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It’s always a pleasure to talk to Kostya Gorsky, lead designer from Yandex and my good friend.

We’ve been discussing the future of browsers, apps and the Internet lately and have formed a vision of how all this stuff should work. I’ve been convinced that the address bar is not necessary and will die some day, and that there won’t be any meaningful difference between apps and websites. This simplification raises some questions and causes some problems at first, but they are all technical. People won’t care. We can make it.

Today one can find a site with Google from the Spotlight page on an iPad and add it to their home screen — all without knowing anything about web addresses. Even if you can explain the difference between an app and a website to your grandpa, this will not be of any value to him. Why bother, it’s all just coloured rectangles.

Kostya have recapped it all well: “You should have a screen with the coloured rectangles and a way to add them to it”.

And so I’ve coined a new design for iPad’s home screen. See the App Store icon. Before:

After:

Of course, manual updates will die, too.

We’ve went into much more detail with this, having talked for about an hour. And I wanted to publish this picture.

Everyone is a designer

Life does not present you with a choice to be or not to be a designer.

Everyone always has to make design decisions. There’s no escape: whatever you do, other people will interact with your product or service. Your design decisions can be good or bad, but they cannot not exist. You have to make them, or you are stuck.

To make these decisions, you have to be competent. That’s why design is a basic discipline, as language is. Saying you don’t want to learn design is like saying you don’t want to learn to write. It’s bullshit. Kids should start learning design in primary school: it’s for everyone.

You can’t just make crap and say “hey, I’m not a designer”. There’s no such thing as “not a designer”. If you make crap, you’re just a crappy designer. Fix it.

Calendar icon manual

As I’m sure many designers do, I have an Assets folder with a collection of small things you always need (mouse cursors, spinners, checkboxes etc.). There’s one thing that’s so easy to create from scratch that I don’t even bother to store it anywhere.

Let’s say you want to add a popup calendar to a date input. Here’s how you make a calendar icon for it.

Start with a 4×4 black rectangle (showing at 1200% zoom):

Make three of them in a row, with overlapping borders, like this:

Clone this whole thing and move 3 pixels down, like this:

Now clone this whole thing and move 3 pixels down and 3 pixels to the left, like this:

Done (don’t try to click, it’s just a picture):

A Samsung iPhone has been found

This is great, especially today (from Idioteka):

The text says:

Attention! A Samsung iPhone has been found in the school. Refer to the educational director U. V. Kuznetsova.

Should Apple use this as an extra evidence?

On password-less login

Ben Brown asks if it is time for password-less login. Well, yes it is. It’s actually long been.

I think an even better solution would be to remove the password completely, allowing users to login with only an email address. Each time a user needs to login, they enter their email address and receive a login link via email.

That’s part of our usual process of removing mandatory signup. We try to convince all our clients to do this (see also: Interface is Evil). The thinking goes: password is not really needed to sign in: you can always click the “I forgot” link. So why not just assume that the user has forgotten their password?

This flip makes sense for almost every website. If users visit a site infrequently, signing in via email is not a big deal. If users visit a site regularly, then chances are high that they are already signed in and won’t see the form anyway.

In Bureausphere (it’s a kind of online designers club available only in Russian), we go even further. There’s no sign in or sign out at all. On the me page, if we haven’t recognized the user by cookies, we just ask for an email (I’ve translated this bit for this screenshot):

If we know this user, we just send a link to their page, and the link logs them in behind the scenes. There’s no way to log out. And if we don’t know the person, we still do the same: the page will be created on the fly as the user clicks the link in the e-mail.

There is one problem with this approach. While no user likes messing with passwords, people at least understand how the system works. So if we change it, even for the better, we must take into account that some users will be confused.

Some details in Mountain Lion

  1. Launchpad no longer displays all the Adobe’s crap “apps” (the likes of “Uninstall Adobe Flash Extension Manager Help Center Updater”). Somehow it learned to distinguish between real apps and this useless stuff.
  2. Apple for some reason decided that Launchpad should have not eight, but seven icons in a row, which broke all my logical page arrangements. Oh well. Had to reorganize it. I hope in ML it will at least remember the positions well and don’t shuffle them unexpectedly. By the way, search in Launchpad is great.
  3. When you delete a file in Finder, it no longer moves selection to parent directory. Huge win (via Aleksander Karpinsky).
  4. Many have already pointer out that the battery icon in the main menu no longer has an option to display time remaining, only the percentage. But what’s more important, when you ask it to display percentage, it now displays it to the left of the icon (iOS style) and doesn’t enclose it in the stupid, useless and noisy parentheses. I wonder what made them use those parentheses in the first place. Anyway, I don’t want to see the percentage anyway.
  5. In Calendars, when some of the day’s events are out of view (i. e. you are viewing a schedule from noon to midnight, but you have an event in 9 am), they are still shown as small “tails” on the edges, so while you don’t see what event or events are there, you least know that there is something.
  6. In Mail, if you put a folder (e. g. “Projects”) in the bookmarks bar, it no longer behaves like a pull-down menu. Instead, it takes the name of the form “Projects — The TTP Project” using the name of the subfolder you last opened and opens that folder immediately. To see the whole list of subfolders, you need to click the little triangle on the right.
  7. When you right click a mail and select “Move To”, Mail no longer displays the whole mailbox hierarchy for you to pick a folder. Instead, it shows just the top-level folders, any of which you can hover to reveal a submenu of its subfolders and so on. This made the “Move To” command almost impossible to use, because the menu structure is just too fragile to use confidently. This turned out not to be true. In reality Mail displays each folder as a menu of its own if it is collapsed in the mailbox sidebar and as a list of subfolders if it is not. And it does the same in Lion. The reason for my experience is that in Lion I had all my hierarchy expanded and in ML it was not.
  8. You can now drag a file from somewhere to an app icon in Launchpad to open with. Start dragging, then press your Launchpad hotkey (it’s ⌘Esc for me) and drop a file on an any icon that would accept it. Cool.

