This post is a comment to the Stevens Creek TripLog/1040 UI design discussion happening on John Gruber's Flickr entry and Ryan Singer's SVN entry.

The first thought I had about this iPhone app's screenshot was, as many : "hammer, please".
But it's not pure villainy, just excessive sensitivity, and there are some logical facts backing this gut feeling, one of them being : this design mixes 2D and 3D features without any meaningful intentions regarding this dichotomy. It even seems to have no understanding of this dichotomy at all, which is even worse. But the beautiful thing about a mess is that you can only do better. Here are some comments which will hopefully help in this sense.

Pretty much every OSX and Apple apps UIs share this common analogy : they don't display a rendering of a flat, 2D, printed surface, but it shows an arrangement of items that can be described with height, material and texture proprieties. All these simulated 3D objects react to a single (or a single set of) light source, consistently from one screen to another. Every Apple designed iPhone app lives under a softbox giving this fat glossy reflection on top of the iTunes/AppStore/Sms/... buttons, and a more diffuse gradient on top of the Notes button, for example. You can visit every apps on your mac and imagine how it would look like if you turned these lights off. Not that it would turn you on, but it goes a long way to express how consistent the MacOSX UI is.

ℱ version française.

Going for a coffee this afternoon, I saw a fancy cyclist standing still on his two wheels only, waiting for his turn at the red light. He stood like this, without moving an inch for a good 30 seconds : well done, champ.

This had me thinking that in fact, being able to gain equilibrium on two turning wheels is quite striking, as mundane as it can be for us today. On our dear western society technological achievements timeline, the appearance of the bicycle* is oddly late, compared to tremendously more complex concepts that came to us before that.

See, the men who knew there was hydrogen in the sun (Angström, 1861), knew the speed of light (Foucault, 1850), communicated through a telegraph (Morse, 1844), understood the gravity phenomenon (Newton, 1687) and who were 5 years close to discover the automobile didn't know what it was to pedal and move forward at the same time.

Imagine the confusion and awe in Voltaire's or Benjamin Franklin's mind if they had been overtook by a bike while on their morning walk.

* the one with a chain drive, introduced around 1880, not the crotch-cruncher known as the Draisine that appeared in 1818.

Movie still : Jour de fête by Jacques Tati.

Until thought control becomes accurate enough, physical interfaces will remain necessary to interact with video games. Consequently, these products can and should be considered as tangible objects, or more accurately, products experienced physically. The first contact one has with a video game is in fact with the controller of the platform it is played on.
This past year, casual gaming has had a huge boost in consumption while alternative controllers such as the Wiimote and Rock Band game accessories have attracted numerous gamers, novice and seasoned alike.
Would it be too adventurous to state that these two events are linked, that these new ways of controlling games (read : new ways of experiencing a video game product) have brought some much needed fresh air in this industry ? You'll see for yourself, but I assume it's the case. Details on their way, followed by some projections on the role multi-touch interfaces could play in casual gaming.

This post, where my commentary on the Kindle product design has been described as a "silly attempt to review via photos" made me realize that product designers are actually this kind of guys, they judge products from pictures.

How the Kindle is ugly and feels wrong, let aside the subjectivity of beauty or taste.

About this ringtones issue in iTunes.

Songs as ringtones is one of the worst experience that mobile phones have brought to us : it's an attention seeker feature, nothing more. Having a song playing when this given person calls might mean something to you, and that's fine, but for the 2/5/20 people around, it's just intrusive and embarrassing.

I had to redesign my portfolio website recently, and as Coda had just been released by Panic, I gave it a try.

Of all the good features this app offers, the best experience I had with it was actually the Panic sans font rendering on the screen. It's sharp, rounded, very comfortable to read. I used to work with Monaco 9pt as I found it was the most lisible font I had to work with code, but Panic sans feels so much better, as you can see :