Tablet interfaces, web apps and oh, I’m back!

Posted on September 29, 2011 by IdeaMonster

Been away for quite a while, since I’ve been working for one Apple related blog, but now I decided that it’s time to be more creative, instead of repetitive. So CreationMachine is officially back in “business” (whatever business it is) and you can expect more updates soon.

A couple of interesting things happened when I was gone: first and foremost some Android tablets were trying to beat the iPad, the Kindle Fire was announced (and it can shake things up finally), and there’s an explosion of Web Apps led by Financial Times, that withdrew from the App Store to cut the Apple Tax out of it’s subscription. We’ll be seeing more and more of those kinds of apps in the near future, so HTML5 is something to keep an eye on. Especially after “Hype!” and “Edge” by Adobe, which are in fact targeted at app developers and designers.

So there are things happening and there’s been changes, but not too many apparently, so we’ll manage somehow. Just need to redesign the site and connect it to my wider network, so an official start will happen soon. And when I say “soon” it really means soon or it’d drive me crazy ;)

Tablets are coming

Posted on February 13, 2011 by IdeaMonster

As predicted there are a few nice tablets out there with the recent announcments of Motorola Xoom and HP TouchPad joining the already successful iPad. These look and work well and will surely add to the revolution. So is it time to start rebuilding our user experiences on the web yet? Well we can start by using more and more HTML5 / jQuery options. And maybe take a different approach to content. Exciting times to be in the center of the new computing revolution. And I hope to see many great web designs for tablets soon.

Predictions came true – tablet era ahead of us

Posted on January 6, 2011 by IdeaMonster

As I predicted earlier, the wave of tablets came from this year’s CES. There’s so many of them, both good and bad, that we surely can talk about a revolution in browsing. Some of them run flash, some don’t, some do it in a limited way. But the touch input will be the new browsing in the starting decade. And we should think about that while designing.

That might mean a small revolution in web design, towards a mixture of print and web styles, that are easier to grasp on tablets. Maybe “swipe to change page” mechanisms, more jQuery and Javascript, video and sound. And bigger, clear controls. We’ll see where it goes next, but since most of the internet is about consuming content, we might see a big transformation of the way in which the content is delivered. Exciting times!

Interfaces of the present

Posted on November 9, 2010 by IdeaMonster

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 ;)