The Next Trend In Mobile – Gorgeous Design
This week, two mobile apps have pushed UI (user interface) design to a whole new level on the iPhone. Those apps – Path and Flipboard.
If you’re not familiar with Path, it bills itself as “the smart journal that helps you share your life with the ones you love.” Basically, it’s a gorgeous app that looks like it could’ve been Facebook if Facebook debuted on mobile. Flipboard is a customized news reader that has been iPad-only for quite some time and finally made its way to iPhone & iPod Touch.
Path
Path is not a new app, but it feels like it after the recent 2.0 release. Path has always been a very beautiful app, but that’s all it had going for it. You could only share with a small number of people and the number of friends I had using it I could could on one hand. Path 2.0 takes sharing to a whole new level and ups the game in user interface design by doing so.
The first thing you see when you launch Path is your home feed. It comes pre-installed with a beautiful stock photo, but it can easily be customized to anything you like.
Path also has a fantastic pop-out menu for sharing new content: photos, videos, music you are listening to, location, text, people & sleep/wake.
While some may argue that Path isn’t really doing anything new and that there are many social networks that allow for sharing all this information (a scrappy little startup called Facebook comes to mind), what keeps me coming back to Path is it’s user interface. It’s a joy to use as both a content sharer and consumer and is really pioneering mobile social sharing forward in terms of user experience. It will be interesting to see how Path’s momentum holds up once Facebooks revised app is released with support for “timelines.” It’s supposed to be incredible.
I always wondered how Flipboard was going to bring its magazine-style format to the iPhone screen and still have it feel like the Flipboard I knew and loved. To my surprise, they pulled it off wonderfully.
The app revolves mainly around upward-swiping gestures to navigate through individual stories. It also has a wonderful “Cover Stories” feature that attempts to highlight the content most important to you. Similar to Zite, this is supposed to get smarter the more you use it.
As you drill down into each tile, you get news, photos and other content that can easily be shared or bookmarked for later reading. This is all formatted in the same magazine-style format found on the iPad but perfectly tailored for the iPhone’s 3.5″ screen.
As you can clearly see, Path and Flipboard are really upping the game when it comes to UI design. I’m really anxious to see how other apps follow suit. The recent updates to the iPhone Twitter app area also a step forward in design aesthetic, it’s just unfortunate that it comes at the expense of user experience.
What other apps have you seen that have exceptional design? Let me know in the comments.
Why You Won’t Need a Camera on Your iPad Soon
Today, Apple announced the details of the forthcoming update to the iPhone OS. One thing that Steve did not dive into but was referenced on the screen hyping the 1,500 new APIs opened to developers was this gem:
What does this mean? Well, first let me say that I am by no means a developer, so while I do have an understanding of APIs and technical mumbo jumbo, I don’t claim to be an expert.
That said, the first thing that came to mind when I saw this was “A ha! Now that the iPhone OS has opened up full access to the still and video camera data, you should be able to pair your iPhone to your iPad.” What do I mean by that? Well, imagine using your iPad in a dock and your iPhone (or iPod touch that will be undoubtably released with a camera in the near future) as a wireless camera. This would be much easier than trying to video conference on the iPad if it had a native camera, and now that you will be able to multitask, sharing files and utilizing the touch screen of the iPad with a wireless camera (iPhone/iPod) setup is a much better user experience.
Apple has released the iPhone 4.0 SDK today so if any developers have had a chance to dive into to it, I’d love to know if this is plausible.
How To Play Farmville and Not Annoy Your Friends
Mashable recently published an article called “How to Block Farmville on Facebook.” As they point out in their guide, Farmville is immensely popular, even more so than Twitter, and for those that don’t play the game, it can be extremely annoying to have your news feed overflowing with lost cows, yellow ribbons and crop mastery.
I have no shame in admitting that I play Farmville, and actually have a pretty kick-ass farm! I can also say that unless you are a fellow Farmville player, you don’t see any of my Farmville-related stories because of my use of Facebook’s super-handy list feature.
Here’s how you too can play Farmville, Café World, Mafia Wars or any other game that posts notifications to your wall while keeping your non-gaming friends from hating you.
Step 1: Create a Custom List
When you login to Facebook, click on the “Friends” tab on the left column. You’ll then see a list of your friends with the option to “Create a List” on the upper-right area.
Step 2: Add Friends To Your List
Next, simply create a name for your list and click on the friends you want to add to it. It’s best to create a list for each Facebook game you play, so in this instance I am creating a list called “Farmville Friends.” I then add every person that I interact with on Farmville to this list. When you are done, click on the “Create List” button on the lower-right corner of the box.
Step 3: Customize Your Post
The next time Facebook asks you to publish something from within a game to your wall, click on the lock icon on the lower-right corner of the pop-up window, then click on customize.
