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47: Extreme Minimal Guns

 

00:00:00   Krista Murgen you wrote an article you had an article on Macworld this week is why I invited you to be on the show why?

00:00:04   Ios7 design is bold but flawed

00:00:07   A lot of attention for this article. I think I was really surprised by that that was it was really

00:00:13   Flattering it's very nice. I

00:00:16   Think that there's more that you could say about it though in my opinion sure

00:00:21   You describe it. I don't want to put words in your mouth

00:00:24   mouth, but you describe the move, you know, and it is kind of hard to describe just what

00:00:29   exactly they've done. It's very clear from the moment they first showed that video on

00:00:33   stage that they did something very drastic.

00:00:35   Right.

00:00:36   But once you start to want to articulate it, it's kind of hard.

00:00:40   Mm-hmm.

00:00:41   It's not flat. It's not in depth. So you call it faux 3D to real 2.5D.

00:00:47   Right, yeah. And that comes from just what I used to do in After Effects. So I read Matt

00:00:56   and Reece's article about multi-plane technology. I was like, "Yes, exactly. That's exactly

00:01:01   it." And so I was really excited by this, actually, just in terms of I really want to

00:01:07   design for it because it sort of combines my past animation experience with user interface

00:01:14   design and I just think it's super cool. But yeah, so they've stripped away the sort of,

00:01:19   they were going for 3D but it was flat two dimensional elements and they were sort of

00:01:26   static on the screen and so they had to rely on these really bubbly icons with a lot of

00:01:31   gloss and really deep shadows and stuff. And now that they can have sort of two and a half

00:01:35   D where yes, it's flat planes but when you tilt the phone you can sort of see how things

00:01:40   moving relationship to each other. So now that they have that, they can strip away all

00:01:47   the unnecessary fake 3D stuff, which I think is really cool. Because the fake 3D stuff,

00:01:53   it really wouldn't work with this, because as soon as you would tilt the phone, the shadows

00:01:56   and the gloss wouldn't move with it. So the illusion would be totally broken that way.

00:02:02   So it really, this sort of flat, two and a half D sort of thing really works best with

00:02:09   flat planes.

00:02:10   Dave Asprey And I think that the fact that you have an

00:02:13   animation background and I think that it's not a coincidence that you articulated this

00:02:19   change very well.

00:02:20   And I think part of that is the fact that part of the design team at Apple behind this

00:02:25   have come from not from a traditional user interface background but from a motion graphics

00:02:30   background.

00:02:33   And I don't think it's a coincidence at all that like the movie they used to open WWDC

00:02:37   which had nothing to do with iOS 7, but it was chock full of really interesting motion

00:02:41   graphics.

00:02:42   Oh, beautiful. Yeah, it was gorgeous. Yeah, I loved it. I was really excited just to see

00:02:46   that and thought it was great that they opened with that.

00:02:49   In some sense, I'd like to see some of that come to iOS 7.

00:02:52   Oh, yeah, definitely. That'd be great.

00:02:54   There's like a fluidity to those videos that I think would fit right in with iOS 7 but

00:03:02   isn't quite there yet. I think it might just be a factor of time.

00:03:05   Right. I don't know really much about the technical aspect. I don't know if it's

00:03:12   a matter of just there being limited ability to actually do such fluid animations and do

00:03:19   it in real time on the phone, or if it's a matter of they just haven't perfected

00:03:26   it and honed it that much yet. But I definitely think it's going in that direction. It'll

00:03:30   become more and more fluid that way. Hopefully, I think it would graduate possibly to a more

00:03:36   3D interface where you're moving through folders and groups of apps basically on a

00:03:42   Z-axis through the phone. I think that would be neat. I could see it happening. It's

00:03:47   just sort of an interim step.

00:03:49   Dave: My favorite new thing I think in all of iOS 7 is to go from home screen to a folder

00:03:55   to an app that's in the folder and then go back out.

00:03:58   Yeah, I love it. Yeah, it totally reminds me of the Powers of Ten movie.

00:04:03   Yeah. That's what you said in the article, and I agree with that. You're zooming in

00:04:07   in a certain way, and it feels fun. It makes me want to put more apps in folders.

00:04:12   Yeah, totally. Yeah, it feels like you really are moving that way, whereas before, things

00:04:18   would just sort of move up and down. Yes, you were sort of getting the idea of going

00:04:23   going into something, but not completely. You know what I mean? It's better at writing

00:04:30   than talking.

00:04:31   No, that's okay. But I think that sometimes you can make the logical argument for it in

00:04:38   writing better, but I feel like when talking about things, you can make the feel argument

00:04:44   for things better. That's why I do a podcast. I don't know if it's true or not. But I do

00:04:49   I do think too, I think that the fact that there's people with a serious professional

00:04:54   motion graphics background behind this is what adds the rigor to the rules about the

00:05:01   planes in iOS 7.

00:05:04   I mean, yeah, in iOS 7.

00:05:07   Because I've seen people say that, "No, there's no difference with iOS 6 in that regard.

00:05:13   It's really just stylistic chrome because things slid under nav bars before."

00:05:18   But in the old days, designers used to cheat.

00:05:22   My favorite example of that is the linen because sometimes linen was over like in Notification

00:05:27   Center.

00:05:28   You'd pull it down and linen is over.

00:05:29   But then you'd open a folder and linen was under.

00:05:32   So where is the linen?

00:05:33   Where is the linen?

00:05:34   Right, exactly.

00:05:35   Yeah, that's a really good point.

00:05:37   And you can cheat because you can make software do anything.

00:05:40   You can have it be over and under.

00:05:43   It's almost like a brainteaser or like an Escher puzzle.

00:05:46   But it takes away from the satisfaction.

00:05:49   It doesn't make it feel like you're using a system.

00:05:51   It makes it feel like it's all a little arbitrary.

00:05:56   And I feel like Apple has really specifically addressed that problem.

00:05:59   Regardless of whether you prefer brushed glass as the sort of look and feel of the layer

00:06:04   or you like the fake linen texture of the layer, at the very least, I don't see how

00:06:10   anybody could argue that having a more logical set of rules as to what goes on what layer

00:06:14   is not a win for the system.

00:06:16   Right.

00:06:17   No, yeah, I think that's a really good point.

00:06:20   And I think actually the blurred sort of frosted glass thing makes a lot of sense because you

00:06:25   could have sort of infinite layers because it's always whatever is underneath of it,

00:06:29   you know, is underneath of it.

00:06:31   So that sort of, like it always makes sense, whereas linen, it sort of, it felt like it

00:06:35   should be under and so then when it was over it was confusing.

00:06:39   I don't know.

00:06:43   Evan has a lot of problems with just the rampant sort of tons of use of blur sort of everywhere

00:06:50   throughout the system, but I don't mind it so much yet. We'll see how I feel about

00:06:55   it in another couple of months.

00:06:57   Well, I think that gets to Craig Hockenberry's point, which I keep making every week on the

00:07:02   show, but that it goes to the 3D effects in the original version of Aqua. Once you add

00:07:08   I think probably the right way to go is to go a little overboard and then dial it back

00:07:14   a year from now in iOS 8.

00:07:17   But I think Nevin's probably right that it's overboard right now.

00:07:23   But I think it might be the right way to go in the first version that goes this route.

00:07:31   I have a very specific question for you, and I've been thinking about this.

00:07:37   And I don't think I've looked in what Apple has written so far for the human interface

00:07:42   stuff.

00:07:43   And they don't really have like an iOS 7 human interface guide yet.

00:07:47   They have sort of a transition guide.

00:07:49   Yeah.

00:07:50   Yeah.

00:07:51   But there's nowhere near as much documentation as I had sort of assumed there was when I

00:07:56   first logged into the ADC account at WWDC.

00:08:00   And it seemed like there was a lot there.

00:08:02   And I was like, "Okay.

00:08:03   When I get home from WWDC, I got to read all this."

00:08:05   And then I read it all.

