Josh Clark's Blog, page 33

The Twitter Uncertainty Principle: How Tweeting Changes Us

I Tweet Therefore I Am is a lovely and thoughtful essay by Peggy Orenstein about the effects Twitter has on the way she experiences the moments of her day:

On a recent lazy Saturday morning, my daughter and I lolled on a blanket in our front yard, snacking on apricots, listening to a download of E. B. White reading "The Trumpet of the Swan." Her legs sprawled across mine; the grass tickled our ankles. It was the quintessential summer moment, and a year ago, I would have been fully...

How Big Is Big Enough?

The crew at O'Reilly Answers recently posted an excerpt from Tapworthy about the ideal size of iPhone tap targets. Forty-four is the magic number:

Just how big is big enough when it comes to iPhone tap targets? Well, what's the size of a fingertip? Apple pegs it precisely at 44 pixels and this measure appears reliably throughout the standard iPhone controls. In portrait orientation, 44 pixels is the height of buttons in the Calculator app, of the keys of the iPhone's virtual keyboard...

Develop iPhone Apps with Staying Power

This week at Mashable, I shared some ideas for extending the (alarmingly brief) lifespan of mobile apps. Here's the dilemma app developers face:

An app's shelf life lasts exactly as long as it can hold users' attention. iPhone owners chew through apps, gulping down their content, then tossing them out and moving on. that the average user never launches an app more than 20 times before abandoning it. of downloaded apps get so much as a glance over the...

Providence UX Meetup: July 20

Photo by

Hey Providence peeps, on Tuesday July 20, grab a wireframe, a color palette, and a cocktail glass to mix it up with local user-experience pros. A few folks are staging a casual meetup of designers and UX nerds. If you dig liquids, interaction design, info architecture, and usability, come join us!

This is the second outing for this fandango; a few interaction designers kinda spontaneously got together for a social meetup a few weeks ago, and we...

Designing for iPhone 4's Retina Display

So, um, maybe you heard: there's a new iPhone out. For my money (and I shelled out plenty for it), the phone's best feature is the new "Retina display," the eye-popping high-resolution screen. Everything they say about it is true: at 320 ppi, the pixels are just plain invisible. The crisp bright screen really looks as good as print, absolutely gorgeous.

But what soothes the eye also adds headaches for designers. For three years, the iPhone came in just one flavor of screen resolution: the...

Graffiti Compasses, Welcome Mats, and the Art of the Generous Greeting

Love this. Seems an anonymous do-gooder is making some guerrilla usability improvements to the New York subway, spray-painting compass points outside stations to help emerging passengers get their bearings. NYC the Blog has the details along with photos.

NYC the

It's a simple solution to a common problem, how to ease the blinking confusion of disoriented straphangers arriving at a new station. Web and software designers oughtta have the same...

Dieter Rams and the Fresh Prince

Design

I was chuckling over this Fresh Prince photo at Design Dare the other day. "Now they all look dumb," wrote Design Dare's Jon Bell of Will Smith's fresh eighties entourage. "Oh, fashion."

Got me thinking about the difficulty of truly timeless design, whether for fashion or objects or software interfaces. Designers and their creations are captive to their times, and notions of "good design" constantly shift under our feet. I tweeted that...

Now Available: Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps

Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps is available on bookshelves everywhere starting this week. Grab the book at your favorite bookseller, [order it from Amazon:], or buy direct from my publisher O'Reilly Media, who also offers ebook versions. You can even save some major coin by buying the book as an iPhone app for just five bucks.

What's it about? I'll let the book jacket do the talking:

So you've got an idea for an iPhone app -- along with everyone else...

Tapworthy "Nails a Sea Change" in App Design

Software-startup guru Bob Walsh gave a glowing review of Tapworthy over the weekend. Thanks, Bob!

Yes, this is a book of chapter, verse, example, and tightly-edited interviews with developers behind some of the biggest iPhone apps. But that's a disguise. It's really an awesome set of fresh, up-to-date and useful ways to think about how you design iPhone apps, smartphone apps, desktop apps, web apps, you name it. This is not your typical rehash conventional software interface "best...

Patching Up Your iPhone Wallpaper

Nnngh, the iOS 4 wallpaper change makes me crazy.

Don't get me wrong, after 24 hours of casual use with the new iPhone operating system, I love it. It's fast, edges have been smoothed, and nearly every change is for the better. I have a few niggles, but on the whole, the thing is a terrific evolution, with subtle care and thinking throughout. It's saying something that my one serious quibble so far is an aesthetic one.

But eesh, it's an aesthetic issue that seriously hampers usability. The new...