One of the additions we made in Tiny Tiger 1.5 was a new parent info page. It's hidden behind a parent gate, and it provides information that we hope will help parents understand the app and use it more effectively with their kids. I thought it might be useful information for parents who haven't downloaded the app yet, so I put it on the Tiny Tiger Web Site:
Tiny Tiger Parents' Guide
It's in two parts: instructions on how to use the app, and some ideas of ours about creative ways to use the app, particularly for parents who limit their kids' screen time (as I do).
If your kids play Tiny Tiger and have some ideas for additions to the Parents' Guide, please let us know! We'd love to hear from you.
This is my new favorite children's book! A mischievous musk ox is tired of being in the middle of the alphabet, so he decides to take over ALL of the letters. He tries to convince his friend, the aggravated zebra, that this is not only okay, but highly logical. Their interplay is funny for kids and adults, and it reminded me of some of my other favorite characters like Cork and Fuzz by Dori Chaconas and Lisa McCue, and Tim Egan's Dodsworth and his duck. Author Erin Cabatingan and illustrator Matthew Myers do a great job of creating fun, memorable characters within the constraints of an alphabet book, which is no mean feat. Put this on your holiday shopping list!
P.S. The authors just released a follow up called Musk Ox Counts! I can't wait to check it out.
We’re thrilled to announce the launch of our most recent client project. “Pillowcapers: A Sleepy Adventure” is an original, hand-animated children’s storybook from the design and animation team at Yankee Peddler. It’s the story of Sam and his dog Shuffles, who save the town of Tidy Corners from some deadly, whimsical invaders.
Bill, Jody, and their team are as obsessed with quality, detail, and user experience as we are, so it was a joy to help them bring their story to life. Their gorgeous animation set a high bar for the project, and we worked really hard to make sure the code was just as amazing as their images.
There were a number of technical and design challenges that we faced when making this app, which we’ll be talking about in the coming weeks. For now, go get the app and enjoy the story!
This is Sofia's favorite outfit for Tiger. "He looks like John Lennon!"
We finally did an update! Tiny Tiger v1.5 is now available in the App Store. Changes include:
Updated for the iPhone 5
A new parent info page which contains a Parents’ Guide, behind-the-scenes info about the app, and some helpful links. (This page is protected by a gate to keep the little ones from getting distracted.)
iOS 7 compatibility
If you are a fan of Tiny Tiger, we would love it if you could write a review or rate the app. It makes a huge difference in the app’s visibility. Thank you so much!
We're still here! We've had an extraordinarily busy summer and fall, but we have some exciting announcements to make in the coming weeks. So stay tuned!
Sofia just turned eight, and like a lot of kids her age she's interested in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books. I recently started reading her Little House on the Prairie, and it's been a great experience for both of us. She loves the story, particularly because it's about kids her age and has lots of animals in it. I've found it to be stimulus for some great conversations about difficult topics. Laura is a very relatable character, which provides kids with an easy point of reference when discussing topics like food, wealth, the history of the American West, science vs. superstition, racism, climate change, and America's treatment of Native Americans, to name just a few. If you have kids between the ages of 6-12, I highly recommend reading at least this book. If they like it, there are eight other books you can enjoy.
There are thousands of games in the App Store, but surprisingly few of them contain a truly original gameplay mechanic. When I find something unique, I'm always interested. When I find something unique and beautiful, I get really excited.
Such is the case with Marcus Eckert's Wide Sky. As it says in the (gorgeous) game trailer, Wide Sky is "a game about hedgehogs and ropes". You use your rope to swing through the clouds, crashing into orbs and performing stunts. Completing challenges unlocks new ropes, which have their own set of challenges. It's a lot of fun and surprisingly addictive.
Did I mention that the hedgehog wears a red scarf?
What makes this game truly amazing is its animation. We are obsessive about animation here, and it's thrilling to find an app that takes such care. Every single action and motion looks considered—nothing is generic. His web site briefly mentions that he wrote a custom animation engine called Meek for this game, which I would love to get my hands on.
