The design work of Woody Harrington

April 29, 2012
by Riccardo Mori
Handpicked

NovelTeaCafe Logo 2

The other day I was going through the ‘Design’ section of my RSS feeds backlog, and this entry in Design Work Life got my attention. It’s an identity project for Novel Tea Café, a fictional tea café with a literary theme carried out with great visuals and a witty touch I truly love (the various tea flavours have names like The Tell Tale Tea, 20,000 Leagues Under The Tea, The Picture Of Earl Grey and so on). It’s made by a young designer called Woody Harrington.

I found this project so good I decided to check out his website, Woody Harrington Design, for more. And I was not disappointed. Take a look at all his projects and see for yourselves. My favourites are Mammal, Bibliomania and Flash Fiction.

Three mechanical keyboards

April 26, 2012
by Riccardo Mori
Handpicked

Shawn Blanc has written a great, thorough review of three ‘clicky keyboards’ — the Das Keyboard Professional Model S, the Apple Extended Keyboard II, and the Matias Tactile Pro 3:

After a month of using and testing the three most popular clicky keyboards for Mac, I am extremely glad I jumped into these waters. The sound and the feel of a clicky keyboard only takes a few days to get used to, and what follows is this intense feeling of productivity that now accompanies anything I type.

Something I like about mechanical keyboards is that each key has its own unique sound and feel. You could tell how many words someone types, and how many in-line typos they fix, simply by listening. Space Bar, Backspace, Return, and the letters — each produce a unique sound and have their own tactile feel. There is variety when typing on a mechanical keyboard. […]

If you too want to adorn your desk with an ugly keyboard — one with a loud personality and which increases typing productivity — then I recommend the Das Keyboard. I prefer both the tactile feel and the sound of the blue Cherry MX switches, and though I find the Das to be the ugliest of the bunch, a serious typist knows you shouldn’t be looking at your keyboard while you’re typing. 

As for me, I started typing on a mechanical typewriter and on a Commodore VIC-20, and from there it’s been a mechanical keyboard after another, including a fair share of Model M keyboards. When I switched to the Mac as my main system back in the early 1990s, my first Mac keyboard was the not-so-bad Apple Keyboard II (M0487), then the much better Apple Standard Keyboard (M0116); then, when I acquired a used Macintosh Quadra 700 in 1999, it came with the glorious Apple Extended Keyboard II, which I’ve been using ever since, alternating it with the Apple USB Keyboard (M2452) and later with the first-generation Apple Wireless Keyboard, the one that retains the looks of the Apple Pro Keyboard.

I’m not a fan of the latest Apple keyboards. I find them to be great for short typing sessions, but for heavy-duty typing (which is 95% of the time for me) I go back to my Apple Extended Keyboard II or the first-gen. Apple Wireless Keyboard. Now that the Extended II is temporarily decommissioned (it needs cleaning and I have to figure out why the ‘P’ key behaves erratically), I’m using its more compact equivalent Apple Standard Keyboard (M0116). The only drawback of this kind of keyboard is that it lacks function and media keys, but I truly love its size. If you want the most compact and beautifully mechanical keyboard ever built by Apple, by the way, check the Apple Desktop Bus Keyboard (A9M0330), first released and sold with the Apple IIGS in 1986. I have one attached to my Macintosh SE, and it’s a joy to use.

But you know what my secret dream would be? That someone built an adapter to let me use the Macintosh Plus Keyboard (M0110A) with my modern Macs. It’s probably the sturdiest, loudest Apple keyboard available. Too bad it has that quirky, proprietary connector.

Tumblr, ads, and a humble request

April 20, 2012
by Riccardo Mori
Handpicked

As Ars Technica reports, Tumblr will launch ads starting May 2:

As recently as April 12, Kamp told Ad Age that advertising was “a complete last resort.” In 2010, the CEO famously said, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, that the company was “pretty opposed to advertising. It really turns our stomachs.”

Yesterday, however, 25-year-old CEO added that putting ads on Tumblr Radar would get an advertiser 120 million impressions per day and will be available as of May 2.

I don’t know the reasons for this sudden U‑turn. Some speculate that Facebook acquiring Instagram may have scared Tumblr somehow, but whatever the reason, I hope the Tumblr user experience won’t be too drastically compromised. It’s not clear to me how ads will be shown. Will they appear only when users are browsing other tumblelogs in the Tumblr dashboard? Will they appear in every tumblelog? And where will they be placed? Will they appear in the left or right sidebar? At the end of a post, like in WordPress blogs?

I have a few active tumblelogs, and those I consider most important are The Quillink annotated and Minigrooves, and I’d hate to see them ruined by ads appearing alongside my posts or, worse, above or immediately below the masthead.