What else?

Button text in Mountain Lion

John Siracusa in the review:

Creating a new document and then immediately closing without saving now shows a dialog box whose far-left button is labeled “Delete” rather than the milder “Don’t Save”. The same button in the dialog that appears after selecting the “Duplicate…” command and then immediately closing the duplicate window is now labeled “Delete Copy” instead of “Don’t Save”.

Nice touch.

Two stupid windows on a Mac

There are two stupid windows on a Mac that annoy the hell out of me.

This one appears on my main machine in a couple of minutes after I close the lid of my notebook:

It tells me that the remote volumes are no longer available, which I well know and don’t give a shit about. What am I supposed to do with this information? If I were using the volumes in any way, like copying a file, I would have noticed the problem long ago (as the file would stop copying, obviously).

Additionally, it has two buttons that do exactly the same thing: nothing. No matter what I press, the volumes are no longer available and I can’t do anything about it. What do you mean “Disconnect All”, it’s been disconnected several minutes ago, and we both know it. This window should be killed.

This second one appears one in ten times when I change something in iCal:

Now what is that? Not only are they dumping some cryptic server messages onto me, they are also presenting me with a choice. What am I supposed to do here? I don’t want to go offline, because why would I, and I don’t want to “Revert to Server” because I have no idea what it means.

“Revert to Server” is the default one, so it feels like it’s safe to choose it, but I’ve learned that it actually undoes my latest change. There’s no excuse for that: I’ve made my change for reason. Why would you even offer me the choice to undo it, let alone make it the default one? And “Go Offline” actually saves my edit and syncs it to iCloud (when it’s in a better mood later). Someone in iCal department should read Raskin and learn that user’s input is priceless, and it should always be saved by default.

Just change the button names to “Save and sync when possible” and “Forget what I’ve just done”, and it would be ridiculously obvious that this window, too, is useless and should be removed.

Insert a photo into a mail message before iOS 6

Some people are excited about the addition of this “Insert Photo or Video” thing in Mail app in the coming iOS 6:

Many think that today (in iOS 5 or earlier) you have to start by picking a picture or video, then select email from the action menu. Someone even complained that several times he found himself in a situation, where he had composed a message and was going to attach a picture and only then remembered that he had to start from the Photos app and do it all again.

Well, you don’t have to start from Photos app. To insert a photo or video to an email that you are composing, go to Photos app, find a photo you want to insert, press and hold, tap Copy, then go back to your mail, tap where you want to paste it, tap Paste.

Many will like the iOS 6 way better, but it’s not true that you cannot add a photo to an email in the earlier iOSes. But it was true before “Cut, Copy and Paste” was added in iOS 3.

Gruber and Siegler in The Talk Show #4

In The Talk Show #4 John Gruber is joined by MG Siegler. What a company! It was recorded before WWDC, and they were discussing all sorts of rumors, it was quite entertaining.

Then there was an interesting take on why one should care even about the small details which “regular” people won’t notice. Gruber (48:46...):

Maybe people don’t buy Newsweek and think, my god this thing is very finely printed. You may not think it, but you notice it. And that’s just like the way Apple stuff is all the way. Where people don’t buy, well, normal people don’t buy the iPhone and think about how nice the seams are between the steel antenna and the glass in front. You may not think about it, but you appreciate it.

But the most amusing part was on Google. Staring with Apple’s move to in-house maps and a pathetic Google’s pre-WWDC event (56:54...) and ending with an analogy with Microsoft (1:21:20...). Gruber:

Google is to me the new Microsoft, where they are the ones sticking their fingers in everybody else’s pies, and not making any friends, and spoiling the friends that they had... How far this industry can go in five years: when the iPhone was introduced there’s Eric Smidt invited up on stage backslapping with Steve Jobs talking about what great almost sibling companies Google and Apple are... And now look where they are. The way I see it is, Google’s really made enemies of everybody...

Siegler:

And it’s one of those things like we were talking about earlier, where, you know, you talk to them, and they don’t seem to be aware of this. Even though it’s not like a big secret, and anyone can see it...

Gruber:

It does seem like they are oblivious about it, and that’s to me is a difference from when Microsoft was the enemy of everybody in the Walley, is that Microsoft seemed very self-aware of their role... But Google seems to think that they are still everybody’s friend and everybody else kind of hates them.

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