00:08:06   like, "Wait, that was only like 20 pages." Here's a specific question. In all of Apple's

00:08:14   apps in iOS 7, the ones that have all been updated for this new look, they use a white,

00:08:21   mostly solid, semi-translucent nav bar. They pick different—they can forget what they

00:08:30   call them—tint colors, something like that.

00:08:32   Nicole: Tint colors, yeah. UI tint.

00:08:34   So mail, the button to go back to your inbox is blue and calendar, it's red and notes,

00:08:40   it's yellow.

00:08:41   Right.

00:08:42   Do you think that white nav bar is Apple's intent for that all iOS 7 apps to use that

00:08:51   and only pick a color for text or do you think colored nav bars are still going to be a thing?

00:08:57   They'll just be flat, semi-translucent.

00:08:59   Just be clear?

00:09:00   Yeah.

00:09:01   they'll still be colored nav bars and that they'll just use the blur. I can't remember

00:09:07   what presentation video it was, and I watched a few of the WWDC presentation videos, and

00:09:13   they gave specific instructions for how to color the nav bar and keep the translucency

00:09:19   and blur happenings and still control the tint color as well. I think that they're

00:09:25   not totally opposed to that. I don't think that they're wanting everyone to use the

00:09:29   white. I think all of Apple's stuff will probably, for the most part, stick with white until

00:09:35   – I don't know, until they decide to break out into something different. Maybe not this

00:09:40   time, but in the future, another big update. But yeah, I think other people and third-party

00:09:47   apps will definitely use colored NavVirus still, but just using the translucency and

00:09:53   blur still will be – that will be the thing.

00:09:56   and removing exaggerated 3D edges underneath the scrolling content beneath it, just having

00:10:03   it sit there right on top.

00:10:04   Yeah, I think so.

00:10:05   Like Nike will still use a vibrant red and Yelp will use red and who else has a distinctive

00:10:12   color like that? Lots of apps have distinctive colors like that.

00:10:15   Sure, a lot of them do. I think that's a big part of knowing where you are as far as being

00:10:20   in a third-party app. It's just a big part of the color screen tells you what the app's

00:10:25   identity is, sort of, so I can just, at a glance, when I pick my iPhone back up, be

00:10:29   like, "Oh, yeah, I'm in Mint," or whatever. I think that'll—and stripping away all

00:10:36   of this other stuff, I think, yeah, we're going to rely a lot more on color. I think

00:10:42   having colored nav bars will be a big thing.

00:10:44   Dave: Yeah. I've come around on that. I left WWDC thinking, "My God, everything's

00:10:49   got to go white because that's what's going to fit in." Then as the weeks have

00:10:52   settled in and I've used the beta more and more, I start to see that the white isn't

00:10:59   really, I don't think, supposed to be system-wide. It's more like the blue-gray gradient.

00:11:06   Yeah, it's like the defaulty Chrome.

00:11:10   Like the Chrome that Safari and the settings app and mail used on the old iOS.

00:11:16   Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

00:11:18   That's what the white is.

00:11:19   And Apple's just using the default Chrome because that's what the system should do.

00:11:27   One of the other things that's annoyed me over the years is the way that when the iPad

00:11:32   came out, they made certain changes there, yet didn't, never until iOS 7, never unified

00:11:41   it between the iPhone and iPad.

00:11:43   So for example, the one that's always bugged me is that on the iPad, Safari is gray, whereas

00:11:49   on the iPhone, it's that blue-gray.

00:11:51   The blue-gray, yeah.

00:11:53   And I always thought that the gray-gray was better for Safari, that Safari was an app

00:11:56   that really should be color neutral.

00:11:58   Yeah, that's a good point.

00:12:01   Always bugged me.

00:12:03   Yeah, I wonder, and I actually haven't looked at Beta 2 on an iPad yet.

00:12:09   Evan said he looked at it on iPad Mini and it didn't look great because of the text rendering

00:12:15   and the non-retina screen, but that's all I've heard on that and I actually haven't

00:12:18   seen Beta 2 on iPad.

00:12:21   Yeah, it's sort of NDA territory, but I don't know. It just seems like they have a long

00:12:28   way to go.

00:12:29   Sure.

00:12:30   I don't know what they're going to do. I talked about this a little bit last week, but I wonder

00:12:34   what you think too is in past years they've always shipped new iPhone and iPad hardware

00:12:40   with a new version of the OS. Although sometimes iPads would come out with like the original

00:12:45   iPad came out with like iOS 3.2 or something like that.

00:12:48   Right, yes.

00:12:49   It had a weird number.

00:12:50   Sort of a cycle, yeah.

00:12:52   But the iPhone has always coincided. New iPhone hardware has always coincided with a new .0

00:12:59   of iOS and the new phone has never been able to be like back like if you bought

00:13:05   it if you buy a new iPhone 5 today you can't put iOS 5 on it it was made to

00:13:10   only run iOS 6 so presumably the new I've any new iPhone or iPad that comes

00:13:17   out this year would only run iOS 7 right but I can't help but wonder if they have

00:13:24   a backup plan that just in case iOS 7 isn't ready to ship in October.

00:13:30   That's a good thought. Yeah.

00:13:32   Maybe they would ship the new phone with iOS 6 and say, "Look, iOS 7 is close and it'll

00:13:39   be a free update for everybody," which would kind of be embarrassing for Apple.

00:13:42   Yeah. I couldn't see. Honestly, seriously, I couldn't see them doing that. Actually,

00:13:47   I would see them delaying the release of the iPhone until iOS 7 was really ready instead

00:13:53   of releasing it with iOS 6 just because they trotted out iOS 7 early.

00:13:58   I don't know.

00:13:59   I don't really know how they make decisions at Apple, but I couldn't really see them doing

00:14:05   that.

00:14:06   They trotted out iOS 7 here and made a big deal about it.

00:14:11   It's even made its way into the mainstream media about what a big change it is.

00:14:16   My mom was reading about it.

00:14:18   If my mom is reading about it, then it's a bigger deal.

00:14:23   Well, and it's literally the front page of Apple.com has been for the whole month since

00:14:29   WWDC.

00:14:30   Right, exactly.

00:14:31   I can't really see them releasing a new phone without iOS 7 being ready to go that day.

00:14:36   But I also can't see them missing the holiday quarter with a new iPhone.

00:14:40   Yeah, good point.

00:14:42   I feel like that's the bit, you know, it's like this is one of those irresistible forces

00:14:49   meets an immovable object type thing.

00:14:52   And I feel like in this case, the immovable object of, you know, iOS 7 needing to be on

00:15:02   the new iPhone loses to the irresistible force of they absolutely need a new phone for the

00:15:09   quarter and probably new iPads too for the holiday quarter. Ultimately, obviously, what

00:15:17   they would want is to ship the new hardware and have iOS 7 be ready.

00:15:21   Well, sure. Yeah.

00:15:23   I just feel like this is the one year where if the OS is not going to be ready in time,

00:15:29   this is the year because the change is so truly dramatic.

00:15:32   back.

00:15:33   Yeah, it is. It's so huge. It's so different. I'm really impressed that they have done such

00:15:39   a monumental overhaul in such a short amount of time.

00:15:42   It's incredible. When you work on individual products, like single app, and you know how

00:15:47   long it takes, you just think you kind of get a sense of how much work it would be to

00:15:51   change every single pixel in the OS.

00:15:54   Yeah, and not just the pixels, but the fundamental, just like the physics and all the animation

00:16:00   and everything. That's so much bigger. I mean, it's crazy. I can't imagine how much work

00:16:08   went into that.

00:16:09   Dave: The other night, I was watching TV and got bored. I went through my testing phone

00:16:15   that's running iOS 7 and tried to find anything in the system that hadn't changed, just the

00:16:20   appearance of. The only thing I could come up with is the text completions. If you misspell

00:16:30   a word and it lets you cancel. There's like that little white half capsule with a little

00:16:36   tiny X.

00:16:37   I don't think that changed. Although maybe it did. If it did, it only changed suddenly.

00:16:44   Okay. I've actually got two things here. I'm going to check them out. Hang on one second.

