My friend and a great iOS developer Alex Babaev approached me with an idea to make a unit converter for the iPhone. What? Aren’t there hundreds of them on the App Store already? But after a short discussion it became clear to me that none of the ones that existed were good.

All the converters had stupid menus with categories and icons, as if the designers were thinking about a nice Dribble shots instead of the utility of their apps. By the time you make it through the user interface and set it up for the conversion, you forget what you wanted to convert in the first place.

So we did it our way. Our product is called Ångström:

We have started from scratch. You have a number in your head, you want it converted stat. You do not want an endless list of categories distracting you.

We ask you for a number and strive to give you the answer with as little taps as possible. Ideally, with zero taps. That is why we check out your clipboard first. We use the units from the previous convertion before you change them. We show you your unit history before you have started typing the unit. We try to guess the target unit i. e. we know that it is natural to convert feet to meters, but miles to kilometers. We learn what you convert to make better guesses over time. We keep currency rates updated, but show you approximate values when offline. We support alternative spelling of many units.

The version 1.1 has just been released. We invite you to have a look at what we have done. Ångström has been “In Review” for five days. Presumably, Apple employees were playing with the equals sign and just could not stop.

Yep, we have had lots of fun with the animations and transitions. If nothing else, this alone is a good reason to test drive Ångström. Every tap is welcome. And if you don’t feel like tapping, you can just run the app and enjoy our text caret animation for hours. For some reason, I, personally, particularly love it.

Download in the App Store for free

The free version includes most units for daily use. An advanced unit pack is available as an In-App Purchase.

Following my original post with London Underground voice announcements, reader Yaroslav Eremenko and another reader who preferred anonymity have sent me several other recordings. Now I have announcements from the Northern line, which I did not have before.

A recording of a train operator explaining a delay with a red signal, the quality is very poor:

Central line

District line

Northern line

First, trains to Edgware:

Euston, both branches:

More Bank branch to Morden. This one is at King’s Cross, the beginning is omitted:

It is notable that on the Northern line, they say “this train terminates at S” instead of “this is a L line service / train to S”. I also like the expression “This train terminates at Morden via Bank” as a shorthand for “This is a Bank branch train and it terminates at Morden”.

Piccadilly line

Victoria line

National Rail

I have updated the original post with the new recordings, make sure to check it out for my whole collection.

By the way, still no Bakerloo, Jubilee, Metropolitan, Waterloo & City lines and DLR. If you have any recording in your collection or would like to make some, do not hesitate to share them with me. Thank you!

Some authors use footnotes too much. This usually takes the following form:

An exciting story on a subject ¹, blah-blah.

---

1. Another exciting story on the same subject. Or the boring details on the subject. Or an explanation on why some of the details are not actually true and how it does not matter.

How am I supposed to read this? Does the author want me to scroll down every time I see a superscripted number to read the footnote? Or should I ignore it?

When I follow a footnote, I lose track of the main narrative. This is no surprise, for if the footnote’s content fitted the main line, it would not have ended up in a footnote, and I would not have to scroll back and forth. So when I return from the footnote, I back up a bit to get back on track. When I encounter the same footnote again, I can finally connect the dots. Not exactly a smooth reading experience.

When I ignore a footnote, I feel I am missing something. And many writers prove me right: when I finish reading and glance over the footnotes, I often find them worth reading. This makes me re-read the parts of the main text to figure out how the footnote is related to it. Then I can finally connect the dots. Not a smooth reading experience either.

Galileo Galilei’s book, a scan from the Edward Tufte forums.

In a book, where no scrolling is involved, footnotes are not as irritating as on the web. But a good designer will still avoid them, prefering sidenotes, as on the spread above. They require no meaningless numbers, you just place them beside the relevant text. This design helps a reader quickly check out whether a note is worth his attention and continue reading practically uninterrupted.

If you use the parallel narrative often, this is what you should look into. However, most of the time footnotes on the web are a sign of inconsistent writing.

Uvildy is a lake about 100 km from my home city of Chelyabinsk, Russia. In winter, it freezes over. Where there is no snow on the surface, the transparent ice looks stunning.

I have made a video today:

And also took several pictures (original size; right-click to save and use as wallpaper, if you like):

Camera: iPhone 5s.

Check out my new dark psytrance / new school hard goa mix, Locket Rauncher.

