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d5tryr

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I'm an interaction designer at the State Library of Queensland...

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I absolutely adore this app, I've used illustrator for +10 years and I honestly feel that manipulating beziers through direct input in Inkpad is not only a more pleasing, and intuitive, experience but in a lot of cases a more effective method of creating vector art. I frequently use it throughout my design process (and occasionally for the entirety of it).

You should be extremely proud of the powerful a tool you've created, and I hope that this transition to open source is positive for the app and for you and your team. I can't wait to contribute, even if it's only by way of design suggestions.

I'm pretty sure I've emailed you with glowing compliments before but I can't tell you enough how much I love using your app.

I'll post a few of my illustrations in the hope that other designers might see the potential of this tool and start using it too:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/24117106/yh/Ibis%20small...

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/24117106/yh/corin%20ston...

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/24117106/yh/reclinging%2...

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/24117106/yh/Sweeno%20scr...

I assure you any perceived simplicity in my images are a product of my style rather than any limitations of the app :)

That's a courageous and bold statement to make. Apart from the weasel words that entirely undermine it.

If you want to say that all lawyers are evil, without any evidence, at least have the conviction to say that.

If you want to imply that some undefined minority, or possible majority, of lawyers may, or may not, potentially be paid arsonists, but might also not be arsonists, paid or otherwise, then... I dunno, maybe say something worthwhile instead.

> They don’t show the product. This is a product ad, not a brand ad or a perception ad. And Apple has always impressed me (blah blah blah...)

Does not bode well for the rest of these bullet points when the first one is demonstrably wrong. How the hell is apple support not a product?

Probably shouldn't have bothered reading that far through such linkbait in the first place...

Agreed, given the overwhelming discrimination that demonstrably exists in IT sectors it would be nigh on impossible to prove that hiring a lot of women was an act of discrimination as opposed to a natural result of not discriminating.

It's extremely pretty, though I question some of the UX desicisions.

Double-tapping an item makes it vanish. Due to the seemingly random selection of nodes that appear when re-searching for a parent node, that item may never be seen again...

Seems odd that a gesture like double-tapping, while not often used in iOS, would result in the exact opposite action of the familiar double-clicking to drill down or expand of other UIs.

I just noticed that the spool sizes are also accurate indicators of duration. The two spools, how long you've listened for & how long remaining are another elegant way of visualising duration. Sometimes you are interested in time listened and sometimes time remaining, this provides a visual cue for both.

Smart, and again more expressive than a label.

Which would be an appropriate arrangement of it was their content. But it isn't. Would you be willing to pay for those two products without the podcasts themselves? Of course not, the app and the servers are valuable to a consumer because of the content. If the content creators don't get a cut of that advertising money then the business model isn't fair.

Not to mention that stitcher removes any editorial control over the kind of advertising associated with any given program.

First of all it provides a visual cue as to the rate at which a podcast is being played at, a constant cue rather than an indicator that has to be found and read. For that reason, on a purely practical level it is useful.

More importantly though you seem to be suggesting that an interface should never make reference to the technologies that preceded it, for fear that a teenager might be made aware of something they've never seen before?

What a terrible thought, that someone might be encouraged to investigate analog audio technology. Why can't an interface be a history lesson too?

I posted this in the comments of the blog yesterday but it hasn't been approved yet, I imagine there are a lot of comments to get through. Please excuse the second person singular grammar, I'm copying this straight from the notes app on my phone:

Your last two points I agree with, but given they are optional and can be switched off I think those criticisms are not only misplaced but suggest a sense of entitlement similar to the designer's arrogance you bemoan.

On your first point though you are simply wrong.  The thing you incorrectly call 'visual texture' is actually clutter.

The borders for individual table rows are superfluous as the baseline of the text draws that line regardless. Additional borders duplicate these baselines and demand that a user reads twice as many visual elements in order to interpret an interface.

The same is true for coloured backgrounds.   If a distinction of utility has already been inferred by shape and proximity then to add an additional visual cue adds little more than another layer of complexity.  This is unnecessary visual information that a user has to decode.  Time that could be better spent performing the tasks they've actually come to the app to do.

I'd suggest having a read of Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Envisioning Information to get a better grasp on these concepts.

>I’m pretty much only using it to consume content. I suspect that most people use their iPads similarly:

And with that line it seems clear that this article is not about people like me...

The back button doesn't make sense in Angry Birds. If an interface element is superfluous or unpredictable in Angry Birds then it makes no sense to bog down a touch interface with it.

Angry Birds may seem to be a silly little game, but it is not an edge case. It's an exemplar of interaction paradigms going forward.