Since the Washington Post made an iPad app too, I think it’s both the time to elaborate on interfaces and the time to admit, that the change is surely coming. The dying press industry can actually revive with this new medium, which is good because we need well written content. There’s nothing wrong with amateur bloggers, but the most valuable content is and will always be made by professional writers and journalists. So now we have the chance to try those out because the new york times, washington post and newsweek all made really nice applications that bring the press to the new medium. And of course they will also be available on other tablets when they finally come out. And that leads to a conclusion that there’s another change in interfaces coming.
Apparently a click to view interface doesn’t really work with press on a tablet. No, every one of the magazines has swiping motion to change pages / browse through articles. People don’t like to point and click, they like to browse. And what’s more natural than a swiping motion? Right!
And since the tablets are slowly taking over, we might want to consider websites that are also navigated that way (or can be navigated with both regular and modern touch controls). That might lead to a regression of thought, because we’re actually coming back to the system that was dominant before the PC revolution. And this system is already catching on. So it might either be a case of nostalgia, or simply a way to do it right. And if it’s the latter we should consider that with all of our feature layouts.
Below you can see the AD for washington post, pretty funny, especially the last sentence ;)
Many of us might actually miss that because it’s not an option often used in tutorials online and the “snap to objects” function is used quite a lot in photoshop as well. But let’s imagine we have a couple of text fields and we want to align them vertically or horizontally together. Well we can do that with a set of these tools, the icons should be pretty much self-explanatory as it allows you to either align the baselines or centers of objects and it shows which kind of alignment each icon represents. Go and try those out!