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You could argue that Apple’s Scott Forstall-era iPhone software gave digital skeuomorphic designs a bad name, especially after skeuomorphism escalated to an obnoxious level in iOS 6 which culminated with Forstall’s departure and the Great Flattening of iOS.
A software calendar with a skeuomorphic design would typically imitate the appearance of binding on a paper desk calendar complete with faux coiled wire hinge. Or, a note-taking app might mimic the appearance of yellow post-it notes and implement faux leather stitching.
This was the golden age for skeuomorphism.
Nowadays, the software on our mobile devices and even computers is minimalistic, employing eye-candy such as translucency and layers of animated objects to keep users engaged.
Your typical skeuomorphic design: iOS ‘s Calendar app on iPad
Tired of minimalism, one designer wants to bring skeuomorphism back.
“I recently got to work on some old-school skeuomorphic interface for the calendar app Opus One,“ wrote Michael Flarup, designer, entrepreneur and keynote speaker. “I still love working on crafting experiences like this and had a lot of fun making leather, paper and metal again.”
Available on Dribble, his skeuomorphic concepts for the Opus One app veer off the path of minimalism, expectedly evoking strong reactions. As evidenced by the screenshots, you probably haven’t seen this amount of skeuomorphism on an iPhone X before.
And thanks to the phone’s OLED display with vivid colors, it works great—especially with the lighting on the side tabs really popping out and giving a Neoprene-like texture to them.
It’s easy to see skeuomorphic design pieces as dated.
Most of them are because we collectively stopped doing them. Most visual designers of that time moved on to make simpler interfaces and, like myself, found their playful-fix in game interface design, icon design and other places where you weren’t laughed out of the room for playing with gradients and lighting.
But something is changing.
Google made gradients and shadows less of a design offense with their Material Design and I’m seeing more and more tactility make it’s way into interfaces around me. Buttons have started to stand out. Whimsy has started to be a differentiating factor— not just in animation and interaction (where whimsy was banished to live under the rule of minimalism) but also in visual design. It’s been a slow march back towards bringing fun into UI design again— but I finally feel like we’re close.
He’s right that skeuomorphism has evolved from its green felt and linen days when it became one of the nastiest things you could say about a design to the modern, subtle interactions, if only as a differentiating factor. “What I am saying, and what I have always said, is that design can be anything we want it to be,” he said. “We should strive to make fun and memorable experiences that are appropriate to the context, but not arbitrarily restricted.”
Is this a great comeback for skeuomorphic designs or what?
Asked last June how he felt about his skeuomorphic designs for the iPhone and iPad software, former iOS chief Scott Forstall responded by saying the following:
If you look at the designs we did at Apple, we talked about photo illustrative designs, metaphorical designs. And those were infused into the design sense of Apple by Steve Jobs since the original Mac if not earlier. The original Mac had a desktop and folders that looked very much like the desktop on which that Mac sat.
And so we used these design philosophies. It doesn’t mean that we loved every single part of it. It doesn’t mean I loved every single part of it. There’s definitely things that I was less a fan of than others. But we built these designs that worked. And how do we know they worked? You just had to watch people use it.
Any designer could tell you that skeuomorphic design debate isn’t dying down, far from it. Let me refresh your memory with Apple’s original ad for the major iOS 7 overhaul.
It’s certainly difficult to draw a line between pure minimalism and skeuomorphism.
Just because a piece of software appears to use a flattened appearance, like iOS, doesn’t mean it’s 100% minimalistic. As a good example, those switches in the Settings app on iPhone and iPad for you to turn functions on and off–well, that’s skeuomorphism. And your desktop OS, with windows mimicking sheets of paper filling your desk that you can move around—that’s another example of the principles of skeuomorphism.
Justin Baker, lead Product Designer at chúng tôi summed it up nicely:
Modern skeuomorphism, therefore, is the bridge at the intersection of digital and industrial design. It is about facilitating non-traditional device interaction without sacrificing usability. It is about enriching and enlivening real world objects in the context of our human physiology.
Are you feeling nostalgic for skeuomorphic designs? Do you miss skeuomorphism in iOS?
