Saint Blog

A conversation with our UI designer earlier today got me thinking about how easy it can be to fall into the trap of conforming to a certain design or interface aesthetic once you see a few incarnations of something. In particular, most of the iPad applications that have been launched in their thousands over the past couple of months seem to do one of the following:

1) Use old iPhone design principles in a bid to get an application out there on a new platform ASAP.
2) Try and create a brand new shiny aesthetic but without much thought for what this new platform is and more importantly how people will use the content made available.
3) Take one of the early prototypes that were developed (think Wired, Sports Illustrated etc) and then merely pinch those ideas.

This has been getting a load of airplay today, a new social magazine application from FlipBoard. I like the feel of this, the transitions between pages and between content. I like the way they’ve taken a problem (lists and lists of updates, news, photos, lists and lists and lists) and attempted to solve it through UI Design, creating something brand new but oddly familiar.

As Anna quite rightly pointed out, this is something new, its too early to settle for either some new accepted norm for an application, a set of rules that we automatically abide by. This is a phase to be playing, experimenting, building UI’s that may be baffling, challenging and indeed may fail and fall by the wayside.

But that’s why we do what we do, right?

Taken from the motherboard blog:

The latest and perhaps realest step forward in the realm of lazy, mouse-free interfaces arrives courtesy of John Underkoffler, who happened to be working in theMIT Media Lab alum when the producers of Minority Report came through looking for face-melting ideas for their movie. They hired him and his idea, and after the years-long, caffeine-fueled sloppy intercourse of Hollywood and Silicon Valley, he and his company Oblong have emerged at the TED conference with an actual spatial operating system.

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.