Apple
November 16, 2011, 09:19 PM
I’ve been slowly getting through Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. One tidbit I was struck by:
…he pulled out a device that was about the size of a desk diary. “Do you want to see something neat?” When he flipped it open, it turned out to be a mock-up of a computer that could fit on your lap, with a keyboard and screen hinged together like a notebook. “This is my dream of what we will be making in the mid- to late eighties,” he said. They were building a company that would invent the future.
That was Steve Jobs in September 1982 at a retreat with the Macintosh team. He had imagined the laptop one-and-a-half years before shipping the first Mac, and seven years before the Macintosh Portable saw the light of day.
October 06, 2011, 12:30 AM
I have been a Mac user since 1985, when I was in the seventh grade. For months I lusted after the Mac on display at Computerland on Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco. I’d go there after school just to play with MacPaint. It simply captured my imagination. Finally, after many weeks of begging, I got my dad to buy me a 512K Mac. Thus began my love affair with Apple.
Imagine how lucky I felt when I actually began working on the brand and on Pixar in 2001-2002. It was such a privilege to be so close to the magic and to Steve Jobs himself.
The Steve Jobs I knew was human. Not a god. Not someone who could distort reality. Just a man.
But he was sharp and always focused with his opinions and observations. He demanded perfection. Always.
I was a lowly pixel pusher when I worked directly with him. In addition to Pixar.com, I also designed some pitch slides for him. His feedback was always direct and always right. Yes it was surreal to have him call me on the phone and for me to load slides on his Mac.
Near the end of my tenure at Pixar, I wanted to do more. I was hoping to build a little design department there. But Steve didn’t think I was ready, and he told me so—directly. Even though I was crushed at the time, it was probably one of the best pushes I ever got to do better, to stay hungry, and to stay foolish.
Thank you, Steve. You changed me—and more importantly, the world—for the better.
September 08, 2011, 09:39 AM
I’ve been using Mac OS X 10.7 Lion for a few days now. I won’t go through all the new stuff; you can read John Siracusa’s epic 27,000-word review instead. But I do want to talk about one thing: natural scrolling.
Apple calls “Natural Scrolling” the reverse of what we have all been accustomed to for the past 15+ years since Microsoft’s IntelliMouse made the scroll wheel popular. And despite my tweet to the contrary, it is definitely taking some time to get used to it completely so that it’s muscle-memory. But I need to break current muscle-memory that’s been a decade-and-a-half in the making.
Natural scrolling actually does make sense for a complete computer newbie. On a trackpad, the user is pushing the page up with her fingers, just like on a touch device such as an iPhone or iPad. This works fine on the Magic Mouse too.
But there still is cognitive dissonance. As the user pushes up on the trackpad the scroll bar moves down and the cursor stays put. Yes on iOS the scroll bar moves down as well, but the user’s actual finger is directly pushing the content up. Whereas the finger gesture on the trackpad or mouse is physically dislocated from the screen, there’s a another layer of abstraction that’s happening (at least in my head).
And then I thought about how that gap might be closed. What if that stationary cursor turned into a grabber hand and moved with the scroll gesture?
Here’s an experiment.
As soon as the gesture starts, the cursor changes into a grabber hand that will move with the gesture. When the gesture is finished, the grabber returns to its original position and changes back to the normal cursor.
August 26, 2011, 02:06 AM
With everyone sharing their sweet Steve moments, I have to share mine.
I was working at Apple in the motion graphics group within the Graphic Design department. I was assigned to work on the intro animation for the Mac OS X 10.3 Panther setup assistant. We went through the normal design process with our stakeholders (people in charge of “MacBuddy”) and got to an animation that was essentially swarms of dots that formed each of the different translations of “Welcome” on the screen. And then we showed this nearly-final animation to someone higher at the top—forgive me, I’ve forgotten who this was—and he killed it because the dots looked too much like sperm. OK, they kinda did. (Think about swirling points of light but with motion trails. We tried increasing the motion blur, but it was no use.)
It was back to the drawing board and I presented more ideas. Eventually Steve got involved and started looking at the animations. Each week my boss would show Steve a new revision of it, and each time we got a little closer. Then on Round 14, the week my boss was on vacation, I had to go present it to Steve Jobs.
He was eager to see this new revision. No pleasantries. No introductions (actually he knew me from Pixar). Just got right down to business. But he did say this to me, “Wow. We spend more time on MacBuddy than Microsoft does on all of its UI.” And then he chuckled.
The presentation was quick and he only had a couple of pretty minor notes. I think I had one more revision and it was finally done.