You're reading Tired Of Minimalism, This Designer Wants To Bring Skeuomorphism Back
How To Bring Brightness Controls Back To Your M1 Mac’s Keyboard
Apple’s new laptops have a revamped keyboard layout with more dedicated function keys, but some previous options didn’t make the cut.
Some of the new offerings I find very useful, like the dedicated Spotlight key, which allows users to invoke Spotlight for program launches and file opening without moving the cursor up to the menu bar. Others, like the dedicated Do Not Disturb/Focus key and the Siri key, are of less use to me.
I use neither function, and immediately noticed they have replaced a pair of keys which I used to use frequently: the keyboard brightness keys. However, the good news is there is a way to bring them back.
This method involves creating a custom LaunchAgent, a small script which runs automatically on each login or reboot, and which tells the system to implement our custom keyboard shortcuts when pressing certain function keys. In this case, we will be telling the system to view presses of the F5 and F6 keys (currently Focus and Siri) as commands to lower and raise the keyboard brightness instead.
How to bring back keyboard backlight hotkeys1) Open up TextEdit on your machine and create a new document.
2) If your machine is not already configured to create new documents as plain text (it likely isn’t), go to Format in the menu bar and select Make Plain Text to remove rich formatting from the current document.
3) Paste the following script into your TextEdit document:
{ “HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc”: 0xC000000CF, “HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst”: 0xFF00000009 }, { “HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc”: 0x10000009B, “HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst”: 0xFF00000008 }
The resulting document should look something like this:
4) Now Save… your document to your Desktop, with the following name and file format:
com.local.keyRemapping.plist
Note: The resulting document has a file type of .plist. It should NOT be a .txt document. MacOS sometimes ignores the user’s wishes and automatically adds .txt to the filenames of documents saved by TextEdit. If your saved file is named chúng tôi , or even chúng tôi , select it on the Desktop and manually rename it, deleting .txt and ensuring it ends only with .plist.
5) We now have our key remapping script. Copy it, and paste it into the following folder:
~/Library/LaunchAgents
This is the /User/Library folder, not the /Library folder at the root of the drive. It is located inside your own user folder, at /Macintosh HD/Users/YOUR_ACCOUNT_NAME/Library/LaunchAgents.
If you do not know how to find or open the ~/Library folder, see our more in-depth explanation on the topic.
6) Once your key remapping .plist is inside your ~/Library/LaunchAgents folder, reboot your Mac. This should cause the LaunchAgent to be detected and run for the first time, and enable its functionality.
You can now try pressing your F5 and F6 keys; they should now turn your keyboard backlight up and down. Please note, if you had previously set up custom keyboard shortcuts involving those keys in System Preferences, Keyboard, Shortcuts, they could be interfering with the script and should be removed. Any other problems are likely to be due to the correct formatting, naming, or placement of the script in ~/Library/LaunchAgents.
It goes without saying, but this will only work on laptops with the new keyboard layout which features F5 and F6 as dedicated Focus and Siri keys, and only on machines which have keyboard backlighting.
If you wish to revert your changes, simply navigate to ~/Library/LaunchAgents, and delete the com.local.keyRemapping.plist file that you find there. Then reboot your machine.
To use this script while also retaining somewhat quick access to Do Not Disturb/Focus and Siri, you can access Focus from the Control Centre in the top-right of your screen. Its logo is two toggles on top of each other. Siri can be added to the menu bar by going to System Preferences, Siri, Show Siri in menu bar.
In theory, this script could be edited to change various function keys’ functionality, though you would need to know the hex codes used by the script to refer to the various key mappings. If you know any more of these, where to find a comprehensive list of them, or have similar examples of key remapping scripts you have created, I’d love to see them!
Zuckerberg: Facebook Wants To Take The Pain Out Of Building Apps
Facebook is seen as a website for connecting people. Now the company also wants to make it easier for outside developers to build their apps and connect them with users, by providing back-end hosting tools.
On Thursday the social network held its first Parse Developer Day, a conference geared toward third-party app developers. Parse is a cloud-service company that provides a hosted back-end infrastructure to make it easier for developers to build their mobile apps. Facebook announced its acquisition of Parse in April.
