Josh Clark's Blog, page 32
January 26, 2011
Typetastic New Yorker Cover
This week's New Yorker just landed in my mailbox, and I'm kinda swooning over its typetastic cover, "Mental Landscape" by Frank Viva. The New York skyline and surrounding landscape, rendered with fontabulous panache...
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Flexibility vs Security: Whoops, There Goes Your Credit Card Info
Security researchers developed a working spyware app for Android that's disguised as a voice recorder. In reality, it settles into the background, listens to your phone calls, and knows when you speak a credit card number. The app then relays that info over the network:
Soundminer sits in the background
and waits for a call to be placed.…When triggered by a
call, the application listens out for the user entering
credit card information or a PIN and silently records
the information, performing the necessary analysis
to turn it from a sound recording into a number.
The software works for both spoken numbers, as requested
by some voice-activated IVR systems and by human operators,
and numbers typed into the virtual dialpad on the phone
- recognising the DTMF tones and translating them back
into numbers again.
Yikes. For all the promise of ubiquitous computing, of little genius devices that know everything about you, there's a corresponding flood of evil geniuses ready to take advantage.
Apple's been mighty successful at keeping exploits like this off of iOS, but they've done it by strictly limiting what apps can do on the phone. Strong walls within the operating system mean that background apps can't do stuff like this, and of course every app gets a hard look by Apple's reviewers before getting into the App Store. Depending on your point of view, this is either a strength or a weakness. Android, of course, has a far more laissez-faire approach, allowing apps lots of flexibility and requiring no review to get into the Android Market.
Photo by Massimo Barbieri.
The upside of the Android approach (or for that matter, of the iPhone jailbreak community) is that your phone is truly yours. You can put any kind of app you want on it, customize it to your heart's content. Pimp my phone. But the downside, demonstrated by the Soundminer app, is that you take more responsibility as a consumer for what you put on your phone. You have to go carefully. With great power comes great responsibility, blah blah blah. Inevitably, I suppose, that means managing the dreary administrivia of stuff like antivirus software for Android.
I'm not suggesting that Android is inherently insecure; it's just that you have to know how to use the thing. When Android launched, its early-adopter audience was mostly composed of tinkerers—a tech-savvy crowd who wanted the flexibility to turn their phone into whatever they wanted. But Android is growing fast, and as it extends its reach into relatively cheaper smartphones, its audience is turning correspondingly younger and less educated, too—a simple fact of available pocket money. Going forward, that means Android Nation will be less and less of a geek population. Yet safety on Android requires a threshold of nerd savvy, and that divergence worries me.
One promise of this new era of mobile computing is ease of use. Watch kids and other computer newcomers use an iPad, for example, and you get it. The iOS platform sacrifices flexibility for ease and safety, two important ingredients of delight. I like the Android platform, and I appreciate all that it can do, but you have to know what you're doing, or you can get into trouble. You have to work much harder to get into trouble with iOS.
More and more, I'm thinking about platforms as cultures. iOS is remarkable for crafting a warm, personal connection, while Android is more about efficiency and technology. (The difference is particularly stark in their TV ads.) Likewise, security vs freedom is a cultural decision—as you can see at any US airport—and one that now extends to our personal technology decisions. As designers and user experience pros, it's more and more important to help our audience understand those decision points.
There's room for all of these cultures, and there's no "right" or "wrong" platform. (And anyway, at the current rate of innovation, the notion that there will be a winner in the short term is naive at best.) You should have the option to pimp your phone if that's what you want. It's just that it's important to go into it knowing the responsibility this flexibility requires.
January 25, 2011
Mobile Design Workshops
Photo by BeerNotBombs.
I'm putting on my professor cap this year with a bevy of in-depth courses and workshops about creating tapworthy mobile experiences. Some are online while others are live and in person (see me in startling high-definition!). All will be eye-opening, even surprising, and if I have my way, plenty of fun, too.
No pressure, but I do recommend that you act fast. The first of these classes—an eight-week online course—starts this week, and one of the live workshops has already sold out. Here's the rundown:
Online Course with O'Reilly Media
Wednesdays, January 26 – March 23, 2011
Tapworthy iPhone Design and User Experience
Live Workshop at Webstock (SOLD OUT)
Wellington, New Zealand
February 16, 2011; 9:00am – 5:00pm
Tapworthy Mobile Design and User Experience
Live Workshop at IA Summit
Denver, Colorado
March 30, 2011; 9:00am – 5:00pm
Tapworthy Mobile Design and User Experience
Live Workshop at User Experience Lisbon
Lisbon, Portugal
May 11, 2011; 3:00pm – 6:30pm
Designing for Touch
Live Workshop at WebVisions
Portland, OR
May 25 – May 27, 2011
Designing for Touch
Can't make it to one of these long-form workshops? I'm also dishing talks and keynotes at a crazy volume of frankly awesome conferences. Please do come and say hello. You can also follow my conference misadventures at Lanyrd.com.