00:16:51   I'm running iOS 7 on my phone because Olive's iPod Touch couldn't be updated to iOS 7.

00:17:00   So, you're using it on your daily phone?

00:17:03   I am, yeah, which is I almost never do that actually.

00:17:08   I always let Nevin do that and then I just sort of look at what he's doing.

00:17:11   I'm just like, "You're an idiot."

00:17:12   But I couldn't.

00:17:13   Yeah, I had to do it this time just because it's such a huge change.

00:17:16   That's one of the ways that I know that I'm getting over.

00:17:21   And it's funny too because you get older and you should be less scared of such things because

00:17:25   you have more to lose when you're young.

00:17:29   But now, I don't know, somehow getting older makes me way more cautious.

00:17:35   I remember two years ago at WWDC and it was Monday and it was like 5 o'clock and a bunch

00:17:44   of us met at the W for cocktails and Marco Arment came in and we were all talking about

00:17:51   I guess it was iOS 5 at the time and everybody was wondering about something.

00:17:54   Marco was like, "Here I have it.

00:17:55   I've already installed it."

00:17:56   We were all like, "Whoa, you're nuts on your regular phone?"

00:18:00   He was like, "Sure, why not?"

00:18:01   He took it out and he showed us a thing.

00:18:04   It was like, we were all like, "Wow, that's cool.

00:18:06   Glad we have someone to play with it."

00:18:07   Then somebody else did something else and all of a sudden his phone went to the Apple

00:18:11   logo and restarted.

00:18:12   Marco was like, "Oh, this might be a problem."

00:18:15   So it has changed a tiny, tiny bit. I can send you a screenshot. So it's the same shape,

00:18:21   but in iOS 7, there is not the big shadow around it, of course, and it no longer – it

00:18:28   had a blue stroke and – is that a little bit of a glow? No. Okay. It's like a one-pixel

00:18:34   blue stroke in iOS 6 and a big drop shadow and a smaller X, actually. So the X is slightly

00:18:41   larger and a lighter gray, and that's about it.

00:18:45   So then everything has changed.

00:18:46   So if anybody else out there, anybody listening, I would be interested.

00:18:50   Hit me on Twitter and if you can find any aspect of iOS 7 that has not changed the appearance.

00:18:58   I don't think there's anything.

00:19:00   I think every single pixel.

00:19:01   I think maybe…

00:19:02   Okay.

00:19:03   So I'm in.

00:19:04   I'm looking at photo stream shared from someone else and the little like button looks

00:19:12   like it's the same. The little smiley face. No, it's different. No, never mind. I lied.

00:19:19   It's flattened. The old one is slightly, has a little gloss on it and it's shinier.

00:19:25   Dave: One of my favorite changes and it's one that I've thought ever since the first

00:19:29   iPhone in 2007, I always thought was too much in bad taste is that I made that joke about

00:19:35   Marco and you get that Apple logo when the phone restarts. The old Apple logo in iOS

00:19:40   like the most overbearing…

00:19:42   Oh God, that chrome on the Apple logo and it's gone and it's so much better.

00:19:47   It was like three light sources.

00:19:49   Yeah, and like a huge…

00:19:51   I didn't…

00:19:52   I don't…

00:19:53   I never liked that.

00:19:54   Even from day one when everything was like bubbly and shiny and stuff, I looked at that

00:19:59   and it was just like…

00:20:00   The Apple logo in particular, it was so blingy because it wasn't just a gloss.

00:20:04   It was like six times a gloss, you know, with…

00:20:08   It was two shadows and all this stuff.

00:20:10   And now, it's just a flat white Apple logo, which is to me what it always should have

00:20:14   been.

00:20:15   Yeah.

00:20:16   Yeah, it's great now.

00:20:19   I miss the battery illustration.

00:20:22   It used to be so pretty.

00:20:27   And the new one, yeah, the new one does feel a little, I don't know, it just doesn't…

00:20:31   Like the plugged-in charging screen?

00:20:33   Yeah, it's, I don't know.

00:20:36   I mean, I have lots of little grapes, so going back to talking about white overlays and stuff

00:20:42   like that. With photos, I really don't like it. And again, with photo streams, when you're

00:20:46   looking at the activity on a photo stream, there's a white overlay and it fades out on

00:20:51   your photos. And it used to do that, but in black. And it just, wow, white over a photo

00:20:57   just doesn't work for me at all fading out. Like black fading out of a photo is like,

00:21:02   Okay, fine. But anyway, I don't know. There's a lot of little things that I'm just like,

00:21:07   "Yeah, I think that makes sense though." It's the same reason why I think like in

00:21:10   iPhoto, it defaults to a dark background in between you, like when you're at thumbnail

00:21:16   view. The reason why photo apps like Aperture and Lightroom tend to use dark backgrounds,

00:21:25   it somehow is more neutral to have a black or dark—if there is any kind of chrome or

00:21:33   border or something like that, it's more neutral, whereas anything white seems like

00:21:38   you're drawing attention away from the photo.

00:21:42   Lauren: Yeah. It just doesn't work with a lot of photos. I don't know. I think black

00:21:49   is definitely nicer. But again, maybe I'll change my mind eventually. It is more—I

00:21:55   It's more museum or gallery-like to have.

00:21:59   Like if you're looking in your photos app and you're looking at collections or whatever,

00:22:02   it's more slightly, I guess, more gallery-esque.

00:22:06   But yeah, it's not as nice, I think.

00:22:10   I do like the new photos app a lot though.

00:22:13   And I do think that there's a case where regardless of what you think of the aesthetic changes

00:22:18   in 7, here's a case where they've obviously put a lot of time and thought into just what

00:22:22   it means to be a photo app on an iPhone in 2013, which is that, look, let's face it,

00:22:29   you're going to take like 1500 pictures this year and they're all going to be on your phone.

00:22:35   How can we deal with that in a better way?

00:22:37   Cheryl Kane-Piasecki Yeah, the collections are great. Years to collections

00:22:41   to moments, I think it's super cool.

00:22:43   Dave Asprey And it's surprising how useful those tiny,

00:22:46   tiny thumbnails in year can be because you can pick out some spots, some shots. I mean,

00:22:52   you're not going to be able to. If you shoot something in a dark room, it's just going

00:22:55   to be black. But there are some like if you shoot like 10 shots on a certain like a sunny

00:23:00   day or something like that, they stick out and you're like, "That's what I'm looking

00:23:03   for."

00:23:04   Mm-hmm. Definitely. Yeah. It works well. It's kind of surprising how much detail your eye

00:23:13   can see at such a small size.

00:23:16   Dave Asprey Yeah, totally. I think it plays into the retina

00:23:19   screen. I don't know if it's actually pixel for pixel the same, but it's like maybe the

00:23:25   same number of pixels in what used to be a full-size thumbnail. And even at a tiny size,

00:23:31   you can kind of pick it out. I want to get back to your suggestions for where you think

00:23:39   IOS 7 is flawed. But first, first I'm going to take a take a break here. Thank our first

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00:25:02   thanks to them. So we've gotten to the bold part of iOS 7. Explain to me your case for

00:25:12   what's flawed about what Apple has shown us so far about iOS 7.

00:25:16   Oh, so I mean, and it's a lot of little things, but just the big ones where the type, which

00:25:22   actually I've gotten used to, so I'm using just the default settings for typography now,

00:25:29   And there's a setting for higher contrast backgrounds, which I had turned on originally.

00:25:35   So I've turned that off because it's sort of just like, well, I should use it the way

00:25:37   that people are going to see it.

00:25:40   And it's not bothering me as much as it was originally, but it's still, especially

00:25:45   in the places where they use ultralight, which isn't, you know, they don't use it a ton,

00:25:49   it's usually like they use light a lot more than they use ultralight.

00:25:52   But where they do, it's sort of like, wow, that's really light.

00:25:56   And then even just like reading mail, and it's just really light and kind of hard

00:26:02   to read.

00:26:03   And I feel like, well, legibility is so hugely important.

