Thoughts about Design — Product Management UX/UI & Interacion Blog — Frank derFrankie Neulichedl

Enterprises and Businesses will love the Metro-Interface ... in Windows 9

While I think that businesses are going to skip Windows 8, I don't think that Metro will be going away. I would even say that the desktop will be gone completely in Windows 9 and that businesses will love it.

3 reasons I prefer Google Drive over Dropbox for professional use

It took me some time to find a use for Dropbox - and yes there are plenty, but I had already similar services setup on my own, with remote access etc. So even after I started using it, I never felt that it is safe for real professional stuff. And here are the reasons why that is and how Google Drive resolves this issues.

I cracked the Pinterest code

Why is Pinterest so addictive for so many people? Because it's the first social sharing platform (it's not a full social network) that allows you to follow just specific "boards" of a user. How many times do we unfollow people on Facebook, Twitter or Google+ just because they overshare one aspect of their life, while we are interested in another. Or how many times have you restrained yourself in posting a cool recipe to your followers just because you feared that you alienate dilute your message.

On Pinterest I can select what boards (call them streams on any other social network) to follow and if the user sticks to what he advertised I can be sure to not see postings I don't care about.

It's the first time that I can do this without hacking around and asking my followers in what circle they want to be, etc...

Pinterest might be at the moment filled with "frugal" furniture, fashion and photography, but I will create some more themed boards and will start sharing my findings also on Pinterest - and this time you can select what topics you are interested in.

Let me know in the comments or by contacting me what boards I should setup - this has also the benefit that I can see what topics are most likely interesting to you guys and give you more of those :)

And last but not least, here is my Pinterest Account

http://pinterest.com/derfrankie

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Google+ launches new design - I like it

I'm curious to see if there will be the same outcry on google+ with the new design as you always hear on Facebook - but I like it. It is still clean but they have added a more App - Feeling. It seems that you can do more with Google+ now. The Toolbar on the lift is customizable and filtering your feed is also more intuitive.

I wonder if the page still consumes all the available memory of you computer if you leave it on in the background - will test that - but cudos in general to Google to improve quickly.

#googleplus #redesign #ux

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Responsive Design breakpoint traps

Allessandro has made a good write up about responsive web design and analyzed some examples - the only problem I have is that he falls into the device/breakpoint trap as many do - me included. Most responsive website just look great at certain screen sizes - a normal Laptop Screen, the iPad, the iPhone ... everything in between looks often akward.

If the design has fixed widths then we generate white space (therefore the many minimal designs) or if we have fluid designs, we get strange overlays when sidebars don't move to the right place or we have too long text lines, that make the content unreadable.

And there will be more viewers with odd screen sizes than we have now in the future - so most of the responsive websites of today will be redone in a couple of years when they become unbearable.

Another downfall of responsive is that it's not so easy to optimize the user experience because you are bound to the same structure. If you have to load a new page on the desktop, you have to load it on the mobile view as well. I'm still on the boat of having separated mobile sites if you have major functionality changes ... if not than responsive is good enough. #responsive #design #webdesign

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Responsive Design: One Design for Each Job: Not Enough! For any web designer, thinking responsive means accepting a new challenge: to be creative not only to produce something that works well on desktop PCs, but also on tablets and smartphones; to create n...

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Buy your competitors and shut them down - old ways of doing business in the web ...

To all you who call the web a hotbed for innovation - the business practices are just the same as in the old school offline world. Facebook for example has become big enough to swallow all upcoming and already established competitors. After acquiring Friendfeed, now Instagram. Both tried to be more than just blogging / photo sharing services - they are social networks. So what's next - Path? Reddit? Who cares.

The important thing is that we are in full transition from the early days of social networks to a mature market. Services will be launched just to be appealing to the big 3 (Facebook, Twitter, Google) and this strategy will fail, making the big 3 just bigger.

#facebook #instagram #socialmedia #business

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Breaking: Facebook's Buying Instagram for a Billion Dollars Mark Zuckerburg just announced that Facebook has agreed to buy mega-popular photo sharing service Instagram for $1 billion. Facebook's been on a buying spree of late, and has been beefing up its own a...