Facebook already provides software tools to let outside developers plug into the social network’s data with Facebook Platform. But that service is focused more on the distribution of apps, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during a surprise appearance at the conference in San Francisco.
“We want to do more than that,” he said. What Facebook is trying to do with Parse, he said, is to give developers new tools to build and grow their apps.
In other words, Facebook wants developers to focus less on things like managing servers, maintaining connections to other services and building push notifications, and instead focus more on the user’s front-end experience.
Parse addresses those issues, Zuckerberg said, by eliminating the pain for developers and letting them just focus on building a great app.
During a keynote address, Parse CEO Ilya Sukhar likened the company’s goals to applying for a driver’s license, but not wanting to stand in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles to fill out all of the paperwork.
“You just want to get out there and drive,” he said.
The goal has big implications not just for developers but for Facebook. The social network claims to have more than 1 billion active users, and already lets those people log into certain apps through Facebook, giving the app permission to access their list of friends and other profile information.
But by getting into the business of selling application development tools, Facebook wants to support an even tighter bond between apps and the site.
Simplifying apps developmentTo provide more ways to simplify the app development process, some new products were unveiled by Parse’s Sukhar during Thursday’s event, which drew more than 600 attendees.
The two biggest new products are Background Jobs and Parse Analytics, he said. Background Jobs is designed to let developers schedule tasks into their apps, such as messages or notifications, by sending simple code to Parse’s servers. Prior to that product’s launch, developers could not run arbitrary code on the company’s servers, Sukhar said.
Parse Analytics, meanwhile, will let developers monitor various activities within their apps to see what’s working and what’s not. With the feature, developers can see, for instance, whether their app has more action on Android or iOS, and whether certain demographics are spending more money within the app than others.
Developers could use work-arounds to gather some of this data before, Sukhar said, but now they can get it all in one place, visualized on a dashboard.
Parse also announced Thursday a partnership with the Unity gaming development platform, to make it easier for games developers to build their apps on iOS, Android and the Web using Parse.
Some developers have questions about how Parse’s services might continue to change now that the company is owned by Facebook. Andres Le Roux of chúng tôi wondered in an interview at the conference whether there might be tighter synergies between Facebook Platform and Parse in the months to come.
Another looming question is whether Parse will let developers continue to build their apps for Twitter just as easily as they can for Facebook. During a meeting with the media in May following the acquisition, Parse’s Sukhar said that Twitter with Parse would not be going away.
More than 100,000 apps have been built using Parse, Sukhar reported Thursday. The company’s wide range of clients includes Showtime, eBay, Warner Brothers and Zynga.
Competitors in the cloud hosting space include Amazon’s S3 cloud computing storage service, Google’s Cloud Platform and Firebase.
But Parse sees its biggest competitor as people who build apps themselves, Sukhar said in May.
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As Inflation Concerns Intensify, This Can Put Bitcoin Back In Driver’s Seat
Inflationary concerns have been getting graver with every passing day. At this stage, a few nations have acknowledged it as a real problem, while the rest, continue to bury it under the blanket of neglect.
Other than depending on assets that act like hedges, there’s hardly any way to protect one’s savings from inflation’s grip. BTC, the crypto market’s largest coin by capitalization, has however been associated with the aforementioned tag. And to a fair extent, it has been able to shield the common man from the clutches of the day-to-day rise in price.
However, to continue to do so, it should be able to retain its valuation with time.
Fundamentals – Bitcoin’s trump cardAs far as the fundamentals are concerned, Bitcoin has been faring pretty well on this front. Consider its velocity itself, for starters. Generally, assets with low velocities are supportive of LT high valuations. Since mid-2023, BTC has been able to keep its velocity low on the macro-frame, which is quite a healthy sign.
The BTC market has additionally been witnessing healthy-squeezes on a regular basis. Even they have been able to elevate the asset’s price.
Inflation: A boon for Bitcoin?Well, a lot has been happening in the macro-financial landscape and people in power in the U.S. have been quite vocal about the same. For instance, just a day back, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell spoke about inflation before the Senate Banking Committee and accepted that inflation is proving to be more powerful and persistent than expected.
