Justin Williams compiled a list of the top 50 things Apple needs to do at this year’s WWDC to appease the internet and “analysts” to prevent significant negative word of mouth and plummeting stock value. The worst part about this is that the list is completely true, revealing what insane expectations people have for Apple as a company. One of my favourites…
29) An updated notification center that offers Game Center achivements for successfully tapping the tiny “X” on the first try.
— Justin Williams
Take a look at the whole list; it’s an entertaining and well-researched read.
Paul Miller left the Internet for one year with the hopes and dreams of finding himself:
I thought the internet might be an unnatural state for us humans, or at least for me. Maybe I was too ADD to handle it, or too impulsive to restrain my usage. I’d used the internet constantly since I was twelve, and as my livelihood since I was fourteen. I’d gone from paperboy, to web designer, to technology writer in under a decade. I didn’t know myself apart from a sense of ubiquitous connection and endless information. I wondered what else there was to life. “Real life,” perhaps, was waiting for me on the other side of the web browser.
— Paul Miller
Paul writes about his time “offline” and how it affected him. His time away went a little different that he, or I, thought it would and his first article back is an interesting look at who we are, the Internet’s place in the world today and how we have to deal with our faults no matter where we are.
I’m not sure if they did this in just on take or not, but either way this is the most impressive Rube Goldberg machine I’ve ever seen.
If you’re using a Mac and you find that you spend any significant amount of time writing, I highly recommend you pick up the brand new Ulysses III. I’ll have a full review up later next week, but suffice to say that it is a phenomenal “Plain Text+” editor with nothing but promise on the horizon.
I came across this article a little while back, conveniently just around when I started planning the new design for a website I maintain at work. Responsive design has always interested me, but I found that it was difficult to come up with a design that would fit everything. Then…
The line between what is and isn’t Web-enabled is blurring. People don’t see the Internet on their phone or tablet as being the “mobile Internet.” It’s just the Internet. In the words of mobile expert Brad Frost, “mobile users will do anything and everything desktop users will do, provided it’s presented in a usable way.”
The issue for me was the “presentable way” in which to organize the site’s content. What I came to realize was that my site had a lot of extra “junk” that was essentially all the stuff you shove under your stairs because you might need it one day.
Here’s the secret: you don’t need that junk. While web servers will continue to have a future in the desktop / “mobile” schism, I really believe that responsive design is the future of the web. In order for responsive design to work, though, a entire new view of how we serve websites needs to be adopted.
Instead of sitting in the desktop-mobile dichotomy, we need to move towards viewing users as having different screen sizes, not different contexts. If you can’t make all the content on your site work on a small screen, you probably have too much junk on your site.
My goal from here on out?
Make your site targeted: its primary function should be to address the users goals in coming to your site. The odds are that no matter where they’re coming from, they have similar goals.
Make it flexible: Your site should adapt to different screen widths gracefully without obscuring or omitting content.
It’s a simple formula, but it takes time, thought, and smarts to make it all work. I’m by no means an expert, but I’m definitely going to work towards making it so all users who visit my sites get a fantastic experience of all the site has to offer on whatever screen they happen to be viewing it on.
