and thirdly

retconpunch:

oh hai.

jessieshmessie:

(via Amazon)

Making a X-wing out of a subway ticket

So its been about a week after the iPad has been released. During this whole time I’ve embarked on a little project to collect links to articles that point out the opposite of the general consensus.

That being said, I do feel that the whole announcement was pretty underwhelming. But after spending sometime to think it through, there is so much that just barely scratches the surface, so much that has not yet been revealed.

Its not evolutionary like how the iPhone changed the smartphone landscape. Its something new that we have not yet really anticipated or thought we would use. This is what Apple is good at. To bring you things you never thought you would use and show you how it will change your life.

For that I’m hopeful. Even more so because despite everything, there are many talented and creative developers that will extend and push the envelop of potential for such a new and ground breaking device.

And without further ado, here are the links. Cause I want to document them, and mostly cause I’m just too lazy to continue explaining to friends why the iPad is not “meh”.

• A message to the Internets regarding the iPad by Michael August Pusateri
• The iPad is for everyone but us by Mike Rundle
• iPad About by Stephen Fry (UK Comedian and Technology Columnist)
• iPad by Joe Hewitt (Ex iPhone Facebook App Dev)
• Check Mate: Apple’s iPad and Google’s Next Move by Mike Sigal (O’Reily Radar)
• Did Apple’s iPad Just Corner the Smartbook Market? by Kevin C. Tofel (jkontherun)
• The iPad Is The Gadget We Never Knew We Needed by Wilson Rothman (Gizmodo)
• Future Shock by Fraser Speirs (FlickrExport/ConnectedFlow)
• On the iPad by Dimitry Fadeyev
• It’s not a Big iPhone by Jeff Rock (Tumblr iPhone App)
• The Apple iPad: First Impressions by David Pogue (NYTimes)
• Hands-on with the Apple iPad – it does make sense by Andy Ihantko (Chicago Sun-Times)
• On iPads, Grandmas and Game-Changing by Rob Foster (North Temple)
• The Failure of Empathy by Mike Monterio (Mule Design)
• Computers Shouldn’t Make People Feel Like Idiots by Matt (37Signals)

Oh, and if you thought the iPad was a bad man, what about its competitor? The JooJoo.

marco:

I was asked via email:

It’s my job to research user interfaces and what makes a successful UI. My two conclusions I’ve come to so far are that UIs need to be invisible and familiar.

I was hoping you may have something to add, from your perspective, about what makes an optimal UI.

The “invisible” bit gets most of the way there for my taste.

As a user, I hate buttons and toolbars and sliders and panels and drawers and splash screens and instructional screens and settings screens. In short, I hate UI. I want to notice it as little as possible.

As a developer, I hate having to stop my work because I have to arrange a transaction with someone else (like a designer) to get something done. To minimize external-person dependencies, and because my graphical design skills are abysmal, I avoid needing icons, backgrounds, textures, or logos. The original Instapaper web layout only had one image.¹ Since then, I’ve made extensive use of CSS for styling and Unicode characters for icons to minimize the need for images. Designing “invisible”, minimal UIs isn’t just a preference for me — it’s simply more practical.

But I look at Apple’s iPhone apps, and I don’t feel like my method is lazy or sub-par: all of their apps are the same way. They’re content-focused, with minimal UI. Think about it: what’s the UI to the Photos app? Messages? There’s almost nothing there. Even Safari is just two toolbars and a bookmarks list.

My design goal for Instapaper is for it to look and work like a hybrid of Safari and Mail. It’s not exciting and it won’t win much “design”² recognition, but it’s how I believe most non-widget iPhone apps should be designed: just barely enough UI to get the job done, with the vast majority of the screen devoted to the content.

What’s particularly interesting about the iPad is that its screen is actually too large for this to apply as universally as it does on the iPhone. This is one of the reasons why Instapaper’s iPad edition can’t just be a recompile of the iPhone version: everything’s out of proportion and it just looks strange. It’s like maximizing a browser window on a 30” monitor. And, as I said last week, I suspect most initial versions of iPad apps will have this issue because their developers either didn’t have the time to do more complete redesigns or because they underestimated how different their iPad versions should be.

---

1. It was the “Read Later” bookmarklet. Jacob corrected its jagged edges for me, unsolicited via email, before I even knew him. In the new layout, these are pure CSS, but I’ve added a few small icons where it made sense to do so. ↩

2. On the internet, “design” usually means heavy use of rich graphics and textures. This isn’t how I think about it. ↩

geekleetist:

ancientforever:

Peter Michael Tulay

SteamPunk Dalek is blowin my grapes dudes.

sexualminxxx:

singlebychoice:

theduty:

because you needed to know.

…ladies?

(clicky to embiggen.)

NYTimes article on Microsoft’s decline over the decade. Its a wonder how some people still support them vehemently.

A380 Lego Gallery is just so awesome