Khoi Vinh's Blog, page 135

Citilegs

New York Times Magazine Associate Photo Editor Stacey Baker uses Instagram to photograph women’s legs. There’s an interview with her at SPD.org, and you can see the project at Citilegs.com.

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Page Not Found

A clever 404 error page, courtesy of Random Studio.

See it in action at Random.nu/404.

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Macaw

There’s change in the air for those of us who design interfaces for a living. Where once we could choose only between designing in code or designing in Photoshop, we’re now seeing at least one or two promising if still nascent alternatives. Last month I wrote about Bohemian Coding’s Sketch, which I now use more frequently than Photoshop. (.Net Magazine also did a short interview with me about Sketch.)

Having one viable replacement is almost more than any of us could have hoped for five or ten years ago, but here comes Macaw, still in previews but propitious all the same. It bills itself as a “code-savvy web design tool” and like Sketch it brings a refreshingly relevant approach to designing interfaces. A few of its many slick new features jumped out at me as I watched its longish sneak peek video: built-in lorem ipsum generation; grid-based nudging of elements; and oh yeah generating real code as you’re designing. If they work as advertised, all three look like genius.

I’m really happy these contenders are emerging today, but why did it take so long for this to happen? Technologically, there seems little about either Sketch or Macaw that couldn’t have happened five years — if not a decade — ago. The answer, I think, is simple: the Mac App Store, which has leveled the playing field for independent developers — if not completely, then significantly. It might have been possible to build Macaw or Sketch before, but the Mac App Store gives these new players a visibility and distribution channel that’s invaluable when indie developers go up against entrenched players.

You can watch the Macaw preview here.

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Six Years with Todoist

There was a time that I thought I’d be on the search for the perfect to-do management software forever. That’s what I wrote in this blog post back in 2007, when I first mentioned Todoist, a Web based to-do list application that was then fairly new to me.

But six years later, I find myself still using Todoist, which is kind of amazing to me. I’ve poured thousands and thousands of to-do items into it, and have been faithfully ticking them off and moving them around every single work day. In that time, Todoist has gone from a side project run by its founder, Amir Salihefendic, to a real, profitable company called Doist, with a staff scattered all over the world.

What’s even more amazing to me is that at its core, Todoist is still fundamentally the same; it remains a ridiculously simple bit of software that takes just moments to learn, and it’s still extremely effective. In spite of the many years it’s been in the market, and the many users who have sent in feature wish lists, and the many talented people who have signed on to Amir’s team, it hasn’t become encrusted with complex features geared towards specialized use cases. In the world of software, keeping your feature set essentially unchanged while also keeping it relevant is a real feat. It may not be glamorous, but it’s incredibly hard.

Actually, Todoist has changed in one important way: it’s become more readily available on every platform. Whether you use Chrome or Safari, Android or iOS, Mac or Windows, Todoist is available and fully functional. In fact, today the company just released a brand new version of Todoist for iOS, a fully-fledged, native, beautiful overhaul of its iPhone experience. (At one time, Todoist for iPhone was just a native wrapper around a Web view, and it was exactly as flaky as that sounds. It’s come a long way.). Even better, this new version is optimized for the iPad, too. I fully expect to be using Todoist for the next six years, at least.

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Rain Room

Laura and Thuy at Random International’s “Rain Room” installation at MoMA.

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IFTTT’s Animated Onboarding

IFTTT released their first iPhone app today, and it comes with an extremely elegant onboarding sequence, a series of four screens that walk new users through the core “if this, then that” concept that is the foundation of the service. A bit of parallax animation reveals itself to the user as she swipes from screen to screen, and the effect is delightful.

Of course, this kind of micro-interaction is not particularly novel if you think about how popular parallax scrolling has become on the desktop Web, but it’s also surprisingly rare in the native app environment, which is theoretically even more conducive to clever animations. IFTTT’s onboarding is well done, but to me it’s a kind of baseline — there should be lots more animations that are even more inventive than this. That doesn’t necessarily mean heavier, more complex work, either; a little bit can go a long way.

You can see an animated GIF of these screens here, but personally I think it’s better when you can see a real user interact with the screens, so I shot this ad hoc video too.

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Bob Mankoff Explains New Yorker Cartoons

In this TED video, the cartoon editor for The New Yorker takes apart what makes their so-called “idea drawings” work. Mankoff is a cartoonist himself (he claims to have been rejected countless times by the magazine he now works for before eventually breaking into the business) and understands humor at an anatomical level. He’s also a pretty funny presenter. Watch it here.

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