November 2011
3 posts
The timeline and the periphery.
When Twitter was first created, you could only write 140 characters of your own choosing. Now there are all sorts of other services that tweet on your own behalf, often without your noticing: Foursquare posts your checkins, Instagram posts your images, and all sorts of in-beta services tweet that you signed up for an invite. On the other hand, there are other apps that primarily exist to post your...
The Eatery's first-run experience.
Massive Health released their first product today: an iPhone app that appears to rate your meals, hot-or-not style, called The Eatery. Its signup flow touches on a few things I enjoy thinking about:
1. The “several page tutorial” pattern. Users can’t continue without paging through a set of instructions:
Long content scrolls, forcing horizontal and vertical swipes, but the...
The tappity noise.
One benefit of touch interfaces: the subtle variations of keyboard layouts. Used to be that if you wanted a bespoke interface for your product, you would have to make it in hardware. One of the more half-assed examples: putting stickers on the keys of your keyboard, to indicate some sort of crazy remapping. Folks who went long with the concept ended up with all sorts of crazy stuff, though, like...