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October 2, 2010
Mobile Cultures at IDEA 2010
As I write this, we're getting set to cruise into the second sensational day of the IDEA conference here in the city of brotherly love. I came out of yesterday's sessions with my brain chock full of user experience and content strategy. It's been a great show so far.
Hopefully I managed to give a little bit back, too, with my own talk about mobile culture. I've posted the slides at SlideShare. As usual, my slides don't have much text on them, but I've added an outline of my remarks in the speaker notes for the slides. Click the Notes tab below the slides on SlideShare.
(I always have fun putting presentation slides together, but this time I had a particularly good time, with an all-LEGO-all-the-time theme. If you dig toys, I think you'll dig these slides. Have a peek. Not included in the slides: Me yelling "KHAAAANNNN!" at the top of my lungs from the stage. Kinda had to be there.)
Here's the talk's big picture:
Think of mobile OS platforms as cultures. Deciding which
platform to target and how to design for each—whether web
or native—doesn't hinge only on tech specs or audience
reach. In an era where consumers suddenly perceive mobile
apps as richly personal, where software is content instead
of tool—culture matters.
Every mobile OS has a different personality, design
sensibility, and even government. All of these factors
determine how well your individual app (and its audience)
will thrive, and will have a direct impact on design
considerations. For example, how does the prescribed
design and paternal culture of iPhone's philosopher-king
model fit your app, compared to the frontier-maker culture
and bare-bones geek design of Android? And where does the
web fit in? In the next year alone, we'll have ten major
mobile operating systems to contend with as we design
apps. In this session, you'll discover the cultural and
practical considerations of choosing the right platform
for your app and your audience—and of crafting a design
that works for all.
Going Native: the Anthropology of Mobile Apps
September 24, 2010
iPad and iPhone at Design for Mobile
Wow, I've had a really astounding week at the Design for Mobile conference in Chicago. Many thanks to the organizers (especially Barbara Ballard), the other speakers, and most of all to the attendees. I'm confident they taught me much more than I taught them. (More on everything I learned and the people I met soon.)
My talk on Wednesday was "iPad Design Headaches: Take Two Tablets and Call Me in the Morning." Luke Wroblewski shared his
September 16, 2010
Tapworthy Webcast Slides and Video
The crack team at O'Reilly posted the video of my Tapworthy webcast from this week. It's a nifty little summary of some of my book's top-level ideas, all packed into a tidy 75 minutes. If you missed the webcast or just want a quick review, have a peek:
Just want the slides? Grab the presentation from Slideshare (I included the main talking points in the slideshow's presenter notes).
And hey, speaking of O'Reilly webcasts, we're getting ready to announce the details of an eight-week online...
September 12, 2010
Webcast Redux: Tapworthy App Design on Sept 14
I was all atingle going into my O'Reilly webcast last week, where the plan was to get together with my very best internet friends for a free 60-minute talk to share some ideas from my book. Alas, as sometimes happen, technology intervened. Network weather patterns converged, bandwidth barometric pressure plummeted, and a digital squall ensued at the hosting company. Or something like that. Whatever happened, the audio quality took a nosedive, and all but a few hundred of the attendees could...
August 20, 2010
More UX Meetups in Providence
Three times makes it an institution, right? Tuesday, August 24, marks the third monthly gathering of local user-experience pros here in Providence, RI. The UX Meetup (a.k.a. Designers with Drinks) is a casual gathering of designers and interface nerds—a fun way to mix it up with local talent and share UI triumphs and dilemmas, along with a cocktail or three.
This whole hootenanny doesn't require much infrastructure, but what it does require...
August 19, 2010
Upcoming: Tapworthy Talks in 2010
I'm zigzagging the nation and the interwebs this fall to bring the Tapworthy design gospel to the masses, popping up at conferences hither and yon. I hope you can join me at one of my talks (and if you do, be sure to come up and say howdy!). Here's the rundown of the events where I'm speakings in summer and autumn 2010:
August 25. iPhone iPad SummitSeptember 9. Free Webcast: Designing Tapworthy iPhone Apps for Delight and UsabilitySeptember 20–24. Design for MobileSeptember 30 – October 2.August 12, 2010
For Your Consideration: Tapworthy iPad Apps at SXSW
So I'd like to speak at SXSW again, and I need your help.
Specifically, I need just two minutes of your time to vote for my talk. If you're not already familiar with SXSW Interactive, it's a fabulous brain-bending shindig in Austin, TX, about technology, media, and culture. I was incredibly flattered by how well my SXSW talk about tapworthy iPhone apps was received this year. For next year, I hope to give the tapworthy treatment to the iPad, with a talk on the many design considerations and...
