1. The colors are too similar. To me, On current major version and 3+ major versions behind are indistinguishable from each other, and both are confusingly similar to 2 major features behind.
2. The colors aren’t arranged logically. The range from newest to oldest isn’t supported by a corresponding range of brightness.

Better: use colors with different values (brightness) and, where appropriate, order the colors from lightest value to darkest as an additional aid to color-blind users. The latter will actually improve the chart for all users, not just the color-blind ones.

• make the color swatches large
• position the swatches close together and close to the referenced image
• eliminate any other non-swatch colors from the legend.

In this image taken from an cellular network 4G availability checker, my color-blind eyes see a map filled with a nearly uniform orange. The legend on the right doesn’t help much; the yellow box makes things worse.

Simply increasing the size and proximity of the color swatches helps a lot. In this revised version the difference between all three colors is much clearer:

Although it’s better to use more strongly contrasting colors as well as other visual cues to help color-blind users, just following this simple tip really helps.

As a nice bonus, minor changes like these made to help color-blind users often improve the design for everyone.

The original article at AppleInsider?

Snipes. Overpay. philosophical difference. took a shot. The WSJ article adds nothing to the original source, which it misreports as Apple Insider rather than AppleInsider, and omits the name of AppleInsider reporter Neil Hughes while printing the name of WSJ Senior Editor (!) Michael Hickins in large type.

More importantly, notice that where AppleInsider reported that Oppenheimer said that companies must invent their own technology “rather than take the ideas of others”, WSJ distorts this as “rather than buy it from the outside”, changing a statement about defending intellectual property into one about Not-Invented-Here.

Read both articles and consider which presents the news more professionally. The Journal’s decline has been clear for a while, but breathless sensationalism like this can still surprise.

Apple’s keynote video reveals an exquisite animation introduced to resolve a delicate design problem as you enter the Tracks editor in GarageBand for iPad.

The scene: while recording an instrument and deep in the creative flow, the user taps the Tracks icon to edit the recording.
The problem: how do you get the user from the instrument to the mixer without disturbing that creative flow?
The solution: transition gracefully from instrument to mixer by animating the instrument into the mixer track for that instrument.

Let’s walk though the video to deconstruct the animation in greater detail:

The animation begins in the Smart Instrument view when you choose Tracks (57:09 in the Apple video). You can see the recorded track in green just above the guitar’s wood surface, and chord names (Em, Am…Bb, Bdim) running across the guitar’s sound hole.
Hide the chord names
The first animation phase hides the chord names, which you can see are no longer visible. Why did the designers choose to hide the chord names? Perhaps because rendered text can sometimes look strange during perspective transforms.
Pivot the guitar away
The second animation phase begins pivoting the guitar face up and away. The perspective you see is important, because the guitar face is being pivoted in tandem with the final mixer track representing the guitar, the animation guiding the eye from one to the other seamlessly.
Still in the second animation phase, you see the first hint of the mixer track appearing. That hint of white in the lower-left corner is the guitar icon appearing on the mixer track. You can also see the time marker already horizontally aligned with the time marker in the recorded track above.
Pivot the mixer track into view
Now late in the second animation phase, the guitar face is nearly gone and the mixer track is clearly positioned in 3D at a right angle to the guitar face, as though parallel to the guitar’s side. Hard to describe, but imagine the mixer track taped to the side of the guitar, then turning the guitar onto its back to reveal the mixer track.
When the second animation phase ends, the mixer track has completed replaced the guitar, but the recorded track in green at the top still hasn’t moved. Moving the recorded track onto the mixer track represents the third phase of the animation, which will also unite the two time markers.
Move the recorded track onto the mixer track
The third phase of the animation begins, sliding the recorded track downwards towards the mixer track.
As the recorded track descends it changes color and reveals the individual notes within the recording.
Final animations
The fourth phase animates a number of other elements to their final appearance: the toolbar icon appears, the backgrounds fade into view, and the mixer frame at the far right appears.

It’s still surprising how much value iPad has shaken loose, and how quicky.

When they argue that websites are usable immediately whereas apps must be downloaded, they exaggerate the burden of downloading and the immediacy of websites, and ignore the speed and convenience of apps once downloaded.