You will then see a window that looks like this:
Click on the drop-down menu that says “Only Friends” and choose “Specific People.” You will then be asked to “enter a name or list”. Simply type in the name of the list you just created. In this instance, I would type “Farmville Friends.” Then, click on “Save Settings” below and you’ll then be taken back to the original pop-up menu. This time, if you hover over the lock, you’ll see your custom settings.
Now, when you hit “Publish,” only those friends in your created list will see your post in their feed and on your wall!
Google Buzz First Impressions
I’ve been playing around with Google Buzz for about a day now and have to say that I’m really confused as to what Google is trying to accomplish here.
On one hand, you can’t blame Google for attempting to make inroads in the social media space. Their Orkut service is relatively unknown in the United States and their most popular social tool, Google Reader, sadly hasn’t been adopted by nearly enough users. (I can’t tell you how much it pains me that people haven’t adopted RSS on massive levels.)
Using Google Buzz, I keep asking myself “why do I need this?” Buzz brings nothing new to me that I’m not already getting from Tweetdeck, Hootsuite or any other social networking aggregator. One of Buzz’s most touted features is it’s auto-adding of contacts you email on a frequent basis. Unfortunately for me, that included auto-following a spammer I was having it out with a couple of weeks back. Call me old fashioned, but I don’t want anyone building my personal network without my say.
Buzz offers no options to control the view of your stream, so you’re presented with a massive ongoing flow of information that can be overwhelming if following a few heavy social media users. Perhaps if Buzz was designed to mimic Reader, with a sidebar of your followed users you could group and filter, it would be a lot easier to navigate.
When I first read about Google integrating social into Gmail, I expected a service along the lines of Seesmic; a way to easily read and update my networks, filter users and topics of interest while offering me the ability to easily share and archive my favorites. Unfortunately, what we’re presented with thus far provides little value and leaves most people with more questions than answers. I’m not ready to call Buzz a flop, as one can never count Google out, but until Buzz offers features that I can’t live without, it’s just going to be an annoying list item in my Gmail inbox.
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Flash on the iPad?
There are a lot of people unfairly knocking Apple for not supporting Adobe Flash on the iPad. For a device that’s still nearly two months away from hitting market, I think these complaints are very unfounded.
Yes, it’s almost a certainty that unless some miracle happens between now and April, the iPad isn’t going to support Flash out of the gate, but I believe anyone that thinks the iPad isn’t going to ever support Flash is mistaken.
Apple has their reasons for not allowing Flash on the iPhone, and some of them are justified. Any iPhone user will tell you that battery life is already an issue with the device, and flash could make it a lot worse. Flash also allows developers to bypass the App Store and run applications directly on the phone which also violates Apple’s current terms of service.
I won’t get deep into the whole App Store “walled garden” debate in this post, but Apple’s closed nature on the iPhone has kept the handset virus-free. There have also been no widespread problems caused by sketchy apps; something that could potentially happen if the approval process wasn’t so militant. I’m not saying that their closed-system is a good thing, but it isn’t all bad. Besides, it’s Apple’s store and whether we like it or not, they can do what they want with it.
Don’t let Apple’s history with the iPhone lead you to believe things will be the same with the iPad. This is a new category of devices with an extremely fast processor and a heavy-duty battery. Not only do I expect Apple and Adobe to find some way to bring Flash support to the iPad, I also expect to see background applications on it as well – something that the iPhone & iPod Touch still doesn’t support.
The bottom line is Apple really wants the iPad to be a success. Ultra-portable computing is the wave of the future and Apple wants to dominate that market the same way they are dominating the smartphone market. Steve Jobs isn’t dumb – he knows that Flash is too big a part of the browsing experience to not support it. Now that the shroud of secrecy behind the iPad has been lifted, I fully expect the two companies to start talking about how to bring Flash to the iPad in a way that makes everyone happy.
If they don’t, it’s not really accurate for Apple to make the claim that browsing the web on the iPad is the best experience there is.
Update: It appears that Steve Jobs addressed the issue of Flash in a town hall that occurred a couple of days back. Reports are starting to leak out that Jobs has in fact cited the buggy nature of Flash as the main reason it’s yet to appear in the iPhone OS. Jobs also seems to be placing a lot of stock in HTML 5 as a way to move away from Flash. HTML 5 is a great thing and is going to push the web forward greatly, I just wonder if it will do it quick enough where Apple can get away with never supporting Flash. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.
Facebook Annoyances
I’m a fan of Facebook. It has brought social networking to the masses in ways that Friendster and MySpace were unable to do prior. Sure, MySpace in its heyday rocketed social networking into the mainstream, mostly with the younger generation, but it’s best feature is what led to its eventual downfall – it was too open.