What my time at Apple and working with Steve taught me was this: Keep going until it’s right. Don’t settle.
Thank you, Steve.
February 28, 2011, 11:52 AM
This post was originally published on Bow & Arrow from PJA (my employer) on February 3, 2011.
The New York Times recently published an article about how apps and web services are enabling consumers to customize how they read their online content. From apps like Flipboard and Pulse to services like Readability and Instapaper, users are increasingly demanding to consume content whenever, wherever and however they want.
When Apple introduced the iPad a year ago, many print publishers saw it as a panacea for their dwindling readership. By creating digital editions, they hoped to recapture some of the eyeballs lost to aggregators and RSS feeds. One of the pioneering publication apps was the WIRED Magazine iPad app. Because of its novelty, its debut issue sold 73,000 digital copies in nine days, almost as much as on newsstands. There is a clear desire from users to read magazines on their tablets.
What that first generation of attempts miss though, is they are trying to replicate 20th century print experience on a 21st century device. The magazine apps feel very one way. But the iPad is an Internet-connected device and users on the Internet demand more interactive experiences. They want to copy and paste passages to put on their blogs. They want to share articles via Facebook and Twitter. Using Adobe’s Digital Magazine Solution, Condé Nast is starting to address some of these issues.
Meanwhile apps such as Flipboard are aggregating content and repackaging it for their users. Flipboard presents news items according to a user’s social graph, creating a personalized and highly relevant news stream. Additionally, the app presents this content in a unique way: as a paper magazine. The visual is striking, yet it still holds familiarity with users since it loosely mimics the experience of reading a real-world magazine, with the benefits of interactivity. And so far it has been a hit with users, even earning an App of the Year award from Apple.
Different kinds of content demand different kinds of packages. For example as a designer, I—along with most designers and art directors—flip through magazines such as Communication Arts and Print, and peruse blogs and websites like LovelyPackage.com and SmashingMagazine.com. Seeing something cool usually sparks an idea for whatever we’re currently working on.
To get through the hundreds of design-related sites out there, I use RSS feeds to aggregate this content for myself in Google Reader. Unfortunately, because I am so busy, I am not able to keep up with all my feeds. I may manage to check it only every few days. And I dread seeing that “1000+” number next to my unread items.
So last year, when the iPad was introduced, I decided to find a solution as an independent side project. I knew that an app on this large dedicated canvas could be created to serve this need of efficiently consuming visual inspiration. I teamed up with a developer friend and we started work on DesignScene.
We set out to create something that designers would enjoy using and become part of their daily ritual. We had two primary objectives:
- The UI must serve the content and the audience. It has to be beautiful and show off visuals well.
- The content must be relevant. There’s a glut of design-related websites and blogs on the Internet. Let’s help designers navigate through them.
The UI we designed is sparse—a simple grid that takes advantage of the screen real estate afforded by the tablet. Users flick through the various grid cells to see an assortment of images. They can enlarge the images to fill the screen or read the accompanying text from the original source via the built-in web browser. DesignScene surfaces up the latest inspirational images of not only design, but also architecture, photography, art and so on. The content is a curated list of sources and—as a whole—has an editorial point of view to enhance discovery.
It’s been two weeks since DesignScene launched. [This was originally posted three weeks ago on the PJA blog.] So far we’ve had great response from users and media. We built social sharing into the app and we can already see hundreds of discoveries being shared on Twitter. Our users are interacting with content in a way that was not possible just a year ago.
February 14, 2010, 01:41 AM
I went to the first post-Apple era Macworld on Friday and spent a couple of hours in the exhibit hall. This year it was only in the North Hall, much smaller than it has been in past years. A lot of the big names—besides Apple—that were anchors in previous Macworld Expos were not there: Adobe, Filemaker, Canon, EPSON. Microsoft, HP and others had smaller, toned down booths. The floor was packed with a lot of the smaller players and had a substantial area dedicated to iPhone apps. I found that I had to pay attention to the small exhibitors.
In terms of my show picks, here they are.
- TypeDNA: This is a series of plug-ins for Adobe CS4 that helps you preview and make decisions about your typeface choices. The innovation is that it analyzes 62 characteristics of every one of your own fonts to build a local database. From that database, it will allow you to search by styles, classifications and even find pairs of typefaces that go together. All this is based on scanning the letterforms, not checking the font name. Pretty incredible. It’s not out yet, but should be shipping in the next month or two.