My humble request to Tumblr is: Please, please, introduce Pro accounts. Follow other examples (LiveJournal and Flickr come to mind) and give Tumblr users the possibility to pay an annual fee for an ad-free Pro account. It’s also a increasingly common practice in iOS apps, where you’re offered the choice of having a free app that shows ads, and an in-app purchase (or a separate ‘Pro’ or ‘HD’ version) that removes them. I would gladly pay such a fee in exchange of a tumblelog without ads — I’m not even interested in other bonus options or offerings: paying only to remove ads would be absolutely fine by me. I’m sure other Tumblr users — who use their blogs to do more than just post links and funny videos — share my concerns and sentiments.

Kirby Panel 0.6

April 19, 2012
by Riccardo Mori
Handpicked

Bastian Allgeier, Kirby’s developer, writes:

It’s been a while since the first Kirby Panel Alpha has been released and I’m very happy about all the help and positive feedback. Today I’m releasing the next alpha version. There are still a few missing features for 1.0, but I feel the beta is getting closer.

Please understand that not all suggestions from testers are in this next release. You guys had a bunch of awesome ideas, but the entire process of testing and coming up with the first version of the panel is taking longer than expected and I try to get it done finally.

Kirby is a file-based CMS, which means that it doesn’t rely on a database. Content is managed through a simple files/folders structure, you create posts by using your favourite text editor, backups are a breeze, and the whole installation process and general interface are very simple and user-friendly. Kirby has very modest requirements, server-side; it only costs €30 per website (no monthly fees); and comes with a bunch of free extensions. Kirby’s source is available as a free trial on Github.

I really like Kirby, and I’m glad to have helped Bastian by providing the Spanish and Italian localisation for the admin panel. 

If you’re setting up a new personal site on a domain you own, and prefer a simpler approach than WordPress or other similar blogging platforms, you might consider giving Kirby a try.

Mattebox

April 19, 2012
by Riccardo Mori
Software

Mattebox interface

I don’t remember how I discovered Mattebox for iPhone, probably after following someone’s mention of it over Twitter, but I’m glad I did. Yes, my first thought was ‘Great, another camera app on my phone’, as Mattebox was joining Hipstamatic, Camera+, Instagram, CameraBag, ShakeItPhoto, Lo-Mob, and a bunch of other camera and photo editing apps which by now take up two folders on my iPhone. 

But Mattebox by Ben Syverson is a whole different thing. The best overview of its interface, features and user experience is provided by the beautiful website itself, so please explore it for further information. I’ll just share some of the reasons why Mattebox has quickly become my favourite, most used iPhone camera app:

  1. Landscape as default orientation. I like how Mattebox’s photo-taking experience makes me ‘think horizontally’ and use the iPhone more like a compact camera than just a smartphone with a camera. Too many camera apps are focussed on taking square photos or photos in portrait mode. You can, of course, shoot in portrait mode with Mattebox, but the interface doesn’t rotate and adjust. It stays in landscape mode, like any ‘real’ camera.
  2. An elegant, minimal, usable interface. Mattebox’s interface is clearly inspired by professional cameras, as Syverson says in the Philosophy page. I love how the interface is almost completely out of the way, letting me concentrate on the subject. I love how well thought-out the controls are. It may be an abused term, but they’re really intuitive. The dual-stage shutter release can feel a bit strange to operate at first (in most camera apps, the shutter is just a button, not a slider), but you soon realise just how useful it is to be able to lock focus and exposure.
  3. The adjustments screen. Speaking of well-designed interface, Mattebox’s adjustments screen is one of the clearest, easiest and most effective interfaces I’ve ever encountered in an iPhone camera app. Take a better look at its controls and how they work at the Image Adjustments page. Even in the photo editing stage, the app’s interface doesn’t get crowded with abstruse controls or a multitude of options and previews that take up whole screens. I love Mattebox’s direct approach: you slide your fingers and see the result in real time. And all the icons are very easy to understand, despite the lack of labels. Everything looks and feel really fluid, and you get to adjust and fine-tune your photos in a way that resembles a painting or drawing app, more than a photo app.
  4. It’s not about filters. Mattebox’s default filters are few and very well executed, and give very pleasing results without further modifications. I particularly love Mattebox’s black and white results (see this photo I took a while ago). You can also save your adjustments and create a filter out of them, if you like, which is another welcome feature. But what I really like about Mattebox is its lack of emphasis on filters and gratuitous effects. Most camera apps are basically galleries of effects to play with, some of which are so outlandish it’s hard not to think of them as mere gimmicks. Instead, I love how Mattebox’s main focus is to provide you with a series of selected, professional-looking tools to really perfect your shots. 

Mattebox is $3.99 or €2.99 on the App Store, and believe me, it’s money well spent. What’s more, Mattebox has also a Web interface at Mattebox.net that lets you apply Mattebox’s adjustments to any photo you’ve uploaded on the Web. Just enter the image URL in the address field below the sample photo, click on Open and start editing. You can save your changes by clicking on the Save button.