This iPhone ad must be one of the best tech ads ever. They’re so proud of the user interface that they don’t mind showing you the individual pixels in this close-up:
And they didn’t even bother to edit out the loading of the Google map tiles:
No special effects, no tweaks; they’re just showing you the real thing.
Getting Real, the book, self-published in PDF format this march by 37signals, is now also available as a paperback and in a free html version.
I never finished reading the pdf version because I find reading PDF documents on a computer screen really annoying.
Reading a well-designed html document from screen is a much, much better user experience; it’s easy to change font size, the position and width of page elements changes to fit the browser window and you can just scroll down and keep on reading without being interrupted by page boundaries.
For reading from screen, the html version of Getting Real just works better.
One thing is driving my crazy though; why on earth haven’t they used curved quotation marks in the html version? Proper punctuation just doesn’t matter anymore?
Wired News has some great quotes about design in their Straight Dope on the iPod’s Birth:
Ive told the Times that the key to the iPod wasn’t sudden flashes of genius, but the design process. His design group collaborated closely with manufacturers and engineers, constantly tweaking and refining the design. ”It’s not serial,” he told the Times. ”It’s not one person passing something on to the next.”
Robert Brunner, a partner at design firm Pentagram and former head of Apple’s design group, said Apple’s designers mimic the manufacturing process as they crank out prototypes.
“Apple’s designers spend 10 percent of their time doing traditional industrial design: coming up with ideas, drawing, making models, brainstorming,” he said. “They spend 90 percent of their time working with manufacturing, figuring out how to implement their ideas.”
[…]
“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,” Jobs told the Times. “That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
The website we created for Rijnboutt Van der Vossen Rijnboutt is on the shortlist for the ArchiNed ‘best architect site’ award. It’s one of the 15 sites selected from a total of 135 entries.
We’re very proud of our work, but this couldn’t have happened without the effort put into keeping the site up-to-date by the people at RVR. Great work!
If you like to get a feel of the content management tool we’ve written for them, you can watch a short screencast (QuickTime).
You can vote by clicking the ‘stem op deze site’ button next to your favourite entry.
Remy Sharp has created a very nice Microformats bookmarklet based on Jon Hicks’ proposal for a Safari Microformats plugin.
Via Tobias Lütke, who gives a good example of what you should be able to do with Microformats:
[…] In other words you will finally be able to drag drop a web page with contact information onto your Address software and it should “just work”.
Steve Jobs explains why he thinks the design of an early Segway prototype sucks:
Its shape is not innovative, it’s not elegant, it doesn’t feel anthropomorphic.
Via Signal vs. Noise.
Khoi Vinh’s group at the NY Times is thinking about embracing and extending the Firefox and IE7 feed icon. One of their designers proposed the following modifications:
Really very nicely done. What I don’t get is how the ‘RSS 2.0’, ‘ATOM FEED’, and ‘XML’ labels are going to make things clearer. And what the hell is ‘XML VIDEO’? Some experimental new XML-based video format?
The whole point of the new feed icon was to eliminate the confusion brought on by all these different acronyms. There’s really no reason to offer the exact same content in different feed formats.
The problem with the NY Times podcasts page is not that it offers the same content in different feed formats, but that it allows you to subscribe to the same content with different tools.
You can click 
to add the subscription to your default feed reader, you can click 
to add the subscription to your podcasts in iTunes and you can click 
to add it to your My Yahoo page.
Want to make this less confusing? Here’s how:
Subscribe (default)
Subscribe in iTunes
Add to your My Yahoo page
SanDisk is running a fake grassroots guerilla marketing campaign to convince us that owning an iPod is unoriginal and that iPod users are followers.
Good luck to them. I for one am not offended by images of animals with white airbuds. I think the chimps and cows and sheep are damn cool.
I almost fell of my chair laughing when Avi skyped me just now and this popped up:
Yes, Avi does corporate imaging and information design. He’s also the one who came up with our new logo.
One of the advantages of designing with web standards is that it doesn’t take much effort to create a mobile version of your website. It took me just a little more than an hour to add a stylesheet to Rijnboutt van der Vossen Rijnboutt that optimizes the layout for handheld devices.
Subscribe