- Topaz Labs Filters: This was the first demo that caught my eye. The speed and accuracy in which the ReMask plug-in works is incredible. Much easier to use than Photoshop’s native Extract tool or onOne Software’s Mask Pro.
- Inklet + Pogo Sketch: I’ve always been a Wacom tablet user. I just find that for Photoshop work, it’s invaluable. Inklet is software that allows you to use your MacBook Pro’s multi-touch trackpad as a tablet. Combined with the Pogo Sketch stylus, it’s like a mini-tablet built right in!
- Anti-Glare Screen Protector from Green Onions Supply: I’ve never liked the glossy screen on my MacBook Pro. So when I saw this on the show floor, and how it just cuts the glare, I had to pick one up.
June 08, 2009, 10:59 AM
As with most creative people, I have ideas. A lot of them. I’ve got ideas for websites, products and of course iPhone apps. The last bit has gotten me really excited recently, especially with articles about how tiny iPhone app developers have been able to make a lot of money. I’m not necessarily interested solely because of the iPhone gold rush—just partially—but also because of the thrill of exploring the new user interfaces that are possible with iPhone.
I’m not a developer. I’m a designer. Although if I tried really hard I could probably learn Objective-C and hack something together, it probably wouldn’t be the best quality and wouldn’t necessarily be the best app. There’s an old quote from Pixar’s John Lasseter that I love: “Art challenges technology and technology inspires art.” If I am to do anything well in the saturated iPhone appland, I need to find a genius dev.
In my quest to hook up with an iPhone developer—since I only know talented web devs—I found Steve Weller. Fantastic guy. He fits the profile of an Apple developer perfectly, in a good way. He knows his stuff and he lives and breathes Apple. Although we haven’t actually worked on a project together yet, he is of the same mindset: good developers need good designers (and vice versa).
To me there are just too many apps out there that are nice from a functionality standpoint, but really fail in user experience. That’s where we as designers can give an app that extra special sauce to help it reach Apple’s Top 25 lists.
Steve has organized a meetup for iPhone developers and designers during WWDC this week. It will be on Wednesday, June 10 at 12:15 by the waterfall at Yerba Buena Gardens. See his site for more info and to RSVP.
May 15, 2009, 11:35 AM
Customer and user experience is not always about the website, the phone call, or person-to-person interaction in a store. It can also come through the form of packaging.
I just bought a Mac mini recently (for a living room media server) and was blown away by the unboxing. Apple has always been really great about their packaging. Having worked at Apple, I’ve seen the extreme extent of explorations that go into creating the outside of the box (over 500 comps were created for the Power Mac G5 box). (Incidentally, I worked on the second generation iPod package that featured musical artists like Jimi Hendrix.)
What really impressed me about unboxing the Mac mini was not the outside (although nicely designed), but the inside. The package anticipated my every move. How? Let me illustrate.
After removing the slip case, the typical “Designed by Apple in California” copy is printed on the thin box of manuals and DVDs. This box sits flush with the larger box. Nicely protruding from the right side is a tab to pull the manual box out. The tab also acts as a closure for the box. Multipurpose.
Removing the manuals reveals the Mac mini. What most companies would do in this situation is force you to turn the box upside down and shake the product out. I’ve done this many times and have found it to be quite maddening.
Instead, Apple thoughtfully supplies two plastic tabs that allow you to lift the mini out of the box. Also very cool.
For the bottom of the box, another cardboard layer hides the power supply and cord. Again, there are pull-tabs here built in to help you lift it out of the box. Did you notice the graphic design pattern here? The tabs are all in the same place and of the same size and shape.
After being so impressed, I thought that surely Apple would fail on the one thing that companies always fail at: tape around the power cable would be impossible to remove. Nope. They read my mind and included a little tab to unwind the tape.
Nice work Apple. You had me at first tab.
February 24, 2009, 03:51 AM
When us designers start off designing a home page, we invariably create at least one variation that’s based on the Apple.com home page: a large hero graphic and three or four smaller promo tiles below that. That basic framework that Apple perfected is essentially a reference design.
However, their pioneering is more than just skin deep. Spoonfed Design has a pretty good analysis on why Apple.com is so great.
I think it’s a testament to the quality of work that comes out of Cupertino that most of their designs, whether it’s product, OS UI, advertising, print or online is held as the reference standard. Having worked at Apple, I can assure you that seemingly simple and elegant design (product shot with a headline set in Apple Myriad on a white background) is not as easy as it seems. Besides, what other company can you name that has sparked such design trends such as colored plastic, gel-like buttons, and glassy navigation tabs?
Usability Analysis of Apple.com: Why is it so Good?
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