comments on my blog, and almost a thousand combined emails, twitter replies, messages, and flickr comments, I had figured out that it might be a good idea to make my shirt available for sale.

Adobe Max 2009 Videos (in case you missed it)

No matter where you are, Adobe MAX 2009 Online is your ticket to experiencing Adobe MAX 2009 on demand. Whether you joined us in Los Angeles and want to revisit your favorite sessions and keynotes or you want to catch up on everything you missed, this is where you’ll find links to the webcast keynotes and the session catalog, where you can access more than 200 sessions for instant viewing.

Introducing Atlas: A Visual Development Tool for creating Web Applications by Francisco Tolmasky video from FOWA

Start-up Metrics that Matter by Dave McClure video from FOWA

Branding and Marketing Essentials for Your Web App by Alex Hunter

Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

Now web designers and developers can join the iPhone app party without having to learn Cocoa’s Objective-C programming language. It’s true: You can write iPhone apps quickly and efficiently using your existing skills with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This book shows you how with lots of detailed examples, step-by-step instructions, and hands-on exercises.

Ryan Block on First and 20

Even though the iPhone isn’t an especially good productivity device, that’s what I tend to use it for since I refuse to carry multiple phones. So in terms of the dock, the iPod had to go; between it and the bottom row, I’ve got most of what I need to get down to business……

All you Tweetie fan boys (and girls). This one’s for you…

Of course, many of you out there are will disagree and for you, I present these two cushions as a peace offering. Covered in spicy chocolate sea salt, these pillows are 100% hand-made! Available in two versions these Tweetie for Mac or Tweetie 2 pillows can be yours for $15 a piece or $25 for a pair. Buy them here.

Apple announces In App Purchases for free App Store software

Apple has announced that developers who offer free App Store applications can now take advantage of in-app transactions — a feature that was previously allowed only for paid software. The In App Purchase feature, which was implemented in the iPhone 3.0 software update for paid applications, has now been expanded for use in free applications. Previously, some developers were forced to charge a nominal $0.99 fee for their software to have In App Purchase capabilities.

iPhone app piracy numbers show low conversion rate

image by Nick Humphries

Pinch Media added code to its Pinch Analytic API last June that allowed for the detection of jailbroken devices as well as whether an application had been pirated. Since then, the company has been monitoring the applications of developers who chose to implement the API, and the numbers have been a bit staggering thus far (hat tip to ReadWriteWeb).

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Some Apps and Some Recaps

From their in-game graphic user interfaces to working game interfaces, video games have always been a source of inspiration for me. The creative possibilities are virtually endless when you’re designing a video game interface; you can create just about anything your mind can think of. You can have a futuristic design like Halo or something cartoonish/illustrated like Grand Theft Auto. Video games have always been a good place to acquire some unique and cutting-edge inspiration.

Ember App

EmberApp.com is an amazing online repository for screen captures and other images. Ember is made by RealMac software, the creators of Little Snapper & Rapid Weaver. Ember is a great place to browse through interface designs, web designs, typography and anything in between. With great interface designers, like Tim Van Damme, uploading images everyday, there is more than enough for you to look at, drool over, and make notes of, for your next interface.

Flickr

This rapidly-growing image uploading service receives an exorbitant amount of images everyday. Flickr has become so massive that there are even interface design groups, as well as various other groups, within the web interface, to find inspiration from. Most importantly, its minimal interface allows you to easily view the beautiful pictures that others have uploaded.

Library or Bookstore

by Dunny

In this digital age, we often tend to forget that print publications still exist. Books and magazines still provide tons of places for inspiration. Go to a book store, take your laptop, get some coffee, and read; not on digital format, via your Kindle, but on actual paper. Leaf through some magazines and you will be surprised by the mountains of fascinating ideas that will flow into your brain. Oh, and don’t forget to take a sketchbook or notebook with you so you can record your thought process.

Outside

by Casey Templeton Photography Inc

Sometimes we, as slaves to our own work, forget that we would be 100% better if we just got out of the house for a change. It’s true. Go out for a walk or a run, and even take your dog (if you have one) with you. You will be able to come up with some amazing ideas when you have relaxed and set your mind free.

Concept Cars

This is probably my favorite of the entire group. Concept cars have always been able to push the limits without having to actually have everyday function since they are, concepts. The cars are made to push the boundaries of the Transportation Design industry, so they tend to have sleek steering wheels, doors that open in the opposite direction, solid glass roofs, pushing function over form instead of form over function. Nothing can inspire me more than a groundbreaking concept car design that has amazing attention to detail and incredibly elegant lines.

Where do you find yours?

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Unique Places for Interface Design Inspiration