By allowing users to skin their pages with HTML and CSS, people were really allowed to show off their individuality. Unfortunately for MySpace, the inmates started running the asylum and visiting many MySpace pages became a nightmare. Opening a MySpace page became the equivalent of handling a firecracker that failed to go off. Were you going to be greeted with obscenely loud techno music? Perhaps the glitter text and overuse of transparency effects that never looked right on certain browsers was your punishment. Regardless, these statements of uniqueness gave MySpace a stigma to older users of being a kid’s toy that they had no use for.
This is where Facebook came in and filled the void. Many older people that were not on MySpace most likely were dabbling in Classmates.com for their networking fill. Unfortunately, in order to have any contact with friends from your past required shelling out cash on that service and turned many away.
When Facebook opened up their platform to extended beyond just college students, many MySpace users were reluctant to make the switch. Many loathed the fact that they couldn’t add a song to their profile or post obnoxious images on their friend’s wall. Eventually, as more and more of their network migrated over, the old MySpace stalwarts gave in and created a Facebook account.
Facebook has done a lot of great things, but the best thing they did was grow very smart. When the Facebook/MySpace war was actually something worth talking about, Facebook could’ve allowed users the ability to skin their page but chose not to, which in the end is what allowed them to win over the all-important 40+ crowd.
I get asked if I think Facebook will be around in a few years from now or if they will suffer the same fate as MySpace. I firmly believe that Facebook is here to stay for a long time, as long as they avoid some kind of catastrophic PR nightmare or sell out to a major corporation like MySpace did with News Corp. that alienates the user base to make a quick buck. The reason for this is because of the older demographic; many people that are in their upper 30′s or older have the mentality now that they’ve built up their network on Facebook and refuse to start over again. The time and effort required in moving to a new service just isn’t worth it.
Now that I’ve touched on many of the great things about Facebook, I want to mention a few of the not so great things about Facebook.
Social Networking Training Ground
As someone that is engrained in many, many different social networks, I find myself using Facebook less than others in my close network, despite having most of my real-world relationships housed there. Sure, I’m on the site multiple times a day, but I tend to share status updates only one or two times a week. I’m often asked by my less social media savvy friends why someone like me that loves “this whole social media thing” is pretty quiet on the service and I really believe it’s because I tend to look at Facebook as a “social networking training ground.”
Many of the people in my network don’t understand how social networking is supposed to work. They think Twitter is just full of a bunch of morons that only talk about what they had for dinner or how much they hate traffic, yet they commit the same fouls on Facebook. They post about their kids ten times a day or invite everyone in their network to be in their Mafia Wars family. In my network, I find much less quality information shared on Facebook when compared to Twitter that it’s only natural that I focus more of my time there.
I also think Facebook has some of that “you can pick your friends but not your family” syndrome. If someone is boring me on Twitter, I simply unfollow them and move on. I can’t do that to a relative or friend without facing consequences I would rather avoid.
The Little Things
With all the innovative features that Facebook is rolling out on an almost monthly basis, there are still a lot of little annoyances that really boggle my mind how they’ve lasted this long unfixed.
The most frustrating thing in my mind is the constant barrage of emailed comments I get every time I interact with a post. Why hasn’t Facebook added a little check box that allows you to subscribe to comments on a post I contributed to? Rather than opt-in, I’m force fed email after email from every Tom, Dick or Jane that comments after me, regardless of if they are in my network or not. The only way to disable this feature currently is to disable all email notifications, which I don’t want to do. There needs to be, along with the opt-in check box, a setting to allow you to only be notified of comments by those in your network.
I also can’t understand why we don’t have a dislike button. Perhaps it’s that Facebook feels this will cause some negative comments for users that post something controversial, but isn’t that what social networking is all about – sharing your thoughts and opinions in an open forum? If you don’t want to have people dislike your posts, you should be able to turn off the feature, but I’d personally find a lot of value in knowing how my updates are received throughout my network.
This last complaint is something that only affects a handful of users apparently, and I am unlucky enough to be one of them. For some odd reason, Facebook logs me out all the time. I have opened help tickets, participated in forums and researched possible fixes for months and finally just learned to accept that this issue won’t be resolved any time soon. Evidently since it’s a small minority affected by this it must not be worth Facebook’s time to bother with it.
I don’t want to come off as anti-Facebook because that couldn’t be further from the truth. I love the site and will continue to use it despite my complaints. I just can’t believe that this much time has passed and these major user experience issues still exist.
I’m hoping 2010 brings a lot of great things for Facebook. It was really legitimized during the 2008 Presidential election when it, along with Twitter, was embraced by mass-media outlets. Now that Facebook is a household name and it is continues to grow at a mind-blowing rate I hope that these tweaks can be implemented and I can find more value in Facebook as a user and look at it less as a constantly updated yearbook.
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