Tag design

Mind your Mind Share

It is almost 6 years since Apple announced and released the iPhone. I still remember Steve Jobs mentioning that his goal for the first year was to get 10M iPhones shipped; at the time almost 1% of the global mobile telephony market share. The goal seemed totally unrealistic to anyone involved in the industry as […]

Ubuntu Mono — The Gamma Travesty

In one of the latest commits, Ubuntu Mono, the monospace variant of the Ubuntu font that has recently been included in the distribution, was added to the repositories. Ubuntu Mono is a relatively nice looking monospace font that borrows quite a lot from Consolas, but adds its own distinctive touches that make it fit better with the Ubuntu font family. I have been a member of the beta testing group and have seen it for a while now, but I never quite found the time to properly look into it. Capital Gamma in Ubuntu MonoSadly, while the roman script looks great already, the Greek script suffers from some poor design decisions. Chief among them is Gamma (the capital gamma) which was clearly designed by someone totally unfamiliar with the Greek language and script. Gamma in Ubuntu Mono features a bottom serif that is totally distorting the perception of the character. It is unlike any other modern font I've ever seen and I feel is doing Ubuntu Mono a disservice (it has certainly rendered the font unusable by me as long as it looks this bad). In an effort to remedy this, I have opened a bug in Launchpad, Ubuntu's bug reporting system. You can find the bug, #867577, here. If you have a Launchpad account, use Ubuntu (and/or the fonts) and would like to see Ubuntu Mono fixed for Greek please subscribe, add your comment and/or contact those responsible to help them realise how their effort is being ruined by a few badly designed characters.

Hellenic in the Ubuntu font

Ubuntu 10.10 is just around the corner. In this version some preliminary signs of Ubuntu’s design efforts are slowly showing, although there’s still a vast amount of work to do. One of the ‘new’ things in 10.10 as far as the user experience is concerned is the new Ubuntu font. I am very happy to […]

Objectified (2009)

Having seen Helvetica, I can't wait for Objectified to come out in a few months time. If you're one of those enjoying (industrial) design, appreciating usability, but demanding æsthetics, this movie is probably for you too. Sadly, I doubt it's going to be in any cinemas in Hellas, given that there aren't any arthouse movie theatres around here, really.

Tales of Bad Design: The new Ionising Radiation symbol.

In February 2007, ISO and the IAEA created a new symbol for Ionising Radiation that complements (see “partially replaces”) the classic trefoil that’s been in use for more than sixty years. The new symbol is a red triangle with a black border that contains the trefoil, a number of jagged edges emanating from it and […]

FontStruct!

A free, flash-based and easy to use webapp with which you can 'design, build and share' your own modular fonts. Excellent.

DroidDraw

Android Logo (small)A first attempt at creating a visual UI designer for Android. While not exactly sophisticated compared to more mature visual UI design tools, it greatly simplifies the task for designers (cf. programmers). Worth a look for anyone interested in developing for Android.

The Philips Living Colours LED Lamp

Philips has been an electronics pioneer for many decades and while it has recently been facing stiff competition from newcomers from Asia, there are still some signs of innovation in some of its products. Light Emitting Diode (LED) lighting is one of the main candidates as a worthy successor of the incandescent bulb as the […]

Injury to Insult.

One of my main annoyances with OS X since 10.0 was Terminal.app. My UNIX background requires a decent terminal application and Terminal.app more or less traditionally embodied everything that can possibly be wrong with a terminal application. Up until Leopard, Apple had paid little attention to it and many people had forsaken it for applications such as iTerm. Sadly I never quite liked iTerm, I don't fancy starting X11 up just for the terminal and so I ended up tolerating Terminal.app and hoping that Apple would fix it in the future. I couldn't --- and still can't --- understand how Gnome and KDE provide so much more powerful terminal applications and Apple, the goliath of usability and design, provides such a ridiculous terminal. Or can I? In Mac OS X Leopard, Apple revamped its terminal application. Unfortunately the revamp is nothing but insulting to those people that are most probably going to be using it the most. One of the longstanding issues with the previous versions was the inability to set the ANSI colours so that coloured text could be legible under dark or light backgrounds. In 10.5 Apple has introduced several 'themes', including a number of dark themes provided by the company, (viz. 'Pro'), that use dark backgrounds. Yet actually using those themes is practically impossible with the OS X default ANSI colours and there's no way to change these colours: they are still hard-coded in the binary. The usual solutions are still there, using InputManagers, SIMBL etc. or giving up on Terminal.app and switching to another terminal application, yet so is my dislike for any of those solutions. Given the work that Apple has clearly put in providing the 'theming' functionality --- including a wholly new configuration system and theme inspector it's quite perplexing why they 'omitted' providing support for setting the ANSI colours given that it's been one of the most commented upon, criticised omissions of this application for the past six years. If anything it seems to me like Apple is taunting its users with such ridiculous 'improvements' and the completely needless attention to detail (e.g. 'live' thumbnails on the terminal inspector!), while it ignores real problems faced by those that make use of its software.

Leopard UI flaws

Apple likes showing off. In Leopard lots of things are improved, the UI is more consistent and polished. Yet there are a number of completely ridiculous aspects of it that go quite a long way towards demolishing Apple's reputation as a leader in UI design. Take for example the new Dock, which besides completely pointless is also an ergonomic nightmare, heavy on resources and ugly. Did I mention pointless? (Thanks to the_unknown_Apple_dev for the no-glass option!). The linked blog entry more or less sums up most of the things I found completely, utterly stupid while looking at Leopard images and videos online. I've got some more, such as the relatively dark gray 'platinum' look (I prefer the lighter gray of the 'inactive' windows), CoverFlow (mostly useless in the Finder if you ask me), the proliferation of etched text among others. [via daring fireball] Update: As usual, a really good and thorough review of Leopard by John Siracusa, can be found at ArsTechnica.