“We are tempted to think that our little “sips” of online connection add up to a big gulp of real conversation. But they don’t.”
— Sherry Turkle, The New York Times
Stunning work and a fascinating look inside war photography.
Photographer Ben Lowy discussed his work, which documents places including Haiti, Darfur, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya during times of conflict.
Serendipitous. (Taken with Instagram at NPR Headquarters)
“If the definition of “open” is “that which can be indexed and monetized by Google,” maybe we need a new word.”
Was in the neighborhood. #obligatory (Taken with Instagram at The White House)
Nielsen is wrong on mobile
Josh Clark (emphasis mine):
Mobile isn’t just ‘mobile’. It’s also the couch, the kitchen, the three-hour layover, all places where we have time and attention to spare. 42 per cent of mobile users say they use it for entertainment when they’re bored. Those aren’t 10-second sessions. That means we shouldn’t design only for stunted sessions or limited use cases.
Say it over and over until you’ve exorcised the mental image of your user typing furiously on her iPhone as she frantically runs down a crowded sidewalk, looking for her next 10-second morsel of information. That user undoubtedly exists, but we have to stop assuming this is the only mobile use case.
Skeuomorphs? We don’t need no stinking skeuomorphs…
Propellerhead’s deceptively simple new music creation app Figure takes a very different tack than Apple’s GarageBand in its approach to synth UI. While there is much to appreciate in GarageBand’s expansive capabilities, I have often felt that the team erred on the side of aesthetics at the expense of usability. The primary offender in this category is their implementation of physical knob skeuomorphs, which are a constant source of frustration for me.
Figure, on the other hand, gives us subtle visual cues to the “knobs” controlling the rhythm of each piece of the drum machine without a dogmatic adherence to the physical behavior of a knob. The Figure knobs are delightfully simple to manipulate by dragging up and down, and the knob expands to make the rhythmic value visible while manipulating the control.
This is beautiful work that I hope Apple’s designers will take note of.
NYC
Manhattan from the Brooklyn Bridge
Brooklyn Bridge
New York by Gehry
Tower reflection
Memorial
1 World Trade Center
Tower reflection II
30 Rock
30 Rock
Midtown mist
Great, Another Bootstrap Site
Paul Scrivens:
If you have done your time and learned design or coding, then frameworks offer you a great way to take some shortcuts, but only because you know how to tweak your way through them when things get rough. If you are using Bootstrap to quickly get a site out the door, I understand the importance of launching fast and early, but spend a couple of hours making sure your site doesn’t look like the thousand other Bootstrap sites out there.
Nailed it. Bootstrap is an incredible tool that is easily abused by those who see it as a theme. Don’t look at Bootstrap as a coat of paint to slap haphazardly onto your site. See it as a power sprayer that will let you blast through some of the solved problems of front-end code organization so you can focus on the details of the interface.
“These are “thought-leader gatherings” where “rock stars” emerge from their “silos” to learn about “disruptive” ideas that have been carefully “curated.” ”
— Benjamin Wallace, New York Magazine, on the proliferation of TED and similar conferences.