00:26:06   And I know on a retina screen, you see a lot more and things that wouldn't work on other

00:26:11   screens can work here.

00:26:13   But yeah, I feel like Helvetica Light wasn't a great choice.

00:26:18   I made the case a couple months ago that, maybe back towards the winter, that the future

00:26:25   of UI design, to see the future of UI design, look at print design.

00:26:33   And things that, you know, like, because I remember when we first got like high DPI laser

00:26:36   printers back in the 90s, and you could print these grayscale gradients that looked good

00:26:42   because the dots were finally fine enough.

00:26:43   Well, then we all used them in everything we designed.

00:26:47   Everything had a gradient-colored background.

00:26:50   And then within a year or two, we all realized, my God, we're way overusing these gradients

00:26:55   in our things.

00:26:58   And I feel like that's where UI design got to from the iPhone through now is sort of,

00:27:06   you know, we can do these incredibly cool effects, but then we overuse them too much

00:27:12   and then dial it back.

00:27:14   But I think that if you follow that, and I still think that's right, I think you can

00:27:18   say, "Well, how many people in print design use Helvetica Light as the body font?"

00:27:23   Cheryl Kane-Piasecki Right.

00:27:24   No, that's not really done there.

00:27:27   Dave Asprey No.

00:27:28   I'd say try to think of a magazine that you read that uses a font as fine as Helvetica

00:27:34   Light, and I can't think of any.

00:27:36   I mean, maybe some advertising, you know, like, you know, it does have a sort of luxury

00:27:42   brand feel, Helvetica Light.

00:27:43   Yeah, and it's beautiful. But yeah, it's just like the reading rhythm isn't great.

00:27:51   Your eye doesn't pick out letters, I think, as distinctly as it could with another font.

00:27:57   No, I've always thought of it as a display font, and by which display font means something

00:28:04   that you'd use for headlines or subheads or big, like for signage or titling, not for

00:28:13   body copy. Because when you pick a font for body copy and let's face it, reading your

00:28:18   email is a good use for a font that is supposed to be readable. That's where good typographers

00:28:28   or font designers, they make choices that maybe aren't as aesthetically pleasing but

00:28:34   are more about the, you know, like being a workhorse and doing the right thing for the

00:28:42   user to make it legible as opposed to making it beautiful.

00:28:46   You know, it's a trade-off.

00:28:47   I mean, you want—obviously, you want it to be both, but—

00:28:50   Yeah, of course.

00:28:52   But legibility has to come first if you're talking about a body, you know, body font.

00:28:58   Yeah.

00:28:59   And so I do think, you know, I don't mind the light as much as some people I know.

00:29:04   you linked to and quoted Eric Spiekerman, who is very much opposed to it. I think he's

00:29:11   a little biased though because he's actually—I think he's great. I mean, he's obviously

00:29:14   a great designer and a great type designer. Overall, I've never met him, but I'm a

00:29:20   big fan of his work. But famously, he's sort of maybe not against Helvetica, but he sort

00:29:26   of has an antipathy for Helvetica.

00:29:28   Definitely, yeah. He does. He articulates the case against Helvetica as well as anybody in the movie Helvetica. Gary Hustwitz, amazing and fantastic documentary.

00:29:41   Yes. And that's any weight of Helvetica. And so, Spiekerman's a little bit biased in that regard, but I think with regard to the light in particular, he's pretty spot on though.

00:29:55   What was his description?

00:30:00   He said, he called it a smooth, unreadable carpet, you know, when you see a lot of it

00:30:06   at once in body.

00:30:08   He also said, "Ein a shitstorm," in the little YouTube clip that I linked to, which

00:30:12   I actually said in the comments someone had translated what he said, but I actually just

00:30:17   started watching it.

00:30:20   It's kind of like having aphasia where you recognize a word every now and then, and he

00:30:24   a lot of English words sort of intermittently. But anyway, that was fun.

00:30:31   It is true. I think that overall it is going to be seen in hindsight as a trendy aspect

00:30:40   of iOS 7. I think no matter what they do between now and when they ship come fall, maybe they'll

00:30:47   dial back some of it, which would be great, I think. But I think overall though, it's

00:30:52   It's still going to be a lot of Helvetica, Ultralight, and in displaced cases and light

00:30:58   and in reading cases.

00:31:01   I think in years come by, we're going to look back at iOS 7 as being way too trendy on the

00:31:06   light font direction.

00:31:07   Lauren Ruffin Yes.

00:31:09   I hope that it is and that it changes in the future.

00:31:14   You sort of figure that out.

00:31:16   Dave Asprey I noticed Apple too in their marketing materials.

00:31:20   Since Iowa 7 has come out, I've noticed it more and more, has been using a lot more

00:31:25   of a very light-stroked version of Myriad for their own stuff, their own marketing materials.

00:31:34   At first, I thought that they – I knew they started using it, I think, with like the MacBook

00:31:38   Air or something like that, where it was meant – the actual light weight of the font was

00:31:42   meant to convey the lightness of the actual hardware product you were buying.

00:31:47   But it looks like they're using it everywhere and it's sort of – I almost feel like

00:31:51   it's a fad that's infected Apple is this desire to go with these really light stroke

00:31:56   versions of their fonts.

00:31:58   Yeah. Oh, that may be true. But it does really mirror the hardware really well. But yeah,

00:32:06   that's not always useful.

00:32:08   Right.

00:32:09   Right. No, and I think that too because I keep as, you know, now that I have my old

00:32:15   iPhone 4S running iOS 7 and I'm trying to use it during the day. I don't have a SIM

00:32:19   card for it but I, you know, use it while I'm at home at Wi-Fi as much as I can to

00:32:22   get used to it. And then I switch to my iPhone 5 and every time I pick up the 5, I'm like,

00:32:27   "My God, it's so thin and light." It's like it's back to day one and I'm shocked

00:32:30   at how much thinner they made it.

00:32:32   Yeah.

00:32:33   But I kind of feel like if they went with Helvetica regular or Helvetica Noi regular,

00:32:39   you know, whatever.

00:32:40   Yeah.

00:32:41   I'm not going to say that I don't care about the difference, but you know what I mean.

00:32:45   For body text, just for like the body of emails, chat messages, I don't think that it would

00:32:53   ruin the effect.

00:32:55   No, not at all.

00:32:57   I think that would be really helpful.

00:32:59   So they do use regular. Actually, so they have dynamic type. They try to, as they use

00:33:05   it at smaller sizes, they thicken it up. But I feel like they didn't do that enough. They

00:33:11   don't think enough at normal reading sizes, I guess. I think it's a cool thing that they

00:33:18   do, and that they're aware of that. But I think just regular would be great for things

00:33:24   like mail.

00:33:25   Dave Asprey Yeah, and I've even seen people be confused

00:33:29   about what that setting does, where I've seen a couple of people think that the dynamic

00:33:33   type setting is about making the type thicker.

00:33:35   Adrienne Asprey Well, as it gets smaller, it changes the

00:33:40   weight.

00:33:41   Dave Asprey A little tiny bit, but I think it's only

00:33:43   if you dial it down to the smallest size, then in some cases, it'll switch to Helvetica

00:33:48   regular weight instead of lightweight. But for the most part, you're still getting Helvetica

00:33:52   a light at a smaller size. Whereas, and I think what's telling about the confusion people

00:33:57   have over that is that I think a lot of people, when they're faced with reading their mail

00:34:03   on iOS 7, they don't think this font's too small. They think this font's too thin.

00:34:08   Cheryl Kane-Piasecki, PhD Fin. Yeah, it's too wispy.

00:34:10   Dave Asprey Yes, wispy.

00:34:11   Cheryl Kane-Piasecki, PhD It just doesn't read well. And the icons, sort

00:34:14   of like the toolbar icons, I mean, not like app icons, they really reflect that, and not

00:34:19   in a good way either, in my opinion. Things like the share icon, oh, the bookmarks icon

00:34:24   in Safari. So, it has like the same weight as Helvetica Lite, just looking at it, but

00:34:32   it's also really hard to distinguish. When I first saw that bookmarks icon, I was like,

00:34:36   "What is that? What is that supposed to be?" It didn't read as a bookmarks icon at all.

