phantom_package

RE: DraftSend landing page

When the page loaded, I was greeted with:

Create and Share Interactive Presentations With Just a PDF and Your Voice

I have no idea what this means. Apparently this startup takes "a PDF" and "my voice" and combines them into... something. An Interactive Presentation. Something I'm narrating? What are these good for? What even are they?

After reading the rest of the page I feel like I got it (maybe), but hoo boy does that header text need work. An example would be even better.

Other than that, I think the visual design is nice, though it's a bit dark/moody for the product goals IMO.

no, both ui and ux are a part of design.

For sure.

I would really like to see more UX articles aimed at developers - I think that would help combat the "design is only looks" attitude you mentioned, it's a bit more logical/rational than pure graphic design, and doing it well requires a good dose of empathy.

when you're critiquing design, you have to do it in the context of the design goals the team had in mind.

So even if Comic Sans (in hot pink) is your favorite font, you would agree that it produces the wrong emotion on, say, a gravedigger's website. Not that I wouldn't absolutely love to see that.

Taste is very personal yes, but successful designs are more than expressions of taste - they're about solving problems.

First and foremost, their products are easy to use. That's #1. But right after that is the design of their products.

Based on this quote and the article, I think that when you say "design" you mostly mean "the way it looks" or "graphic design". That's just one design skill among many, and arguably the least critical one to the success of a product (don't skimp on it, though!).

When you talk about the product being "easy to use", that's because it was designed to be easy to use. Intentionally. Probably through a lot of trial, error, prototyping, and user testing. That's 100% design.

Anyways, taking your writeup as more of a critique purely of the graphic/interaction design, here are some thoughts:

- I would love to have seen more exploration of how Stripe approached the typographic choices. Is there a system there? What are the roles of the different bits of typography on the screen? Are they using 20 distinct font/color/weight pairings, or 3? What about the emotional impact of the font? Why do you think Stripe (very consciously) chose this font to present themselves? The world of typography is fascinating and quite accessible.

- The "hovering" behavior on the buttons is more "Interaction Design" than "User Experience". I think these are skillfully done - emotive, but not ridiculous - subtle, but not invisible. It would be interesting to see how the experience gets better/worse as you start fucking with the animation curves/colors.

- Agreed, they have a great color palette. I would love to have seen your thoughts on why they picked these colors. Is each used in a specific role? See above questions on typography. Also, keeping with the "practical" slant of the article, maybe link to one of the better color palette generators out there?

I think you'll notice that even on the aesthetic level, a lot of the above questions are aimed at teasing out some kind of a "design system" that lived in the designers heads and produced the website you're critiquing.

Good design is never an accident, and if you want to help people design better websites, the most useful thing you can do is help them understand how great design happens. By looking at the tradeoffs and struggles and decisions from other (successful) design projects, you gain some new lenses through which to view your own work.

Anyways, thanks for taking the time to put this together, and please keep writing about design for a developer audience!

and 250mph+ top speed is PLAID

Ditto on presence.

I bought a Vive and it's been... interesting. I actually haven't touched any games in months, but I still break it out every few weeks to prototype something in Unity/Unreal. Also, I've been using Google Blocks a ton to create lowpoly models for use in games.

I think the tech is way too compelling to go away anytime soon, but it's obviously not the splash hit that Facebook/etc predicted it would be.

Hi everyone! We started working on Chorus because it was really difficult to recommend the podcasts we love to friends - so we mashed up a podcast player with a social network and got Chorus.

Chorus for iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chorus/id1221631922?ls=1&mt=...

- alonso from Chorus

waiting for us-west-1 :-)

Uber has less than a year of runway left at their current burn rate.

Do you have a source for this?

I'm curious how well this works. A big part of design (aside from visual pleasantness) is information hierarchy, in which layout (order/spacing/size/etc) of various pieces of content is manipulated (via css) for emphasis (or deemphasis).

When you turn off all the styles, you're still getting an information hierarchy (top to bottom) - but it's now being determined by the order of html elements on the page, not the layout the designer used css to achieve. These hierarchies were probably the same on the early-web, but not so much these days.

I really enjoy Unreal's Blueprints. I program in a text-based language for work, so it's fun for me to go home and be able to hack on a game without having to spend more hours staring at text on a screen.

A big difference that I've noticed is that in a visual scripting language, the "nodes" in the graph can change their shape/color/layout/etc based on what type of node they are. I love this. With blueprints, if I'm putting together a material and I put in a color node, a color picker shows up. If I put in a TextureSample node, a little picture of the texture shows up. In a text-based language, every variable is just a string of characters - if you want to be able to tell at a glance what type of object a variable contains, you need to adopt some kind of a naming convention (or use an IDE that highlights them).

Debugging in unreal is also really cool. The "code paths" light up when activated, so it's really easy to see exactly which branches of code are and aren't being run - and that's without actually using a debugger. Side note - it would be awesome if the lines of text in my IDE lit up as they were run. Also, debugging games is just incredibly fun and sometimes leads to new mechanics.

I initially thought that organization would be a problem, but it turns out that you can make functions just like any other programming language, and encapsulate blueprints inside of them.

There are also some things that I don't like about Blueprints. Typecasting usually involves an extra node which feels verbose. If/thens are handled with a "Branch" node, which again feels verbose.

Huh, I've never heard to keep weight off the keyring. I imagine this is to avoid unnecessary force on the ignition assembly? Obviously you wouldn't want to put several lbs on there, but it seems like small items would be fine.