I highly recommend that you give Wide Sky a shot. You won't find a more beautiful game in the App Store.
Numerous news sources reported a remarkable stat from WWDC: 93% of the 600 million iOS devices in the wild are running iOS 6. Developers were ecstatic. Every version of iOS we support costs us (and our clients) time and money. With the radical iOS 7 redesign coming up, we don't have time to spare. We'd love to drop support for iOS 5 and focus on iOS 6 and iOS 7.
Unfortunately, that figure wasn't quite accurate, and it hides an unfortunate truth: the iPad 1 is not long for this world.
The actual figure from the original report is that 93% of iPhones are running iOS 6. Only 83% of iPads are running iOS 6; most of the remaining 17% are running iOS 5.
That's still pretty good, but it ignores an important fact: the first-generation iPad can't be upgraded to iOS 6 or iOS 7. Ever. So dropping support for iOS 5 means abandoning the 15 million iPads 1 in the world*. More to the point, it means abandoning the millions of parents, educators and special needs families who flocked to the iPad when it launched.
For iPhones, the number of devices running old versions of iOS dwindles to nothing after two years as cellular contracts expire and users get new phones. But iPads are unsubsidized by carriers, so there are probably a large number of iPad 1 owners who can't afford to buy a new device. These users will be locked into iOS 5 forever.
If supporting the iPad 1 were simple, this wouldn't be a problem. Unfortunately, it's not always simple. The iPad 1 only has 256 MB of RAM; all other iPads have at least twice as much. Moreover, the processor and graphics architecture in the iPad 1 are slower and less sophisticated. So supporting the iPad 1 often requires real work with very significant costs.
It's a tough decision, and there are no easy answers. We just started a new client project, and I'm pleased to say that it looks like we'll be able to support the iPad 1. This won't always be the case, and I dread the day we have to leave iPad 1 users behind.
The Leap Motion Controller is new input device for your Mac or PC, to give it a few new digital tricks. It appears to operate somewhat like a hand-specific Kinect device, tracking each finger's movement and position. They say it can recognize each digit from the others, with accuracy of 1/100th of a millimeter. Already they are building their own app store, and a dev kit to the general developer community appears to be forthcoming. And here's a new game from Double Fine that uses the device, called Dropchord. Looks promising, but it will be really interesting to see how popular it is in the general marketplace.
While the press and rumor mill took hold of the term "flat design" to classify everything in iOS 7, I've yet to see Apple refer to it as such. Such a misnomer was probably giving Jony Ive night terrors. During its introduction, Apple went into a lot of detail about how much depth the new design actually brings. But the depth is not built upon text laden with etched shadows, double-lined borders, drop shadows, shiny gradients, and the use of real-world textures and graphic elements. It's built upon layers, a consistent visual context, and white space. So how do we translate that into our own apps?
Layers
These layers, namely the Notification Center and Control Center, are both brought to the foreground by swipe gestures from the top and bottom. And as opposed to some of the increasingly common effects of 3rd party apps, bringing these panels to the foreground does not visually scale back the background view. Apple is using only a heavy blur, and a relatively small dimming effect to bring your attention to the front panel.
Will this take the place of the newly dominant interaction of the sideswipe menu? Here's an example of the menu from Pulse, both in its current form, and a quick and literal example mock-up of using Apple's technique:
This is not an endorsement of the above mockup, mind you, but an exercise to allow us to ask some questions. Does the mockup retain more context? Would the type (say, on a Retina screen) be more or less legible? Is there less cognitive load, seeing the vague colors of the news items coming from behind? Does this give a sense of dimension?