00:34:41   It sort of took me like 10 seconds to parse it. And that's happened with a couple things.

00:34:45   Yeah, but even just looking at the icons, like right now I'm in male, looking at the

00:34:51   icons, and they definitely match and they look balanced with the typography there, but

00:34:57   they're not prettier icons or nicer icons to me.

00:35:01   Yeah, I don't like that style either.

00:35:03   And the way I've expressed it is that to me, I think the icons should sort of have the

00:35:08   same feel that Helvetica has.

00:35:10   They have the same—like you said, they have the same stroke width as Helvetica Ultralight,

00:35:13   they don't look like if Helvetica had a new Unicode glyph for iOS sharing icon. It wouldn't

00:35:22   look like that box with the arrow.

00:35:23   It wouldn't look like that. The box with the arrow is funky. I really liked their old share

00:35:29   icon actually. Maybe that would be too heavy for this new overhaul of a system, but something

00:35:38   in between. Again, it's a little too far, like you were saying.

00:35:43   Yeah, and I think that they actually-- that's one of those things where I feel like they

00:35:47   could redraw the icon, but they've gone too far. It is still an arrow coming out of a

00:35:52   box, but I feel like it's so different than the old one, and it doesn't have-- it used

00:35:57   to be a swoopy--

00:35:59   A swoopy arrow, like, yeah, like moving to the-- yeah. So you're sending it somewhere.

00:36:04   It sort of alludes to pushing, sending, whereas this one is just sort of going straight up,

00:36:09   which-- I don't know.

00:36:11   sort of developed an understanding of what that glyph meant.

00:36:14   Yeah, it doesn't have the energy that the other one does or sort of the action.

00:36:18   Right. I don't think that this looks like the same thing.

00:36:21   No.

00:36:22   You'd only know it because it's in the same spot in most of these apps.

00:36:26   Yeah, exactly.

00:36:27   Whereas on its own, I don't think people would say that's the new version of that icon.

00:36:31   Right.

00:36:32   And the Bookmarks one is another example of that too.

00:36:35   Yeah.

00:36:36   Yeah, the Bookmarks one doesn't even look like a book.

00:36:38   No, it doesn't. It's funky.

00:36:41   So, yeah. I'm in agreement with you there that I think that the toolbar icons aren't

00:36:48   good. Here's another one that I picked up. It was subtly bothering me about iOS 7, but

00:36:54   when I read your article, I was like, "Yes. Yes. This is killing me," which is in alerts

00:37:02   and dialog box type things. They use bolder text. It may not even be Helvetica Bold. I

00:37:10   think it's just Helvetica regular, but it looks bold. Yeah, I think it's just regular.

00:37:13   Yeah, it looks real bold comparatively, but... To connote the default button? Yeah, and that's

00:37:21   it. And it's like you can't... I mean, before you could tell based on position, but also

00:37:28   just based on the look of the buttons, like one stood out a lot. Like the whole button

00:37:33   was red or black, depending on what kind of an action sheet you've got. But yeah, there's

00:37:39   There's no way to tell what the least destructive option is.

00:37:44   Right away you have to just look at it for a second.

00:37:47   And then things pretty much follow the same pattern.

00:37:50   They're in the same places and stuff and you interact with them in the same way.

00:37:54   But they don't look the same.

00:37:58   There's not enough distinction there to me.

00:38:04   It confused me all along and I couldn't help but wonder if in some cases it was just a

00:38:07   bug because it's such an early version of the OS that they one was different weight than the other

00:38:12   but then once you said that I kind of started seeing it yeah that's what they mean they mean

00:38:16   go to the bold one by default and it's it in some cases it's the safe option in other cases maybe

00:38:22   it's not the safe option but it's like the preferred option right like you know sort of

00:38:27   what you would expect them to want to do yeah like if you already clicked a trash can icon you

00:38:31   probably do want to delete this so we'll make delete bold and cancel will be thin.

00:38:37   But overall the effect though is to me it's an interesting idea. I think it was worth trying,

00:38:44   but I think it's a complete failure because I feel like that's the sort of thing like if you

00:38:48   have two or three buttons in a dialog box you can maybe play with the color of them but you can't

00:38:55   can't play with the weight. It just looks like you've made like a programming error.

00:39:01   Yeah, yeah. It does look accidental.

00:39:05   Like if I have three articles on my website and they're all three of the same type of

00:39:09   articles, well, then they should all use the same font for the headline. And if one of

00:39:13   them is using a different font for the headline, it looks like a mistake, like I set the wrong

00:39:18   class on the element or something like that.

00:39:20   Right.

00:39:21   buttons look like. And it sticks out at me. Rather than get used to it as the weeks go

00:39:27   on, it sticks out at me more and more as time goes on. And I think, I see the logic though

00:39:33   of why they did it that way, which is, you can kind of backwards engineer it, which is

00:39:37   like on Mac OS X, the default button pulses. It's blue and it has like an animation to

00:39:45   it. And then you know that if you hit the return key on your keyboard, that's the button

00:39:49   that you'll get.

00:39:50   Right. Sorry.

00:39:51   That's all right. And then on iOS, they don't have a return key, so you kind of have to

00:39:57   just tap it. So they would just make like the default one blue and the other one's

00:40:01   gray.

00:40:02   Right.

00:40:03   Typically. Something like that. They would use the background color of the button, though.

00:40:07   So now they've got done away with the backgrounds of buttons, and so they had nothing else to

00:40:11   play with. And so they said, "Well, why don't we try making it bold?"

00:40:15   Right.

00:40:16   That doesn't work for me.

00:40:18   It doesn't work for me either. It's just not distinct enough and like you said, yeah, it's just slightly different enough that it looks wrong. It looks like a mistake.

00:40:27   But it doesn't jump out at you. Like I want to be able to tell at a glance which button is "cancel".

00:40:32   And you know, I do know that cancel is going to be the one on the bottom, usually. But yeah, I just want it to stand out more.

00:40:40   I don't want to have to really parse these.

00:40:42   It's sort of like you get to the point where you're not actually even reading the buttons.

00:40:47   You just sort of know what they do and say.

00:40:51   A lot of that is visual.

00:40:52   So now, you're having to rely more on the text.

00:40:56   It takes just slightly longer.

00:40:58   I would almost prefer if they want to stick to their extreme minimal guns.

00:41:04   I would almost prefer if they did less to differentiate them and only use, let's say,

00:41:10   the placement of the buttons to confer which one should be the default.

00:41:15   So if it's a stack, a vertical stack of buttons like you often get on the iPhone, top/bottom,

00:41:20   the top one is default and the bottom one is cancel and they all have the same weight

00:41:27   of Helvetica, whether it's regular or whether it's ultra, just make them all the same.

00:41:32   If it's like two buttons left, right, the right one is always default and the left one

00:41:39   is always the cancel or the equivalent.

00:41:42   But make them the same weight and just let the consistency of their placement be the

00:41:47   emphasis, even though there's actually less emphasis in that case.

00:41:52   My eyes just can't get used to the different weights of two buttons that are supposed to

00:41:56   be peers.

00:41:58   Interesting.

00:41:59   I'm trying to think what else.

00:42:04   Oh, the icon grid for…this is a big question I have for you.

00:42:07   Oh, yeah.

00:42:08   So, this is pretty controversial.

00:42:11   It is.

00:42:13   Your husband, you mentioned in the article, Neven Murgen, had a pretty good article widely

00:42:19   read about, you know, he called this grid wrong.

00:42:21   This is this sort of template grid that Apple has shown that they say all of their icons

00:42:28   or iOS 7's, what was the word, confer with, comply with, that they match. And you agree

00:42:38   with Nevin that it's not a good idea.

