Love the insights on making ideas happen at 99U. Learnings from this talk by Scott Belsky on How to Avoid the Idea Generation Trap:
Set restraints
Even if you don’t have restraints. Create them.
Value the role of the sceptics
At brainstorms, there normally is no place for skepticism. But with endless possibilities, maybe we should use this scepticism to define the project. Prevent the project from being further extended.
Find competition
If you know someone else is doing the same, it will help to focus and get it out there
99% is discipline
Of the creative process 1% is natural, creativity, the other 99% is about acquired discipline. Spending time on how to set up an ideal organisation and critical thinking about what kind of leadership the project needs.
Clients from heaven
Hello 2013. Another year that we’ll promise ourselves to work out more and drink less. And if you’re working at an agency, you probably have some web design & development resolutions. You are finally going to design the perfect responsive site, learn native app development or become a Javascript pro.
However, for many web designers, there is ‘someone’ who pays our bills and give us the chance to work on those resolutions, but somehow never ends up in that resolutions list: the client.
And rightly so. Because the client doesn’t understand our design. Makes unreasonable demands. Doesn’t deliver the content on time. Is never happy with the end result. Right?
That is; if you believe some of the reports from our industry. Working with clients seems commonly viewed as an occupational hazard, a nasty side effect of building websites and apps.
Ready to Inspire Conference was awesome. Here’s the video of the main conference day.
Measure radiation, toxics in your apple, humidity… with your iPhone. Insane.
Enjoying #inspireconf from the back. Proud we could be part of such an awesome event! (at Stadsgehoorzaal Leiden)
2012 is going to end with a bang! Next week I’ll be attending Ready to Inspire Conference. The impressive line-up includes Jeffrey Zeldman, Brad Frost, Simon Collison and Jessica Hische. We made the conference website and Bram wrote a nice blog post explaining how we did the responsive illustrations.
But that’s not all. The 18th of december we’ll host the next UX Cocktail Hour at Mangrove and - beside serving cocktails - I’ll be giving talk covering UX & agile.
So it looks like December is going to be awesome. And we didn’t even start about Christmas Plum pudding, turkey, kruidnootjes and NYE party’s yet.
Steve Jobs’s legacy in patents
It’s one year ago that Steve Jobs died. New York Times made a nice overview of his legacy, in patents.
It looks like 3-D printers are growing up. More on the Verge: High-precision Form 1 3D printer ditches molten plastic for liquid and lasers.
Forget Touch. The Leap is a small box that let’s you interact with your computer as if it’s Minority Report. Crazy.
Spotify for iPad has arrived!
Stop Talking and Start Making. David Kelley, founder and chairman of IDEO.
Pebble is a watch with e-paper display that connects to your iPhone. There is even an SDK for developers so you can create your own apps. On Kickstarter, of course.
Retina images for the iPad using CSS3
Yesterday I was at a bar when ‘a guy’ entered with a plastic Media Markt bag containing two New iPads. The weird thing, it was 00:30PM and he just bought the iPad’s 10 minutes earlier. And if people start walking into bars with Retina iPads past midnight, I guess it’s really time to think about the impact of the high-res screens on our daily work as web developers.
Because websites look pretty bad on the 3th gen iPad. Images get blown-up.
When the iPhone 4 introduced the Retina screen in 2010, we had to update the graphics in native apps with images that are two times the original size. Apple quickly introduced a solution for iOS developers with the @2x format. If you’re not familiar with it: when you use an image, for example AwesomeLogo.png, adding a larger AwesomeLogo@2x.png is enough. You can still refer to AwesomeLogo.png.
This could be a great solution for mobile Safari on the new iPad (and iPhone4/s) as well, if the browser would check for a @2x image. As this isn’t the case, and we’re not sure if it will ever be, we have to come up with new solutions.
Very interesting case study by Microsoft about the differences between (UX) designing for iPad vs. Windows 8 Metro style.
“In this case study we want to help designers and developers who are familiar with iOS to reimagine their apps using Metro style design principles. We show you how to translate common user interface and experience patterns found in iPad apps to Windows 8 Metro style apps. We draw on our experience building the same app for the iPad and for Windows 8. We use common design and development scenarios to show how to leverage the Windows 8 platform and incorporate Metro style design principles.”
Check it out: Design case study: iPad to Windows 8 Metro style app
