Design

The year’s best user interface animations

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Beautiful Pixels posted their annual look at the best user interface animations from apps and the web. My favorite, from Lush for iPhone, is below. So very delicious.

Predicting the future

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In April of 2013, less than two years ago, Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins announced the Glass Collective, “an investment syndicate among our three firms, to provide seed funding to entrepreneurs in the Glass ecosystem to help jumpstart their ideas.”

Follow this link and take a look at the picture. Does this look like the future? Two years ago, it did, at least to some pretty smart people.

Xiaomi and a culture of copying

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As Xiaomi contemplates entering western markets, it will no doubt have a strategy in hand for dealing with more stringent intellectual property protections. The question is, will it change its stripes? Here’s the latest and greatest example…

Fake food. For wearing. What the what?

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Have you ever walked by a restaurant and seen various dishes in the window, designed to give you a visual sense of the menu? Now imagine that hyper-realistic fake food as a necklace, earrings, hair clip, etc. Awesome!

Jony Ive speaks about the tragedy of design education

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Sir Jony Ive gave a talk at London’s Design Museum, focusing on what he considers a tragic direction taken by UK design schools.

Speaking at London’s Design Museum last night, Ive attacked design schools for failing to teach students how to make physical products and relying too heavily on “cheap” computers.

A terrific read, all the way through.

MacBook Pro Retina cable dock

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Bracket is a Kickstarter for a cable dock, specific to the MacBook Pro Retina. I really like this concept, hope it succeeds. You had me at aluminium.

Vogue profile piece on Jony Ive

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A lot has been written about Jony Ive, much of it biographical and centered on his design milestones. This piece is different. It paints a picture of Ive, does a better job capturing his spirit.

15 year old Google Science Fair finalist, an iPhone, and a huge boost for Alzheimer’s patients

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[VIDEO] 15 year old Kenneth Shinozuka lives in New York City with his parents, aunt and grandfather. He’s one smart kid.

Kenneth’s grandfather suffers from Alzheimer’s and tended to wander out of their apartment at night, getting out in the streets of New York City, causing a number of accidents, not to mention a lot of worry.

Kenneth’s solution won him one of the 15 finalist slots at the 2014 Google Science Fair. Watch the video. Incredible work.

MIT’s slick new UI merges your iPhone and laptop interaction

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[VIDEO] MIT’s experimental THAW UI project lets you overlay your iPhone over your computer screen, capturing data from your computer and interacting with objects, creating a single, fluid environment. To get a sense of it, watch the video below. The real fun starts about 45 seconds in.

A business suit onesie

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Yes, this is a real thing.

The Suitsy is a jacket connected to a shirt connected to pants. A zipper is hidden behind the shirt-button placket (with false buttons) and pants zipper. Fake shirt-cuff material extends from the end of the jacket sleeves to give the impression of a complete dress shirt worn underneath. It’s as if a jumpsuit and a business suit had a lovechild.

iPhone 6 and 6 Plus teardowns

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[VIDEO] Per tradition, every major Apple product release is followed quickly by a teardown video from iFixit. I love taking things apart and fixing them myself and I am very happy with the improvements Apple has made to the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus construction, making it much easier to replace the display and battery.

As you watch the video, note the use of the iSclack tool, a kind of pliers with a pair of facing suction cups designed to grab onto the front and back of the iPhone. Once you’ve removed the iPhone screws, you place the ISClack, press on the suction cups, squeeze the ISClack handles, the suction cups separate, and the phone gently opens. Nice design there.

Jean-Louis Gassée on Marc Newson and the Apple Watch

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[VIDEO] This is a fun read. In today’s Monday note, Jean-Louis Gassée explores the creation of and reaction to the Apple Watch. Most interesting to me was the discussion of the potential role that Apple’s newly hired designer Marc Newson, a longtime pal of Jony Ive, played in the design of the Apple Watch.

The video embedded below is a few years old and has been making the rounds since word of Newson’s hire by Apple got out. It shows Newson lovingly, even wistfully, paging through his watch design portfolio. If you have not yet seen this, take a few minutes to watch. You’ll get to know a bit more about Marc Newson and, I think, you’ll be struck by how much the Apple Watch inherited from these designs.