00:42:40   Well, I feel like either the grid is wrong or people are using it wrong. And he mentions

00:42:47   that too. It's sort of like, well, I'm looking at settings now. It looks like it extends

00:42:52   way too close to the edges and maybe it'd be different if it wasn't so heavy and likewise

00:42:58   like the circle for the App Store or the iTunes Store. Yeah, it just feels like it's too large

00:43:05   within the square. It feels bulky and funky.

00:43:08   I'm going to play devil's advocate here and disagree.

00:43:11   Okay.

00:43:12   I don't think so.

00:43:13   You don't think it looks weird?

00:43:15   It looks unusual. I don't think that it's inherently weird though that it extends. I

00:43:20   agree with Nevin that it goes contrary to the sort of consensus design sense that we've

00:43:26   arrived at with iOS icons in particular, app icons over the years. And that what Nevin

00:43:35   I think has described as feeling right, like just the eyeball sizing is indeed, it's the,

00:43:44   you know, it's like when you're trying to judge like if you see somebody and you know,

00:43:50   like your friend is or spouse or somebody is buying a new dress or a suit because there's

00:43:56   a big wedding coming up and they want to look good. And you go shopping with them and they come out.

00:44:01   And you just sort of have an idea that, "Wow, that does look good. That looks much more stylish.

00:44:09   That's a much nicer suit than your old one." Or the opposite, that, "No, that does not. That

00:44:15   looks like you took that suit out of your father's closet." It's hard to articulate. There's style

00:44:22   changes. I feel like Neven's right that that was the style, but I think it's just

00:44:27   that though, a style.

00:44:29   Just a style and not, yeah, like you're...

00:44:33   They irritate my eye for some reason, but no, you could be right. It could just be that

00:44:38   I'm accustomed to the other style and I don't like seeing the new style. Like the

00:44:43   clock really bugs me. Although, first, I will say that the Photos app icon, I really like

00:44:47   that icon and it doesn't bother me.

00:44:49   That's my favorite.

00:44:50   because it's broken up a little bit more. Like it's not just a circle that's close to the edges.

00:44:54   It's sort of, you know, these rounded wrecks that are, you know, spun around.

00:44:58   Well, somehow to me it's a better use of the space and a perfect and a one that I don't hate it as

00:45:04   much as other people, but the one that it confuses me is the Safari icon. Because I don't understand

00:45:10   why the Safari icon has a circle in the square. Right. Yeah, it could just be the needle.

00:45:18   Right, and let it just be a blue square, or a round square, whatever you want to call

00:45:23   that shape. But let it be sort of like the weather icon and just have a compass in it.

00:45:27   I don't understand why it's a circle and a square.

00:45:30   Right. Yeah, for me, what bothers me about the Safari icon most is actually the needle,

00:45:36   how the needle is touching the circle. So like the circle being close to the edge is

00:45:41   sort of irritating too, but actually the needle inside it is really just bothers me. I don't

00:45:47   I don't like it.

00:45:50   I also kind of feel like the new shape and sort of, hey, draw more close to the edge

00:45:56   edict from Apple on these icons works better on the iPad than the old icons did.

00:46:04   And I don't know that they're bad for the iPhone.

00:46:06   I just think that they're different on the iPhone, but I think they work better on the

00:46:10   iPad.

00:46:13   But here's the big thing, and I've thought about it this week.

00:46:17   And I haven't seen anybody talk about it.

00:46:19   But I poked around Apple's site, and as far as I can tell, that icon grid is not anything

00:46:26   that you can download, or at least not yet.

00:46:30   Like I came out of WWDC thinking that this grid was going to be right there on the iOS

00:46:36   dev center and you'd, you know, how to design icons for iOS 7 and give it to you in a PSD

00:46:42   format or some other format, PDF or something.

00:46:45   then you could start drawing your app icons on this grid. Well, as far as I can tell,

00:46:49   that grid doesn't exist. The only ones I could find are ones that people out there have recreated

00:46:55   on their own.

00:46:56   >> Right. Yeah, I haven't found it as a thing that Apple has produced yet either. But, you

00:47:02   know, I'm sure that they're reworking the interface guidelines and hopefully, you know,

00:47:07   that'll be part of it.

00:47:08   >> Oh, that's what I'm wondering, though. Is it just something we're waiting for or

00:47:13   Or is this just an explanation of their icon system?

00:47:18   And there's...

00:47:19   Well, it seems like they wouldn't mention it if they...

00:47:21   Well, you know, honestly, I don't know.

00:47:23   I was sort of assuming that they were going to release it later, but I don't know.

00:47:28   I could be wrong.

00:47:29   I was too, but now I'm not sure.

00:47:31   Yeah, I don't know.

00:47:37   And the whole reason I went looking for it is I got it in my head that if you took it

00:47:44   and started overlaying it on certain Apple products like base stations and like the Apple

00:47:51   TV, that the hardware already conforms to the same grid.

00:47:55   Nicole: Oh, interesting.

00:47:56   Dave: But I couldn't get that far because I couldn't

00:47:58   download the grid.

00:48:00   So somebody smart out there, if you want to get a mention on Daring Firewall, that would

00:48:05   would be a good project this week is find that grid and then put it on top of products

00:48:10   like Apple TV and Base Station and all the other round square hardware products they

00:48:16   have and see if they fit.

00:48:18   Thanks.

00:48:19   You're a believer in grid-based design? Do you think that there's something to that?

00:48:24   I feel like Johnny Ive is committed to it. And if my theory is right that the hardware

00:48:28   fits to the same grid that the icons do, then I feel like I should win a prize.

00:48:34   I think it works for a lot of things. I mean not for all things. I don't know. I definitely

00:48:41   mostly go on eyeball, but it depends on what I'm doing. The more information and data

00:48:47   that I want to show, the more I want to use a grid. If I'm designing a Mac app icon,

00:48:54   then I don't use a grid at all. I just draw a nice shape that I think looks nice. But

00:48:59   I'm sort of planning out what an app is going to look like, I'm a lot more likely

00:49:04   to use a grid and just sort of, yeah, say how am I going to divide up this window into

00:49:09   thirds and more than that, you know? How are things going to lay out? I think it just depends

00:49:17   on the kind of design that you're doing, the kind of thing that you're showing.

00:49:23   I like the idea of grids. And when I see people who are big supporters of grid based layouts,

00:49:29   like Koi Vin, who has even as a great book on web based grid design, and I see the grids overlaid

00:49:36   on top of the result. And I see that how there's a system at play. I think that's awesome. I love

00:49:42   this. And I'm always so impressed. But whenever I design anything myself, I just go with what looks

00:49:47   good. Right? Yeah. And my favorite example of that is the daring where the daring fireball logo is

00:49:53   on the Daring Fireball website. There's no logic. It doesn't really fit with either of

00:49:58   the two columns underneath. I just kept moving it left and right until I felt like it looked

00:50:03   like it was balanced between the gap between the two. Then I was done. There's absolutely

00:50:09   no way you can draw any kind of grid over that. But once I had it, I thought that's

00:50:15   perfect.

00:50:16   Yeah, we have this book. I can't remember who wrote it, but it's called Grid Systems,

00:50:23   and it's pretty good. I haven't actually read the whole thing. And I'm like, "Oh,

00:50:27   yeah, I love that. I like the concept, but it's not something I do every time, definitely,

00:50:33   by any means."

00:50:34   Let me take one more break here, second break, and thank our second sponsor. Our second sponsor

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00:51:50   I think that's one of the best ways to show off a product.

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00:52:16   All right, Krista, you also design Mac software. You even said one like designing Mac icons.

00:52:25   Famous example, good example of your work would be Piezo from Rogue Amoeba. Really,

00:52:31   nice app.

00:52:32   Thanks.

00:52:33   It's so skeuomorphic now.

00:52:36   So skeuomorphic.

00:52:38   I told you when it first came out, the thing I like best about it is that Piezo, the app

00:52:44   looks like the icon.

00:52:45   Yes.

00:52:46   So it's like when you launch the icon, it's like the icon, to me, it just turns into a

00:52:51   full-size window and now you can use it and you use it and then you close it and it just

00:52:55   shrinks back to the icon.