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Designers think and design for the future, and learn from the past

Seth Godin has written a long and thoughtful peace about the current and future evolution of the internet, mobile computing and the internet of things. It's an important read also for designers, who see their challenges in the problem they are solving right now, or the client they are working for (at least it looks like it). I think it's important because designers in their core have always worked with "data" and brought this data into a meaningful form. Data is according to Seth the key of a future proof and sustainable technological future and we as designers are the ones that can help make sense out of this data.

http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2012/04/06/apple-cloud/?single_page=true

#internetofthings #data #inspiration

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Apple and the Cloud: A Cautionary Tale | Xconomy The consumer's electronic world as we know it today is shared between Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and a handful of other popular brands. Most offerings

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Content aware photo retouching on your Android device

Are you already caught in the Instagram craze? Do you want to edit your photos before enhancing them with Instagram? Why not use one of the proposed Apps by Instagram themselves. The most interesting one is the content aware retouching App called TouchRetouch. Give it a try.

#instagram #android #photography #retouching #app

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Photo Tips: Android Photography Applications We’ve researched applications available for Android that can help you enhance and improve your photographs. Here are a few apps for simple and quick image editing to get you started! Photo Editing For...

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Project Google Glass - everybody mocks it, so it will happen

The augmented reality glasses from Google have made waves in  a sense that everyone is mocking them - which means that they are on the right path. Just think about all the bluetooth guys talking to the air or everybody with  headphones on - they are normal today but have been mocked before. Reshared post from +Project Glass

We think technology should work for you—to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don’t.

A group of us from Google[x] started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment. We’re sharing this information now because we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input. So we took a few design photos to show what this technology could look like and created a video to demonstrate what it might enable you to do.

Please follow along as we share some of our ideas and stories. We’d love to hear yours, too. What would you like to see from Project Glass?

+Babak Parviz +Steve Lee +Sebastian Thrun

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6500 Plus Ones in a couple of hours - welcome Instagram for Android

The Gorilla has landed and all social media outlets will be dominated by Instagram for the next few hours, days, weeks. Instagram shows that you can have instant success in Google Play if you have already a brand, and even if there are enough similar apps.

It also shows that you can get thousands of prositive reviews even if you don't optimize the experience for Android - or do we see some market manipulation here?

What i need now is a way to filter my Google+, Twitter and RSS feed to avoid to see hundreds of the same posts. Any suggestions?

#android #instagram #photography #branding

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Instagram Instagram – A beautiful way to share your world. It's fast, free and fun! 

 Instagram – A beautiful way to share your world. It's fast, free and fun!

Pick from ...

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E-Book on Wordpress Multi Site Installation

I would have loved to have this guide when I started moving all the sites I own to one single installation. Not just download, but donate a small amount ) "Setting up Multisite requires just a little more savvy, and the information is all over the place. This ebook strives to pull it all together, explain you what skills you need to get started, and move you to the next step: running your own Network."

#wordpress #multisite #ebooks

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WordPress Multisite 101 - Ipstenu on Tech If you only knew how many times Andrea and I sat and complained “There should be an (updated) ebook!” you'd wonder why it took us so long. Setting up a new WordPress install is pretty easy. Settin...

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Do we need human readable HTML and CSS?

The lack of visual design tools for web designer brings some strange side effects - like morecss.org "MORE simplifies CSS to make it more intuitive, allowing you to write human readable code that fits with the way you think. MORE runs on both the client-side and server-side (Node.js)"

I'm not a friend of adding functionality to the markup through an additional library. Why? Because it renders the code completely reliant on the library and it breaks if the library is not present. If I need to move the site to a new CMS or want to reuse some of the code, I need to make sure that the library works. I would prefer that it would compile to standard CSS, much like other approaches do.

The advantage of human readable CSS on the other hand is not really an advantage. You have to know CSS anyway, so reading CSS is not solved by this solution. Writing "more" CSS is in this case not an advantage, let's write LESS instead.

As for human readable HTML - or Marksdown as it is called. I like the idea but still find it not really user friendly to write - no really, I know HTML and Markdown seams forced.

What I do like about Markdown is, other than morecss, is that it should remain readable many years from now. Text files are the most stable file format and marking up text as little as possible is a good idea. HTML will be readable as well, so I there is no real need to use Markdown, but if you life in the text editor, it might be an option for you.

#markdown #css #morecss #workflow #compatibility #coding

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More CSS #header colour: cmyk(one-hundred-and-eight, eighteen, zero, forty-five) !unimportant; #header width: twenty-five-and-three-quarters percent !unimportant; #about h2 span background-attachment: scroll !...