After acknowledging that the “risk of higher inflation has increased,” Powell said,
“We tend to use [the word ‘transitionary’] to mean that it won’t leave a permanent mark in the form of higher inflation. I think it is probably a good time to retire that word and try to explain more clearly what we mean.”
The central bank has been using the ‘T-word’ for quite a few months, in the hope that the high readings would eventually fade away with time. Nevertheless, inflation has had completely different plans and has accelerated at a much faster pace of late.
At this stage, it is interesting to note that every recession phase [gray-shaded areas] in the U.S. has been marked with the inflation rate peaking without fail. In the 1980s, for instance, the same reached a level as high as 15%.
Post that, for the most part of the 1990-2023 period, the number remained below 6%. However, in October, prices increased by 6.2% YoY, making it one of the fastest annual rises.
The dollar, engulfed within the rise-in-price environment, has clearly been losing its power and hedges have been able to make up for the same by consistently treading higher.
Ballooning money supply, a cause of concern?Now, M1 is essentially a narrow measure of the money supply that includes liquid currency and coins in circulation. It doesn’t consider other assets like savings, accounts pending, and bonds. M2, on the other hand, is a combination of both liquid and non-liquid assets and is used as an indicator of the cumulative money supply.
Now, when both the charts above and below are observed, it becomes quite evident that the M2 supply and Bitcoin’s price movements have aligned on the macro-frame. The U.S. dollar, on the other hand, has deviated and treaded on its own chalked-out path.
So, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that as the money supply increases, Bitcoin’s price would also head in the same direction. In other words, as per past precedents, the king-coin would, by and large, follow the footsteps of the wider basket of assets instead of only cash going forward.
Powell, interestingly reiterated in his testimony that his baseline expectation is for inflation to fall closer to the Fed’s 2% target over the course of 2023. The same, to a fair extent, seems to be utopian, or rather highly ambitious, at the moment. More so, because of the new COVID-19 Omicron variant.
The entire economic landscape completely shook during the initial leg of the pandemic and briefly stepped into a recessionary phase. If things get worse this time too, the inflationary numbers would inevitably peak further.
Now, a rising threat of inflation would only reduce the purchasing power of the Dollar and in effect, could be glossy for Bitcoin. Nonetheless, keeping the current fractured state of the crypto market in mind, nothing can be said with surety about whether or not BTC would be able to cling onto its own value during such periods. However, its inclination towards the M2 supply is definitely a step in the right direction.
The 6 Best Methods For Finding A Designer
Tired of trying to design your own website for your startup? Looking for a complete re-model of your existing site? Maybe you need to add to your current design staff? You will find no shortage of designers out there ready and willing to work for you, but all designers are not created equal, nor do they all have the same talents and skills.
So, before you go a-looking, you may want to clarify for yourself exactly what you want.
Do you want someone really skilled in UX or are you more interested in the creative aspects of UI? Maybe both are really important to you.
What kinds of components do you want most?
What’s your budget?
Do you want a full-time, an on-call long-term freelancer, or a one-shot freelancer?
Once those points are clarified, here is your road map to finding a designer.
1. Check Design CommunitiesThere are quite a number of these online. They are organizations to which designers have memberships and which display member designs; as well, they run design contests. You will have a large gallery of designs to view as well as see the work of designers who have received recognition for their work. You may see specific components or elements that really impress you, and the designer contact details will be there.
2. Check Your Own NetworksWhat business and professional groups do you belong to? Who among those members has had recent web design work with which they were really pleased? Recommendations from people you know and whose opinion you trust are invaluable. If that fails, get on your LinkedIn account and go to your member groups and ask for referrals. Some of the popular ones include: Freelance Graphic and Web Designers, Designers – Web/Graphic and Web Design.
3. Check with the Department Chair of Design Programs at Local CollegesAre there design students looking for freelance work or seniors who are beginning to look for a career position? Department chairs are happy to speak with prospective employers of their students and will be thrilled to set up interviews for you. They will always recommend their very best students, so the candidates you get from them will be highly talented. This is truly one of the best sources, because students are “up” on the most recent innovations and tools.