When they argue that websites can be updated more frequently, they disregard the problems that can cause.

But what they overlook most crucially is that apps are yours. Websites are remote, and controlled remotely. Apps are with you, controlled by you. The difference is emotional, and powerful.

On your iOS device, open Maps and you’re in the map. The data for that map is retrieved remotely, but it’s brought to you. In contrast, when you visit a maps site on the web, that’s exactly what you’re doing—you’re visiting somewhere else. Similar functionality, profoundly different feeling.

Websites are somewhere else, and they’re someone else’s. Apps are here, and they’re yours.

Best wishes for a speedy recovery, Steve.

Affectionately known as the Gherkin, 30 St. Mary Axe in London looks beautiful.

(via AppleInsider)

Not just a blank slate, but a clean one too. How cool is that?

But I think the Guidelines overlook how educational long popup menus can be. Today I discovered Wallis and Futuna, which Wikipedia says is a Polynesian French island territory in the South Pacific with land area of 264 square kilometers and a population of about 15,000.

This only works because the iPad is itself both beautiful and intuitive. A photographer would need to be confident in both these qualities before presenting an iPad as an option.

The way H.P. made its numbers, Mr. House said, was not just cutting any old costs, but by “chopping R.&D.,” which had always been sacred at H.P. The research and development budget used to be 9 percent of revenue, Mr. House told me; now it was closer to 2 percent. “In the personal computer group, it is seven-tenths of 1 percent,” he added. “That’s why H.P. had no response to the iPad.”

Now I know why my HP LaserJet 3055 still won’t scan in Mac OS 10.6.

Respectful. “You and your content are important.”
Tasteful. “Why mar an elegant design with logos. And how does that help you?”
Determined. “Hey, your carrier’s logo didn’t just not appear there all by itself.”
Confident. “You’ll recognize it’s ours even without the logo.”

Now, consider what it says when a competitor slaps a prominent logo on the front of their device:

Disrespectful. “We’re important. You take second place.”
Tasteless. “The logo stays, period.”
Timid. “Sure, we’re happy to put your carrier logo on there, too!”
Unconfident. “Without the logo, how will you know who made it?”

This goes double for wordmarks, which when placed on the face of a device on which you’ll be reading can only hamper that reading.

In this sense, good design requires courage. Apple’s not shy about displaying their logo, but they are judicious. On a small device like the iPhone, where there’s simply no room to display a logo without intruding upon the content itself, the logo goes on the back.

When Steve Jobs at the recent Antennagate media event said Apple loves its users, this is what he meant: “We work really hard for you, and when a tough decision has to be made, we ask the same question: How does this help the user?”

Nicely put.

It’s beautiful. The subtle design really draws you in: different prey make different sounds—and different sounds again when they’re ensnared; spinning a web is near impossible in some spots where juicy flies lie just out of reach. Throughout the many levels gorgeous artwork and delightful detail surprise.

It’s fun. There are many extra ways to play the game, including two-spider play, where you can spin webs with a friend and race to eat the hapless prey. It sounds gruesome, but isn’t. Who knew that being a spider trapping insects in an abandoned mansion could be so enchanting? The thrill of taking down a hornet, or herding dragonflies towards a web adds to the pleasure.

It’s well-written. In two-spider mode the screen zooms in and out as necessary to keep both spiders visible—you over on the far left trying to complete a web between two tables and your friend over on the far right exploring an old cabinet. Despite the zooming and frenzied web spinning and leaping, the gameplay never falters.

Games like this, conceived on the iPhone but coming into their own on the iPad, show a fun future.

By putting the horse before the cart, Apple will have given students what they want first, only then following it with the education content they will need. In other words, if the iPad can achieve the market penetration of the iPhone/iPod Touch, Apple will have a legion of students on campuses a year or two from now who will be ready to buy and read their textbooks on the iPad. No education hardware selling needed — just release the content and watch it work.

— The iPad: Gateway Drug to Digital Learning?, blackplasticglasses.com, May 5th, 2010

Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.

The avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple’s mobile devices demonstrates that Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content. And the 200,000 apps on Apple’s App Store proves that Flash isn’t necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including games.

New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

— Thoughts on Flash, Steve Jobs, April 29, 2010