Regardless, cool project. I'm planning to do something similar, as soon as I can get an indoor space. I might go even more hidden, and hide it under the lip of the gas tank or etc.

By definition, the people that make interesting cinematic experiences in VR won't be "film makers". I don't know if we've created a job title for them yet.

It's a completely different medium, with completely different advantages, drawbacks, and considerations. Applying film techniques in a virtual environment is not the right approach, as your examples demonstrate. The really compelling experiences in VR will embrace the constraints you mentioned, not try to emulate a medium in which they didn't exist.

I went to New York a few months ago and saw a play called Sleep No More. It takes place across 5 floors of a warehouse, converted into an incredibly immersive series of sets. It's loosely-based on Hamlet, with multiple storylines playing out simultaneously in different parts of the hotel/hospital/graveyard/theatre. The audience wears fawkes-esque masks and is not allowed to speak, nor are they acknowledged by the actors in any way. You can wander anywhere you like, follow any actors you find interesting, rummage through drawers, read books you find lying around, etc. You really do feel like a ghost, and being able to move around the actors (or even leave the room, if you feel like it), is incredibly fun and interesting. It certainly didn't feel like a limitation.

So maybe VR has more to learn from theatre (and specifically interactive theatre) than film? Food for thought.

inappropriate time management

This resonates with me. When I tried Soylent, it was because I was working WAY too much, and that "always-on" mindset carried over into other parts of my life. I felt like I didn't have time for food - I needed to be productive instead! Soylent markets to this extremely well, and it worked on me.

I stopped using Soylent when I found a healthier work/life balance, started meditating regularly, did a bit of traveling, started exercising more often, and met a new love interest. I wouldn't say that I'm a stellar cook, but I enjoy preparing meals - it's just another thing to try to do well.

So Soylent isn't really for me - though there probably are some lifestyles in which it makes sense.

It's obvious that this is a super-early release, but I'm happy that AirBnB ENG is working on a navigation solution.

Also:

On iOS, ViewController transitions can be animated using Lottie. It's possible we could add support for such a feature into Native Navigation.

Yes please.

  nifty looking guy

  react-native-controllers

Funny, so did I. Extremely talented team, and hands-down some of the nicest people I've ever worked with. From what I've heard of Planet, it seems like a solid cultural fit - excited to see what comes next.

Hopefully it does get ported to javascript. In the meantime, if you happen to use react, https://github.com/necolas/react-native-web is a good way to use react-native's styling approach (which uses css-layout under the hood) on the web.

Agreed. While I do think there are some interesting applications for building perfect reconstructions of reality, I think the most interesting experiences won't be in that direction.

One of the things I always look for in a new house/apartment is a good PaceTrack.

Funny, I'm great at building stuff but I wouldn't consider myself an amazing engineer.

I think that goes deeper than the "story we want to tell" - in other words, I don't think everyone is faking it. Look at Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs:

- Physiological - Safety - Love/Belonging - Esteem - Self-actualization

If you're, say, a programmer in SF right now, the first two are definitely taken care of for you. Love/Belonging can be present as a result of your job, but it's also possible that you "stop drinking the kool-aid" at some point (as the author did), so it's not a given. Esteem is really person-to-person, but it's probably not coming from your work as much as what you get in exchange for your work.

Self-actualization is the one you're referring to when you say "what does this all mean, man?". In other words, am I doing what I should be doing? It's definitely the hardest of the bunch, and it's hard to work on that one if any of the others aren't rock-solid (hence the pyramid shape). Only some people nail it down before they die.

Working in tech, I've never felt like I was doing what I should be doing. I'm just lucky enough to be able to make good money while figuring out what that is. I find that that approach to work (I'm trading my time for money) feels (to me) the most honest, and leaves me in the best headspace. It doesn't exactly fit with the startup office culture we have here in SF, so I do consulting, which is a comical situation - I charge a higher hourly rate to interact with this culture less often.

That was phenomenal. I constantly struggle with a lot of this - trying to distance myself from many aspects of the culture, without getting too cynical about it.

I think most of all, I just appreciate knowing that there is someone else kicking around in this city that feels the same way I do.

Is canSee() in the spec? Looks useful, but I haven't seen it before (heh).

Isn't GraphQL/Relay (or similar tools) the solution here? Has the best of custom endpoints (can be conceptualized as a single, infinitely customizable custom endpoint) without the drawbacks (there's only one endpoint, and backend engineers just need to expose a schema).

It was kinda disappointing to see him fail to properly address tools that were designed to resolve his original concern. He basically decides that GraphQL forces you to "shape your models to your views" (which is false, GraphQL/Relay just collates and trims your models before delivering them to your views). In a sense, it allows him to continue to say "yes" to his frontend developers (which is good from a product standpoint) without adding a ton of custom endpoints.

Disappointed this doesn't use webtorrent.

This looks like a really cool piece of software, but I think a lot of it's best features should be unbundled or made available in the IDE you already use.

Namely:

* Simple package search + install without opening a web browser * React-native hot-reloading * Scaffolding of added components, with required props filled in

I really don't want to use a different IDE, and lose everything I've got in my current IDE - I use webstorm, so this would be Live Templates, key bindings, etc.

That said, I'm really excited to see people building software that makes building react-native apps easier. It's not that it's too difficult right now - rather, it's awesome that the development workflow is so hackable, and that the react-native (and react) ecosystems seem to be evolving so rapidly, and are so willing to try out new ideas.

Anyways, nice work Deco Software, keep it up :-)