4. Hold Your Own ContestYou may not know how to set up a contest but there are online companies that do. You can set up one at Logo Arena community. You provide the details and the amount(s) of cash prize(s). They do all the rest. You are under an obligation to pay out the prize; you are not under any obligation to actually use the design, if you want to still look further.
5. Access Niche Job BoardsCheck out Behance, Dribbble and 99Designs. Lots of designers post their resumes and portfolios on these boards. Many will direct you to their own websites where you will be able to see their own site design as well as a full portfolio and references. This is a great way to compare the work of a lot of designers “side-by-side.”
6. Narrow the Field and Check ReferencesIt’s a good idea to narrow your field of candidates down to three or so and then to check the references. You really need to ensure that the designer is responsive, good with deadlines, and is willing to stick with the project until it is finished, no matter how many revisions you want.
Fitport Wants To Be Your Health & Fitness Dashboard
I briefly touched upon FitPort in my article about HealthKit apps. The app debuted today as the App Store’s first HealthKit-enabled application following yesterday’s iOS 8.0.2 software update that fixed a bug in iOS 8.0 which prevented HealthKit apps from functioning properly.
Created by Flask, FitPort isn’t yet another daily activity, health and fitness tracker, but a wannabe replacement for Apple’s stock Health app in iOS 8.
Having spent an hour or so playing with it, I can safely conclude that FitPort deserves your attention so let me discuss it in greater detail.
Above all, FitPort is a very promising fitness dashboard.
Featuring a simple dashboard that can be customized to your liking, it provides an at-a-glance overview of your daily fitness statistics and lets you compare data to the previous day or week to see how active you’ve been.
Taking a page from other tracking applications, FitPort also makes it easy to set your personal goals so you can monitor your progress.
Like any app that uses HealthKit, FitPort first needs your permission to access your Health database. You’ll be asked to selectively choose which of the supported stats will get synced back into the iOS 8 Health database.
As you’ve probably realized by now, HealthKit is hugely convenient because it, along with other HealthKit apps such as FitPort, can feed Health its data about your physical activities.
A quick backgrounder: because iOS 8’s Health app collates data from HealthKit apps and accessories, programs like FitPort help build a comprehensive outlook of your health. Health also lets you visualize data using pretty charts, manage your privacy, selectively share data with other apps and much more.
Back to FitPort.
You can input data manually into the app and all changes get synced immediately with Health. The following Health data types are supported by FitPort: Steps, Walking + Running Distance (mi, km), Active Calories (kcal, kj), Dietary Calories (kcal, kj), Weight (lb, kg, stone) and Body Fat Percentage (%).
The app underscores that “your health data will not be sent to our servers.”
Privacy-minded individuals needn’t worry: you always have complete control over every bit of information you’d like shared with Health — just use the ON/OFF switch next to each category you’d like synced with Health, as seen on the image below.
The good news is, this level of privacy isn’t specific to FitPort as Apple demands all HealthKit apps provide the same granularity. This lets users explicitly enable read and write capabilities for every supported Health data, from Active Calories to Body Fat Percentage to many, many more.
It gets even better: Health sync is two-way.
As you can see below, FitPort was able to import my Steps Taken from Health’s database. If you own an iPhone 5s, iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus, here’s the thing — your device already has some basic data to work with. Go ahead, try it yourself: first launch Health, then tap Health Data on the toolbar and finally add Steps and Walking + Running Distance from the Fitness section to your dashboard.
But where did this data come from?
Thank Apple-designed M7 and M8 coprocessors for keeping track of your motion activity in the past seven days, without impacting your battery, because these chips monitor the iPhone’s sensors without ever waking up the main A7 or A8 processor.
Wrapping up, FitPort still needs some work.
For starters, the app lacks a food database so you must use other apps to log calories. I’m also disappointed that active calories are not calculated automatically, which is a shame, really. Additional Health categories will be integrated over time, the Tokyo, Japan-based developer promised.
Other health, fitness and nutrition tracking apps enabled for HealthKit today: MyFitnessPal, FitStar Personal Trainer, WebMD, Yummly and Carrot Fit, with many more to gain prominence in the coming days for sure.
Now that I’ve seen what’s possible with third-party HealthKit integration, I’m very much excited about what the future holds.
You?
[App Store]
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