In my latest work on Divided, I’ve been thinking about how motion affects the user experience. Two primary things have sprung out at me:
I’ve tried to bring both of these ideas into the next update of Divided, and I wanted to talk a bit about my thought processes as I’ve been building the update.
Smartphones across the spectrum, starting with the iPhone in 2007, have been adding a certain physicality to their interfaces. I’m not talking about the sometime excesses of skeuomorphism, but instead the evocation of the feeling that you are using a physical object.
A human review of the Kindle Fire
Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper, reviews the Kindle Fire.
I expected the Kindle Fire to be a compelling iPad alternative, but I can’t call it delightful, fun, or pleasant to use. Quite the opposite, actually: using the Fire is frustrating and unpleasant, and it feels like work.
Disappointing. I had hopes for the Fire.
Divided has been on sale for just over a month now. I enjoy the retrospectives of other app developers, so feel duty bound to add my own.
At the recent PloneConf in San Francisco, the Netsight crew used Divided almost every evening meal. It’s reinforced my confidence in the concept of a “more complicated bill spliting app”. I’ve also appreciated the work I put in to streamline the user interface. Anyhow, enough patting myself on the back.
It’s interesting that the W3C has felt the need to start a process around allowing users the choice to inform sites they visit of a desire to protect their privacy. A social need has been identified, and the W3C has decided a standard is needed. This seems somewhat of a new remit—or are there other standards of this more socially-driven nature there already?
WebMonkey has a good writeup of the proposal, liberally links to primary sources:
It’s not the end of capitalism at all
A great article from Faisal Islam, Channel 4 News’s economics editor, about how capitalism, in the strict sense, is in the process of reaping rewards rather than on the verge of collapse.
If you look at capitalism through the lens of Marx, then it’s pretty clear that right now, capital has never been so ascendant over labour. Capital is capturing the returns to growth, and labour is losing them.