November 2009
9 posts
4 tags
Thanksgiving Special: The Design of Pie Tins
I don’t bake very often so this might be commonplace, but I found these pie crust tins to be pretty nifty.
When you purchase the crust, it is lined by a solid piece of plastic. It is removed by crimping up the edges of the tin.
After the pie is finished, the plastic piece is inverted and placed on top, now functioning as a cover if the pie is stored. Nice.
6 tags
Correction: Smultron Touch is Really OS X Touch
I posted a few days ago about a nice little UI touch in the menu for Smultron, in which an additional bit of metadata is added to duplicate file names in the Open Recent menu to help distinguish them.
Well, after receiving a friendly email from Benjamin Stiglitz over at Apple, it turns out that this is an OS X wide behavior. Any app written in Cocoa and running in OS X will do this...
3 tags
Google Chrome OS
The big news this last week has been Google giving a sneak peak of their new operating system, Google Chrome OS. It’s already been dissected at great length on the internets, but I think there are some interesting things going on here from a simplicity standpoint.
The video below gives a great introduction to what the OS is all about:
The key take-away here is that Google is...
4 tags
A Nice Menu Touch in Smultron
I stumbled upon this today and thought it was great. Smultron is, according to Wikipedia, “an open source text editor for Mac OS X that is designed for both beginning and advanced users.”
I needed to open a recent file, in this case index.html, and was delighted to see how the repeated file names were given an additional bit of data (the folder where they reside) to help distinguish...
7 tags
Texting in the Foreground - A Follow-up
Just a quick follow up to Monday’s post:
Several people, including Mr. Gruber and Twitter user dillinger23 proposed a UI in which the user replies directly in the modal dialog to a text message. I had some hesitation with this for a couple reasons: 1) not enough real estate for longer text messages, and 2) lack of an ability to view the entire conversation. After comping it up, however, I...
6 tags
Running iPhone Apps in the Foreground
Much has been written about the iPhone’s lack of ability to run third party apps in the background, a limitation that has likely been imposed to conserve CPU, RAM, and battery. This is something that will undoubtedly be made possible with a future hardware upgrade (potentially as early as the next iPhone), but in the meantime, are there any ways to improve the user experience with only a...
4 tags
The Laws of Simplicity
This blog would not be off to a proper start without giving a nod to John Maeda. Maeda’s book, The Laws of Simplicity, continues to be a huge influence on the way I approach design problems, and was one of the inspirations for creating this blog. If you haven’t read it I can’t recommend it enough.
Below is Maeda’s TED talk from a couple years ago, in which he discusses...
4 tags
A Tale of Two Mice
These two mice were announced / released mere weeks apart:
Apple’s Magic Mouse:
Open Office’s OOMouse:
Apparently the latter is not a joke.
It should be made clear, however, that minimalism does not necessarily equate to simplicity. But seriously.
3 tags
The Pencil
There is an old joke, or urban myth if you look at it another way, that goes something like this:
When NASA first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered that ballpoint pens would not work in zero gravity. To combat the problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 billion to develop a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, underwater, on almost any surface, and at...