Khoi Vinh's Blog, page 102
July 10, 2014
Understanding Michael Bay’s Cruel Joke
What to do about a director like Michael Bay, auteur—or perpetrator, depending on how you look at it—of blisteringly macho movies like “The Rock,” “Armageddon,” “Pain & Gain” and of course, the numbingly profitable “Transformers” series (the latest of which sold US$104 million in tickets last weekend)? If there’s a measure of critical respect in…
ThinkUp Now Has Free Trials
You have no reason to believe anything I have to say about ThinkUp, the personal analytics tool that “gives you insights about your social networks that you can’t find anywhere else.” Its founders Anil Dash and Gina Trapani are friends of mine; they work regularly with Matt Jacobs, another close friend and my co-conspirator on…
July 9, 2014
Looks by Dr. Dre
When Apple acquired Beats in the spring, there was some confusion as to why; some people didn’t understand why Apple would want to get into the premium headphones market, while others (including myself) speculated that Apple was buying into the emerging streaming music market. This afternoon I found myself looking through Beatsbydre.com, and one possible…
July 8, 2014
The Case against the Hamburger Menu
For some time there have been low-lying but persistent objections to the hamburger icon and “side drawers” as navigation conventions in mobile apps. This post by Luis Abreu makes a compelling argument for “Why and How to Avoid Hamburger Menus.” Reasons include lower discoverability (what’s out of sight is out of mind), lower efficiency (more…
July 3, 2014
Why Deep Linking Is Back
This post by Taylor Davidson is a few months old, but it’s nevertheless useful as an overview of an important evolution in mobile ecosystems. Davidson writes about the current interest in deep linking—methods that allow users to tap on a link and be taken to a specific piece of content within a native app. Deep…
July 2, 2014
Smarty Pins
This new game from Google combines the company’s signature Google Maps product with trivia questions about geography. Players answer questions like “This was the site of a 1773 tea party, which sparked the American Revolution” by moving the map pin onto Boston, say. If you get the answer wrong, the penalty is determined by how…
Comixology Wants to Know
Speaking of comics, Comixology, the leading platform for buying and reading digital comics, sent out a survey to its customers today. It asks a number of background questions such as, do you buy print or digital comics, how often, what device do you read them on, etc. But the nub of the questionnaire comes more…
July 1, 2014
Darwyn Cooke’s Adaptation of Parker
During a long getaway last weekend, I somehow found the time to read all four volumes in artist Darwyn Cooke’s graphic novel adaptations of Donald Westlake’s “Parker” series. Written under the pseudonym “Richard Stark,” the books center around a brutal, lone wolf thief operating in the 1960s and the loose network of felons, thugs and…
Stacking the Card Deck
This is an excellent overview of the emerging user interface paradigm of cards from Chris Tse. It attempts to answer the basic but still open question, “What is a card?” and proposes a very compelling if still not definitive set of answers. I don’t agree with everything in this presentation, but I think Tse gets…
June 27, 2014
My Favorite Icon Sets
Speaking of hollow icons vs. solid icons, while I still prefer the latter, I recognize that we are living in an iOS 7 world. So I’ve been warming up to the former. In the past year, as I’ve been working on a slew of new projects, I’ve faced the decision to go with one style…
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