00:52:57   The icon is the app itself.

00:53:00   There's very few apps that I can think of where you could ever say that.

00:53:03   Thanks so much.

00:53:04   That's what I was really going for.

00:53:05   Is that sort of design?

00:53:06   Is it quickly turning passé though?

00:53:09   I think so.

00:53:10   Definitely.

00:53:11   I look at it now and I'm like, "Oh, this is way too garish."

00:53:13   Even actually the week that it came out, I wanted to redesign it.

00:53:16   It's too shiny and bulbous now.

00:53:19   I definitely designed the icon to look like the app itself because that's one thing when

00:53:25   I'm sort of shuffling through my Mac apps, I want each icon to sort of jar a memory of

00:53:35   sort of what the app is and what it does and what it's going to do. So I wanted to just

00:53:40   really tie them together in a good way. So yeah, that worked.

00:53:47   I feel like we're going to be left with an unusual situation where come, I don't know,

00:53:55   two, three, four months after iOS 7 ships and most actively developed apps have caught

00:54:01   up to the iOS 7 design trends that we'll have a lot more apps left on the Mac that look

00:54:09   like iOS as we know it and fewer on iOS.

00:54:13   Yeah.

00:54:14   Interesting.

00:54:15   Interesting.

00:54:16   Because a lot of the stuff that I see like in Piezo, Piezo to me looks like an app on

00:54:21   the Mac that has drawn a lot of inspiration from iOS.

00:54:25   Sure.

00:54:26   Yeah.

00:54:27   Right?

00:54:28   So it's like there's like a nice little glossy finish to the levels.

00:54:32   What makes it look like there's a piece of glass over there?

00:54:35   I can't remember seeing stuff like that on the Mac before iOS.

00:54:38   Right.

00:54:39   Oh, yeah.

00:54:40   lighting it directly came from product illustrations of iPhone and of iMacs and Macbooks and stuff,

00:54:49   but they started doing that probably around the same time. I'm not really sure when that

00:54:53   sort of gloss thing came out in Apple product illustrations, but it's definitely from that.

00:55:01   I took that.

00:55:03   Do you think that the Mac is going to keep this stuff or do you think the Mac is heading

00:55:09   for an iOS 7 style?

00:55:12   I think actually the Mac will just keep sort of trailing iOS in that way and so we'll start

00:55:18   seeing more flat Mac apps.

00:55:22   I think iOS is sort of leading the design trends and the Mac is sort of following along

00:55:28   behind it and doing its own thing too.

00:55:30   branching off and going in its own way sort of separately. But yeah, I definitely think

00:55:36   you'll see less skeuomorphism, ornamentation, et cetera, in Mac apps, because that had become

00:55:42   a big thing. But I think it'll start to trail off now, too.

00:55:48   One thing I would love to see them do, and I tweeted this, and people panicked, and they're

00:55:53   like, "Oh, I hope not." But I tweeted something to the effect of, "You realize that come

00:55:57   next year, Johnny Ives, the same team that brought you iOS 7 is going to do a new version

00:56:01   of Mac OS X. I don't know that that's true. I just wanted to make people work it up.

00:56:06   But I wouldn't be surprised if it went one extreme or the other. The one extreme would

00:56:12   be a radical iOS 7 style visual redesign of a Mac OS X. I would think a lot along the

00:56:21   lines of what we see with iOS 7 just within Windows as opposed to these full screen things.

00:56:27   Or, B, they kind of just leave it alone and say that this sort of gray platinum look that

00:56:35   we've gotten to with OS X is sort of the end of the 10 years of development of establishing

00:56:43   a style for it, and that's what it is.

00:56:45   Yeah.

00:56:46   I don't know.

00:56:47   I hope that it doesn't stay the same.

00:56:49   I feel like that would be stagnating and it would be kind of sad for OS X.

00:56:55   So yeah, I'm not sure if—I mean maybe it won't go as drastically in the direction

00:57:00   of iOS 7, but I hope it doesn't stay the same.

00:57:03   Yeah, my guess is it won't.

00:57:05   I really—that it won't stay the same.

00:57:08   And I do think something semi—if you want me to bet, I'd bet a little bit of money.

00:57:12   I'd bet like five bucks that something radical would be coming for next year after the same

00:57:17   team that brought you iOS 7 is eventually finished with iOS 7 and has time to turn their

00:57:23   attention elsewhere. Yeah, I would not be surprised either.

00:57:28   But it's kind of striking though to me that it's cool if you're a Mac nerd and you

00:57:32   want the Mac. You don't want Apple to forget about the Mac. It's cool that Mavericks

00:57:36   has a lot of new stuff. They've devoted a lot of time in the keynote to it. It's

00:57:40   not an afterthought. But in terms of visual style, nothing has changed really.

00:57:46   Yeah, really, no. Which is fine for now. I'm excited about new stuff in Mavericks. But

00:57:53   yeah, I think it'll get visually updated eventually. I don't know. I can't say if it'll be as drastic

00:58:00   as iOS 7 or maybe just sort of an in-between. But definitely hope it'll get at least a bit

00:58:07   of a facelift.

00:58:10   The other thing, maybe I'm off by a year.

00:58:13   Maybe it's a two years out thing because, and I do think, I still think this is true,

00:58:19   that it's not a coincidence that this radical redesign of iOS 7 has happened after almost

00:58:27   all iOS 7, all iOS devices have gone to retina displays.

00:58:32   Whereas retina displays for the Mac are still an oddity.

00:58:36   It's really just two models, the two MacBook Pros, and those are not the most popular MacBooks

00:58:42   that MacBook Airs are.

00:58:44   Right.

00:58:45   That's a really good point.

00:58:46   They couldn't get away with the wispiness definitely on just a standard non-retina display

00:58:52   Mac.

00:58:53   Yeah.

00:58:54   I don't think that would hold up well at all.

00:58:58   Right.

00:58:59   But as far as the physics and the animation and stuff like that, that'd be cool.

00:59:04   That would be totally cool.

00:59:06   And you can't help but think that if it's the prototype of the future, the new Mac Pro,

00:59:13   if it's, as John Siracusa describes it, like the race car that a company makes that shows

00:59:21   off technology that's going to be in the family sedan six, seven years later.

00:59:27   It's clearly in that direction because the new Mac Pro has an entire graphics card that's

00:59:32   not even meant to power a display.

00:59:35   It's just to have a GPU available to software to do things like animate and shade and stuff

00:59:41   like that.

00:59:42   I'd love to see Mac OS X get flatter.

00:59:48   One thing that's bothered me for 10 years about Mac OS X is how big the drop shadow

00:59:56   is between leaders.

00:59:57   Yeah.

00:59:58   Oh, yeah.

00:59:59   I think that's just to make it look super deep to imply that you can have a lot of windows

01:00:03   happening at once and stacked on top of each other? Maybe. I mean, that's always been—it's

01:00:08   gotten—you know, things have started to get flat. I mean, if you look at the newer

01:00:11   scroll bars of the last two versions, they're not those big, honking, always present aqua

01:00:21   scroll bars anymore. It's like they disappear, they're really thin, and they're totally

01:00:25   flat and they, yeah, they're only there when you start to move, you know, by default

01:00:32   anyway.

01:00:33   Yeah, that's a good example of where it's really gone from maybe the most gratuitously

01:00:38   – it was like the last remaining vestige of the original gratuitous Mac OS 10.0 and

01:00:45   then they replaced it with what's probably the flattest thing in the default system look.

01:00:49   Yeah, I would say it probably is the flattest thing. Yeah, you're right.

01:00:55   I think that the Z height, the implication of Z height distance between windows though

01:00:59   has always been so preposterous on Mac OS X. They look like they're three or four

01:01:03   inches away from each other.

01:01:05   Yeah, totally. They really do. They're really big.

