Linked List: May 21, 2012

Monday, 21 May 2012

Oh Yeah, Coda 2 Is Shipping Later This Week, Too 

Really curious how these new visual, resizable, scrollable tabs play out. I would love to see how they worked in Safari, for one thing. My money says Panic just redefined the de facto standard UI for tabbed documents on the Mac.

But maybe I’m underestimating how garish or cluttered these thumbnail-style tabs would look in a web browser?

Update: A few readers have pointed to OmniWeb’s visual/thumbnail tabs as a good example of prior art. OmniWeb’s are in a drawer, arranged vertically, but much of what I like about Coda’s new tabs are the same things I have long liked about OmniWeb’s — you can identify them by what they look like. Can’t wait to see if this design takes root.

Diet Coda 

Blockbuster new iPad app from Panic:

Diet Coda takes everything we’ve ever learned about world-class web code editing, and wraps it up to-go. It’s packed with features, bathed in fun, ready to work.

I’ve been beta-testing Diet Coda for a while, and it’s a hell of an app. I’m retiring the old “iPad is only for consumption” sarcastic schtick because at this point, it’s such utter nonsense. But forget the features and capabilities and touch-based UI design for the moment, and let’s just celebrate what, to me, is the best name for an iPad app ever.

Creating the Windows 8 User Experience 

At over 11,000 words, it’s more like a small book than an article, but there’s fascinating insight into Microsoft’s design thinking in this piece by Jensen Harris, their lead UI designer.

Their top two design goals are, I think, shared with Apple:

“#1 Fast and Fluid”

Fast and fluid represents a few core things to us. It means that the UI is responsive, performant, beautiful, and animated. That every piece of UI comes in from somewhere and goes somewhere when it exits the screen. It means that the most essential scenarios are efficient, and can be accomplished without extra questions or prompts. It means that things you don’t need are out of the way.

Followed by, at #2, “Long Battery Life”. But clearly, they also see something very differently:

Windows 8 imagines the convergence of two kinds of devices: a laptop and a tablet. Instead of carrying around three devices (a phone, a tablet, and a laptop) you carry around just a phone and a Windows PC. A PC that is the best tablet or laptop you have ever used, but with the capabilities of the familiar Windows desktop if you need it. You may choose to carry a tablet, or you may choose a laptop/convertible, but you do not need to carry around both along with your phone. You never think about a choice, or fret over your choice of what to carry. Things just work without compromise.

Overall, Windows 8 continues to strike me as ambitious, different, and carefully considered. Microsoft clearly sees why the iPad has been so successful, and they’re being smart: they’re learning from iOS and adapting, not copying.

Sturm und Drang 

Germans have the best words.

iPhone Charger Teardown 

Ken Shirriff:

Disassembling Apple’s diminutive inch-cube iPhone charger reveals a technologically advanced flyback switching power supply that goes beyond the typical charger. It simply takes AC input (anything between 100 and 240 volts) and produce 5 watts of smooth 5 volt power, but the circuit to do this is surprisingly complex and innovative.

‘Skyfall’ Teaser 

“Some men are coming to kill us. We’re going to kill them first.”