I am not a huge fan of dark psy in general, but these fourty-two pieces are really great. This is very fast music, by which I mean that there is a lot going on at any given moment. So you need to concentrate to get it. If you play it in background, it will be just noise (for an unprepared ear at least).

The tracklist is:

1. Cactus: We Love Radio
2. Jaws Underground: Algorythme
3. Penta: Tollkorn
4. Skazi: Are You Still There
5. Rev: Locket Rauncher
6. Digital Talk: New Age Surf
7. Benza: Duck And Cover
8. Ocelot: Disappear
9. Ninth Of Kin: Gravity Breaker (Inverse Axiomatics, 2012)
10. Audiosex: Virtual Medicine
11. Derango: Confusion is Next
12. Gappeq: The Torque
13. Mubali: Spacial Distortion
14. Ocelot: Upward Spiral
15. Toï Doï: Fonction d’onde
16. Flyh: Sputnik
17. Baal: No Window
18. Syntax Error: Bitmap Bugs
19. Kashyyyk: Charly And Ervin
20. Gappeq: Tower Of Babel
21. Phi: Everything Never Can’t Stop Us, Dude
22. Jaws Underground: Johnny Got Is Gun
23. Gappeq: Mobius Strip
24. Slum: Sneak, Beneath My Notice
25. Highko & Looping: Chillout (Beloochi Remix by Psykovsky)
26. Sienis: Phinary
27. Time Lock: Flying
28. Crownick: Petrified
29. Toï Doï: Saturnday
30. Sienis: High Frequency Science
31. Crownick: Acoustical Veins
32. Scorb: Mutoid (Extended Version)
33. Tamlin: Fjaqek
34. CCL: LF-Ants
35. Meteloids: 48 Krunchy
36. Psykovsky: Suddenly
37. Fungus Funk: Metropolis (Robot Empire) (Propaganda Remix by Psykovsky)
38. Tutankhamon 9000: Lost In Luxor
39. Psyside: Hysteria
40. CCL: Unleash The Beast
41. Digital Talk: Abyss
42. Sabretooth: Smooth Hound

Enjoy the music.

There will be no privacy in the future.

It does not matter whether you think it is good or bad. Maybe you truly believe that privacy is a basic human right and should be respected and protected. But who cares about your beliefs? I like privacy myself, so what? Technology will make this concept obsolete: there will just be no such thing soon.

When technology makes possible something people want but has side effects, first it happens, then people learn to deal with side effects. People pirate music and videos, even if copyright owners disagree. Kids watch porn, even if their parents would prefer them not to. Terrorists plan attacks online, even if others object.

Freaked out about Google Glass? Yes, it is ugly and people who think it is the future are crazy. In reality, future is when what Glass does today will be happening without Glass. People will be constantly recording live video of everything they see. The video will be instantly made available to everyone. The software will be able to do face recognition on that video (by the way, the delivery drones will also be recording video). You will not be able to stop the spread of private information. Basically, at some point you will have a 3D model of the whole world where you will be able to look at anything at any angle or distance, live. And you will be able to search it and run any analysis on it.

Everyone will be able to learn where you are and what you are doing at any moment. And where you have been. And with whom. Everyone will be able to see you taking shower and shaving your balls. They will be able to capture a video clip and share with others. You do not like it, I do not like it, but it will happen.

If you spend time trying to protect privacy with the law, you are as stupid as copyright owners spending the time to shut down torrent trackers. Future is inevitable, and you are just being in denial. When you stop technology with law, this means that you restrict access to that technology to governments and grant them the right to use violence to everyone else who tries to use it. If you let governments enforce privacy on your behalf, they will do their best to make sure you do not have access to private data, but they do. NSA will be happy.

Protecting privacy with the law is a bad idea.

Now suppose there is technology that lets your friend spy upon you having sex. Then there should also be technology to check out who has been spying. Thus, while you cannot stop someone from spying, they will think twice before risking to ruin your relationship.

To adapt to the new world, first you make sure the new rules are for everyone, then you think how to use them in your own self-interest.

When a web page is loading, images appear in random order, causing unpleasant flashing. Good web developers have learned to deal with the issue by coordinating things with Javascript.

An example would be Apple’s Mac page, where an animated spinner is displayed on top for a couple of seconds, and when the menu items are ready, they appear with a nice animation.

Since coordinating the load process requires tedious programming, it is not what many people choose to do. There are tools which simplify the task to some extent, however the very necessity of programming is a dead end for most people.