01:01:09   Whereas on the classic Mac OS, I think they just drew a one-pixel gray line along the

01:01:15   right side and the bottom side, and that was all you needed. It was perfect. A little bit

01:01:19   more like paper, like sheets of paper that are stacked as opposed to …

01:01:23   to…

01:01:24   Oh yeah, that's a good analogy.

01:01:25   As opposed to hovering.

01:01:26   Yeah, as opposed to these floating…

01:01:28   Yeah.

01:01:29   Right.

01:01:30   Sort of suspended big things.

01:01:31   There's the implication of an awful lot of z-height distance between windows has always

01:01:36   bothered me.

01:01:37   Mm-hmm.

01:01:38   All right, we're almost up for the hour, but there's one more thing I wanted to talk

01:01:42   to you about.

01:01:43   And that was…

01:01:45   And I didn't even know you were involved in it until you brought it up in your MacWorld

01:01:47   article, but that you were a speaker at AppCamp for Girls.

01:01:51   Yes.

01:01:52   Yeah, that was so great.

01:01:53   It was really fun.

01:01:54   I'm going to do it again in August, so it'll be good.

01:01:57   So tell me more about how that went.

01:02:00   Yes.

01:02:01   I just went in for one day.

01:02:02   I think the next time the camp runs, I'll go in like a couple hours a day for all five

01:02:08   days.

01:02:09   But I just went in and I did like a 45-minute talk, just like an overview about user interface

01:02:15   design principles and sort of what that means on iOS.

01:02:18   and I talked about patterns and anti-patterns and had this bit about hugging the HIG and

01:02:24   just telling them to sort of embrace expected patterns as far as for problems that have

01:02:29   already been solved.

01:02:30   And they were actually really into it and super attentive.

01:02:33   I didn't expect a room full of middle schoolers to pay attention to sort of anything that

01:02:38   an adult would be saying standing in the front of a room, but yeah, to have this group of

01:02:43   12 middle schoolers being really interested in interface design was awesome.

01:02:47   And then, and yeah, the biggest part of the whole thing was when I talked about iOS 7,

01:02:52   and I didn't want to, you know, get too into iOS 7 because they were going to be working

01:02:57   on iOS 6, so I wanted to stick to sort of how iOS 6 works and looks and just user interface

01:03:03   patterns in general, that sort of a thing.

01:03:05   But yeah, it was great.

01:03:07   They were super into it and just had a ton of questions and comments and it was great.

01:03:12   And then I worked with them sort of individually afterwards.

01:03:15   They were broken up into teams and I talked to them one-on-one and I talked to them with

01:03:19   the teams altogether too and that was great.

01:03:22   Dave Asprey And it was just a – I think they were calling

01:03:25   it a beta of the camp because I think it was only – well, a dozen girls?

01:03:30   A dozen kids?

01:03:31   Nicole Stelzner It was.

01:03:32   Yeah, it was I think just 12, maybe 13 girls.

01:03:33   Yeah, so it was the first time.

01:03:35   So they had done an Alpha camp before with just three, sort of seeing like what the camp

01:03:39   would be if they did it.

01:03:41   And this time it was a beta, so sort of just like doing a run-through, seeing how it would

01:03:45   really work.

01:03:46   And yeah, and it went really well.

01:03:50   Jean McDonald, who runs it, said it was—they had a lot of great feedback.

01:03:54   And so now they'll be doing it, I guess, sort of for real, I guess, as a launch.

01:04:01   It felt really real when I was there.

01:04:02   It felt super organized and—

01:04:04   And right now, it's just—while it's in beta at least, it's a Portland thing.

01:04:09   Yes.

01:04:10   Yeah.

01:04:11   other cities.

01:04:12   Dave Asprey Because obviously, middle-aged kids aren't

01:04:15   going to be able to pack up and just go to Portland.

01:04:20   Being local is a bigger deal for a kid's thing than for an adult conference.

01:04:24   Lauren Ruffin Sure.

01:04:25   Yeah, definitely.

01:04:26   For summer camp especially, I think it's harder to travel for that.

01:04:31   Dave Asprey I think it's such a great, great idea.

01:04:37   But it's not done yet.

01:04:39   Just because this is the thing that I wanted to bring it up again is to launch it, just

01:04:44   to get it off the ground, Jean set it up as an Indiegogo project. Indiegogo is sort of

01:04:51   like a Kickstarter type thing, but it can be used for different types of projects that

01:04:55   Kickstarter can't. If you think about it as a different way of doing a Kickstarter

01:04:59   type thing, that's all you need to know.

01:05:01   Right. Yeah. I think of it as Kickstarter for nonprofits because the things that I funded

01:05:06   on it were all nonprofit sort of fundraiser things.

01:05:08   Yeah, a perfect way of putting it. And it's often more for things that can't quite be

01:05:14   described as a product. You know, like Kickstarter is like epitomized by things like the paper

01:05:20   watch or whatever that thing is called.

01:05:21   Yeah.

01:05:22   Where you give money and then you're going to get a thing that you can like pick up.

01:05:26   Whereas App Camp for girls, you don't get a watch.

01:05:30   Right.

01:05:31   They had a $50,000 goal and they hit it.

01:05:37   As I speak right now, it's $73,000, which is awesome.

01:05:42   But they really want to hit $100,000 before this is up.

01:05:46   As we speak, 11 days left, probably by the time you hear this, about a week left.

01:05:53   But I would encourage everybody.

01:05:54   You could just Google AppCamp for Girls and get there.

01:05:57   you if you go to Indiegogo.com and search for AppCamp for Girls, you'll get to the

01:06:02   project page. If you haven't contributed, I really think everybody out there who listens

01:06:07   to the show would be—it's such a great idea.

01:06:09   MELISSA Yes. Do it.

01:06:11   DAVE I'm super excited about it.

01:06:13   MELISSA Yeah, me too. It was such a cool thing to

01:06:15   be involved with. I'm really excited to be involved with it again going forward. I

01:06:20   hope they reach their $100,000 goal and keep it going. It's totally the sort of thing

01:06:24   I see my daughter doing when she's like 11 or 12, hopefully. I mean, it depends on

01:06:29   who she turns out to be and what she's into, but I would love it to have just grown to

01:06:35   the point that she can enroll in it 12 years from now.

01:06:38   Dave: Yeah. I think it's great. I hope it takes off.

01:06:42   Nicole. Yeah, me too.

01:06:43   Dave. But I could definitely use everybody's help, so I would encourage everybody listening

01:06:48   to check it out.

01:06:49   Nicole. Yes.

01:06:50   Dave. And I'm so glad to hear that the beta one went well.

01:06:52   Nicole. Yeah.

01:06:53   Not surprised. I feel like there's probably a huge untapped market out there.

01:06:58   Mm-hmm. For sure.

01:07:00   Really, really excited about that. All right, Krista Murgen, thank you so much for being on the show.

01:07:05   Yeah, thanks for having me.

01:07:07   Is there anything else? Any website you want me to point people to? Should I tell them your Twitter?

01:07:11   Oh, sure. Twitter.

01:07:13   What's your Twitter handle?

01:07:14   Oh, it's @antichrista.

01:07:16   Antichrista. Get it?

01:07:17   Like Antichrist with an A on the end.

01:07:19   Exactly.

01:07:20   That's cute.

01:07:22   It's a great name.

01:07:25   And Rogamiba.com, of course, as well.

01:07:28   Rogamiba, our friends, Internet funnyman, Paul Kofosis.

01:07:32   Is he your boss?

01:07:34   Do you report directly to Paul Kofosis?

01:07:36   I do.

01:07:37   Yeah, he's my boss/project manager.

01:07:39   Yeah.

01:07:40   Yeah.

01:07:41   Internet funnyman.

01:07:42   That's him.

01:07:43   He's got a show with my wife now.

01:07:45   Yes, and it was really funny.

01:07:46   I loved the first episode.

01:07:48   It was really good.

01:07:49   Yeah, it was.

01:07:50   Just the tip.

01:07:51   the tip now we're all in cahoots together nice well anyway thank you very much Chris

01:07:58   this is great yeah yeah thanks for having me