Covering a background layer with a semi-transparent layer and a blur is an old technique, and personally not one I tend toward. The blur and dimming generally have to be rather extreme, to be sure that no background content can conflict with the foreground type and elements. At that point, haven't you lost as much context as the original concept, moving the content off stage right?
iOS 7 has seemingly removed our old favorite "Coverflow" layout, but that doesn't mean they've ditched 3D effects entirely, as seen in the new Safari tabs view:
Given that Evernote apparently has Precogs on their staff, it's not surprising their app received an Apple Design Award for a familiar looking concept:
Tilting the view planes in such a way allows the top of the content to be seen, which preserves at least the most helpful part of the context. In the case of Safari, it allows a smooth transition between the active view and the other possible views that might replace it. Evernote is actually the flat one here, showing the names of the various notebooks you have the option to change to.
Context
I believe this is the strongest element in iOS 7, and the one us developers can most likely work into our apps. The clearest example is the new Photos app:
When you see the animation, you see how they're using likely Collection Views to maintain your context throughout the app, letting you essentially magnify your interest in a series of steps, here based on time.
But the context retention doesn't stop there. When you want to share a photo, whereas before an action sheet or a pop-over would be used to present the options, iOS 7 takes this further by shrinking down the photo, and bringing the options up from below. Given their approach to layers as noted above, you might have thought they'd stick with some kind of frosted glass view to the action sheet here. The new approach keeps the image in sight the whole time. Also, it allows you the option to select multiple images in the dialog, which I think is closer to the order of actions our brain naturally wants to do.
App launching also uses this approach, zooming into the app, rather than the app coming to the foreground and pushing other elements out of the way. A consistent visual map is maintained throughout common actions. If you wake up your phone, unlock it, launch Photos, navigate down to a single image, share it, then close the app, you would never have left the strong contextual path Apple has laid for you. By incorporating a form of this context saving from view-to-view, and state-to-state, you can maintain the visual chain for your users.
There's still much more to study from the new design. Some of it is more successful that other parts, but on the whole there are some great visual tools and concepts that Apple has given to us. Now it will be our task to make the handoff between their world and ours as seamless as possible.
Design is how a product works, but more and more it's also about how a product is made. The Remade wallet is a great example of end-to-end design. CanvasPop is a company that prints customer photos on canvas. Troubled by the amount of canvas they were wasting, they created a line of affordable ($19-24) wallets called Remade, which are sewn from their leftover canvas. The wallets are made by EcoEquitable, a Canadian sustainability non-profit that provides jobs and training to immigrants and underemployed women. The images come from hand-picked designers and CanvasPop customers (with their permission, of course), who receive a royalty. The rest of the proceeds are donated to charity: water, a non-profit that provides clean drinking water to people in developing countries. What's not to like? I just ordered one.
Even when working on digital products, creativity is often in its most liberated form when not bound by those tools. These stainless steel stencils help you add some of those specific digital elements to your analog inventions. They have ones for iPhone, iPad, and even have cross-platform support with stencils for Android and Windows Phone, amongst other.
And to boot, they're made by brilliant local Seattle studio Design Commission, who are easily worth a mention on their own. Most recently they might be known for their work on Haiku Deck, a beautifully designed presentation app for iPad.
The big story of WWDC is obviously the iOS 7 redesign. Aaron and I both installed the iOS 7 beta on our phones, and using it has been an interesting experience. There are many topics we want to discus here, but we can't right now because we're under NDA. We'll have a lot to talk about in the fall!
That said, we can talk about what has been made publicly available on Apple's web site. You can see screenshots of the iOS 7 versions of the built-in iPhone apps on the Apple iOS 7 page and the Apple iOS 7 Design page.
Previously, the built-in views had strong graphical elements that largely provided this for you. In iOS 7, however, we no longer have strong visual cues like dark toolbars and title bar gradients to cue the user about what information is most important. It will be up to designers to do this on their own.