Emerge.js changes this.

Emerge.js is a framework for coordinated page loading. It simplifies the task by removing the need to write any Javascript code. The framework uses a declarative approach, where you specify a desired behavior for each element and do not think about the implementation. To make an HTML element wait for its content to load before emerging, use:

class="emerge"

Elements of class emerge fade in after all the contained images are loaded (this includes CSS images). To display an animated spinner while loading, use:

data-spin="true"

The framework lets you coordinate the order and timing and use different animation effects as you see fit, for instance:

data-effect="slide"
data-await="other-element-id"

Check out the product page for detailed description.

Hyperlinks should be highlighted on mouse hover. This provides feedback necessary for the user to feel that the element is clickable. It is equally good to highlight the borders of the images and other non-text elements. I use red as the highlight color, and it works well.

Interestingly, changing mouse pointer from an arrow to a hand is not quite enough. The pointer is my avatar on the screen, so changing it just reinforces the idea that I am aiming to click an element, not that the element is going to respond to my click.

Since CSS provided us with an easy way to add nice transitions to web pages, some designers have implemented fading in and out of the said highlight color. But using fade-in defeats the purpose of the effect: when an element’s color fades-in lazily on hover, the feeling of responsiveness disappears and a page starts to feel numb.

I use only the fade-out transition, i. e. instantly change an element’s color to red on hover, then gradually change it back to blue when mouse moves away. Here are some links to my previous posts to test the effect (will not work in your RSS readers, obviously):

• Large click areas for small elements,
• The principle of one link,
• Timed modes,
• SIM cards must die,
• Everyone is a designer.

Several years ago, if you were to write an article on article titles and you wanted its own title to work best, you would name it something like “Coming up with a great title for an article” or even “10 qualities of a great title”. That was how you attracted clicks.

But recently something has changed. The articles now have titles like “Here is what you should know before updating iOS” or “Look at this amazing picture of Mars made by Curiosity”. As if the first sentence of the text was used in place of a title. The more and more we see these titles that try to shift your attention from themselves to what goes after them. It is the content of an article, right?

Wrong. What really goes after them is a link. That is how twitter sharing works. Now that the title itself is no longer clickable, there no need to attract clicks to it. Instead, a title should look like a direct speech of someone who shares the link, adding to the credibility of the link that follows.

I find it fascinating how technology changes language.

In several hours Apple will unveil its new products, which are believed to be the new iPads, MacBooks and the new Mac Pro.

Some people have speculated that along with the new Mac Pro Apple will release a new 4K display. Or at least expressed an opinion that such a move would be welcome. Particularly, Marco Arment has said in the latest Talk Show, that he would buy one (or even two) immediately.

A new, better desktop display is what I want either, but 4K is not an answer to that at all.

I am currently using the Apple’s 30-inch Cinema Display from 2004 running at 2560×1600 resolution. Unfortunately, noone, including Apple, has since released a better display for me. Apple’s own newer displays, i.e. a 27-inch Thunderbolt display or a 27-inch iMac display, run just 2560×1440. And not only the resolution is lower, these displays are also glossy, whereas I prefer a mirror to be a separate device. If Apple announces a 4K display later today, I don’t see how it can be better than the 2004 one I already have.

There are different definitions as to what 4K resolution means. Let’s say Apple picks a 4096-pixels-wide option. So for a 16:10 display, the resolution would be 4096×2560. Now there are three options as to how to use these pixels.

The standard “retina” pixel-doubling approach will result in an effective 2048×1280 resolution. So I will end up with 36% less real estate than I have now. Also, on a 30-inch display such 2×2 “pixels” will be gigantic and all non-retina stuff will look ugly (and I don’t want to “upgrade” to a smaller display). So this does not work at all. Another option would be to use scaling (as available on the retina MacBook Pros). While scaling definitely looks OK on retina, I want to enjoy razor-sharp pixels on my new display, not some blurry crap (even if it is not that blurry). And the last option would be to use the actual 4096×2560 as is. With Mac’s very poor ability to scale UI fonts, I don’t think I will be able to see anything in such a mode. I doubt this option will even be available without some sort of a hack.

As you see, there’s no way a 4K display can be any better than the good old 2004 Cinema Display. So I hope Apple will not use 4K and will go straight to “5K” with a 5120×3200 30-inch matte Retina Cinema Display. Please?