The Apple Watch was not designed specifically for me, but it sure seems like it was

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A whimsical post with a valid message at its core. One value of the Apple Watch becomes evident when you receive a call or text and your hands/arms are busy/full:

To check that message or call all I have to do is lift my wrist and the gyro kicks in, turning the display on. Then I can simply glance at my wrist, rather than stopping the dogs to fish out the phone, to see if the message is important enough to drop what I’m doing. And I can then respond through the Watch rather than having to dig for the phone.

Exactly.

Reverse engineering the Apple Watch dimensions

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I love a good engineering effort. Paul Sprangers uses known numbers and some images from the Apple Watch site to build a more complete picture of the various Apple Watch dimensions. Be sure to read the comments, too.

Jony Ive talks Apple Watch after the keynote

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[VIDEO] Following yesterday’s keynote, and after the regular press had all gone, ABC News’ David Muir had a chance to talk about the Apple Watch with Apple Senior Vice President of Design, Jony Ive.

The most personal device you own

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Pavan Rajam, writing about a potential iWatch and its place in your device ecosystem:

The smartphone is easily the most personal device we own today. It is our life in our pockets. It is our connection to the rest of the world. We take them with us and use them where ever we can.

There is simply no guarantee that the person using a smartphone is the person to whom it belongs.

Not the case with your watch, which is a much more personal device.

Setting the iWatch bar

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[Review and Video] Earlier this year, Motorola ended its short stay with Google when it was sold to Lenovo.

TechCrunch has confirmed reports that Lenovo is buying Motorola Mobility from Google. This is the division within Google that the company purchased in 2011 for $12.5 billion. Motorola Mobility will go to Lenovo for $2.91 billion.

Lenovo-owned Motorola quietly released a smart-watch yesterday, the Moto 360. Everyone’s tastes differ of course, but for me, this is the watch that sets the bar for Android and for smart-watches. This is the watch that you should keep in mind when and if Apple announces an iWatch next Tuesday.

NY Times on wearables and Apple’s potential iWatch

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There’s an alleged comment by Jonathan Ive on traditional watchmakers, plus a solid take on the existing state of wearables.

Fine watches are a passion for many people. It’ll take something really special to get those people to turn away from Tag Heuer and the like. If Apple does indeed deliver the goods here, the traditional watchmakers may well be in trouble.

Forget your Tesla S key fob? Use your iPhone instead

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The new Tesla S electronics update will communicate with your iPhone (there’s no Android support), sending you notifications and allowing you to use your iPhone to start your car. The question has been asked before about the security of remote start systems like this. No car is theft proof. And the convenience seems high enough to be worth the potential risk.

A Facebook design story

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Sometimes design is more about recognizing the true nature of a need and not as much about aesthetics.

The design of the original Apple mouse

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Jim Yurchenco was just beginning his incredible design career when he was asked to design a mouse for a revolutionary new computer Apple was working on, the Lisa.

Yurchenco started looking at other input devices to see how it could all be done more elegantly. He found his answer in an Atari arcade machine. Its trackball seemed perfect for the job.

The Atari machine differed from the Xerox mouse in a few key ways. For one, its trackball wasn’t forced up or down. Instead, it just floated. Yurchenco tried doing the same and found the mouse functioned just fine if you let gravity do the work. Moreover, it resulted in less friction and fewer parts. That was one key insight. The Atari machine also used optics to track the trackball’s movement, relying on interrupted beams of light instead of mechanical switches. By borrowing this concept, Yurchenco further streamlined the internal components. That was insight number two.

The third insight came in how you use the thing. At first, Yurchenco remembers, everyone assumed mice had to be phenomenally accurate to deliver a good experience. “Suddenly we realized, you don’t care if it’s accurate!” he recalls. People don’t pay attention to what their hand is doing when they use a mouse; they just care about where the cursor goes. “It’s like driving a car. You don’t look at where you’re turning the steering wheel, you turn the steering wheel until the car goes where you want.”

Terrific read. While you are at it, spend a few minutes with Jim Yurchenco’s design philosophy in the video embedded below.