The Music app is good example of this. Here's a screenshot of the new Music app from the Apple site:
The largest and darkest elements on the page are the cover image, the song title and the playback controls. These form the core of the page. The volume and scrubber controls are secondary elements, so they're rendered lighter. Also note that there is slight vignetting at the edges to give the central controls greater contrast. We can see the effectiveness of this layout by giving it the "squint test", approximated here by applying a blur filter to the screen:
Even without being able to read the text or icons, we still have a very good idea of the relative importance of the information on the page. You can also see the wisdom in their decision to turn the status bar white; if they left it black, it would create an essentially meaningless high-density region at the top that would mess with their carefully-planned hierarchy.
The effectiveness of this layout is highlighted when we compare it to another iOS app that has already adopted a graphical style similar to iOS7—Rdio. They beat Apple to the punch with white backgrounds, spare type, and muted palettes, but their app doesn't stack up to Music:
Rdio made similar decisions as the Music app, but they're not as effective. The contrast on the playback buttons is much lower, and the song title and artist information is extremely hard to read. They've also added unnecessary noise with the black status bar and the dark gray "Now Playing" bar. This is even clearer if we apply the squint test:
In this view, the density of the album information in the middle leads us to believe that that is probably the song title information, which it isn't. That information is completely invisible. The black status bar attracts undue attention because of its value and contrast with the white title bar underneath, when in fact it has no relevance to this display at all. The user is clearly going to need to think every time they use this interface.
I'm not picking on Rdio here. Clearly we will all need to make adjustments to our apps to fit into an iOS 7 ecosystem. But I think it's a great example of how high the bar is for iOS 7 apps. You can't just turn your background white—you have to think deeply about how your app should be organized.
Hello from San Francisco! We're here for Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference. Most of what we learn about here is under NDA, but we can talk about yesterday's keynote. It's tempting to view iOS 7 as a simple facelift to better compete with Windows Phone and some of the fresher-looking Android variants, and I'm sure that was part of the motivation. But what little we saw of the OS in the keynote suggests that this was a fairly deep rethinking of mobile device UX. It looked to me like every single control had been rethought. We have a lot to learn! Of everything that we need to learn, nothing is more important than the new visual and interactive language of the OS. This is crucial, because the clean, spare look of iOS 7 raises the bar for designers. Without button borders, gradients and the other crutches we've come to rely on, bad designs don't have anywhere to hide. In particular if an app has a poor visual hierarchy, it could be unusable unusable. It's a daunting task, but it's also exciting to have an entirely new challenge. My favorite moment of the keynote by far was the intro video. Its description of the Apple design process was a perfect summary of The Curio Dept.'s approach, and it was extremely validating to hear them declare it in such clear, simple terms. I'm sure there are a lot of people who assume that is all marketing talk, but for many of us it describes why we do what we do. It's true for Apple, and it's true for us.
I love writing with a fountain pen, but every one I've owned has left me dissatisfied. They're expensive, and if I don't lose them they invariably dry out after a few days of non-use and have to be rehabilitated.
So I was thrilled to discover the Pilot Vpen (also known as the Pilot Varsity). It's an excellent example of great design—a cheap, disposable fountain pen that just works. It's light, smooth, and writes instantly. I've been using mine for two years, and it has yet to run out of ink, get scratchy or clog up. And because they're so cheap, it's not a huge deal if you lose one, unlike your Montblanc Meisterstuck. The Vpen is a key component of my bulletproof note-taking setup (along with the Behance Dot Grid Notebook).
You can get them for $3-4 books at office supply stores, Jet Pen, or your local Kinokuniya. Oh, and if you balk at the idea of tossing an empty pen, don't worry—the Internet has figured out how to refill them.
If you're yearning for, but can't yet afford, the latest in d/c affluence from Tesla, that doesn't mean your commute can't be electrically powered. The Faraday Porteur is an eBike that looks like it was designed in the '10s (19 and 20). It includes integrated tail and headlights, a "boost" button to aid passing your morning commute rivals, and a detachable front rack system. In the hilly and traffic-clogged environs of Seattle, this fantastic looking bike could at least remove one or two excuses for not biking to work, and we need more of those.