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Everybody loves fresh free fonts - if they are high quality

Now what does high quality mean? For me it means rich character set for international use, suitable for print and web and that they have something that makes them individual. Also check out their older posts, totally worth it.

#typography #font #free #webfont

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14 Free and Fresh High-Quality Fonts (No.3 – 2012) | gonzoblog.nl In this last month there have been a lot of new and fresh high-quality fonts published, again. I have made a selection of fonts that are designed to be well suited for web as well for print, in partic...

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Great visualization of winds in the US

There is not much to add - beautiful #visualization #maps #dynamic

Reshared post from +Mark Harrison

Completely mesmerized by this map... via +Noah G

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Wind Map If the map is missing or seems slow, we recommend the latest Chrome browser. Surface wind data from the National Digital Forecast Database. (For those of you chasing top wind speed, note that maximum ...

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Layered font for old style appeal

I like this concept of creating a separate font for each style element. It helps to achieve a sophisticated look with a couple of easy steps. Nice - and the outline is available for free, almost you pay with a tweet.

#font #free #idea

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Frontage Typeface +freefont on the Behance Network Frontage is a charming layered type system with endless design possibilities.

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Brainstorming done right - again

Brainstorming is the most popular creativity tool - and most people do it completely wrong. Some do it partly wrong and other s get the idea and evolve the tool to fit the culture of the team. The title of this article is misleading, because it's about the evolution of Brainstorming and a specific use case, but still worth reading.

#creativity #brainstorming #ideasworthspreading #teamwork

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Innovation Is About Arguing, Not Brainstorming. Here’s How To Argue Productively Turns out that brainstorming--that go-to approach to generating new ideas since the 1940s--isn’t the golden ticket to innovation after all. Both Jonah Lehrer, in a recent article in The New Yorker, an...

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Combine Gaming and Charity

I like to game sometimes, on my Android, but also on my PCs, so the Humble Bundle is always a great fit as it gives you not only nice games, but it also helps a charitable cause. It's for Android, but not only as PC, Mac, Linux and Steam Downloads are available.

Set your own price and play :)

PS: They also have a nice HumbleBundle App now that helps you with updates - a sort of separate App store - very much appreciated.

#gaming #android #steam #charity

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The Humble Bundle for Android 2 (pay what you want and help charity) Pay whatever you want and get instant access to five epic games: Zen Bound 2, Avadon: The Black Fortress, Cogs, Canabalt, and Swords & Soldiers -- all while supporting vital charities. Each game i...

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Levelling up in an App or website?

While I'm catching up with some SXSW talks through my Huffduffer Account (don't tell me you are an avid podcast listener and you don't know about Huffduffer), I came across the talk Tapworthy Touchscreen Design. While most of the talk was pretty straight forward to anyone who is a interface designer, the concept of using a level system for an application of website was new and intriguing. Not the average gamification bla bla - but just like in a game, where you get more capabilities while you progress, you would setup the application to expose more and more functionality the longer a user interacts with it.

I still have to wrap my head around how you could use this in an extended way, but I can see immediately the advantage of an uncluttered interface in the beginning, which you then fill with more and more functionality.

#ux #interfacedesign #gamification #development

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Teaching Touch: Tapworthy Touchscreen Design Discover the rules of thumb for finger-friendly design. Touch gestures are sweeping away buttons, menus and windows from mobile devices—and even from the next version of Windows. Find out why those fa...

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Cudos to Apple for changing the naming scheme for the iPad and updating the developer...

Guess what, not only has the iPad dropped the number from it's name, but it has therefore followed how "normal" people talk about technology. I'm not only favorable for how Apple handles things, but that John Doe comes into the store and wants "the new iPad" sounds true to me. So why not just embrace it. They talk about making things simple, and with 7 different iPad Versions the easiest way is to not use any specifics in the name. Customers on the other hand will talk about their iPad after the purchase, not about their iPad 3 4g LTE 32Gigs ...

But how about developers who have to identify the different versions. Well, Apple has already updated their development website - they call the "new iPad" just high resolution iPad - so alle the iPad HD rumours where not so wrong.

PS: After further inspection not all developer pages are yet updated, but I guess they will follow.

#apple #ipad #development #branding

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iOS Developer Library — Pre-Release Apple Developer. Search. Search iOS Developer Library. PDF Companion File. Table of Contents. Jump To… Download Sample Code.

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