iPad interface design
Really awesome volley from brilliant writers on iPad UI conventions (focusing on realism/eye-candy).
Jon Bell: “Page Flips Are Better Than Infinite Scroll”
“Forcing a user to drag a finger to initiate a flip every time is unacceptable. I experienced this with early versions of the Kindle iPhone app and it was maddening. “
Marco Arment: “Overdoing the interface metaphor”
“DVD players don’t make fake whirring noises for five minutes before letting you eject a disc to simulate rewinding. Similarly, nobody should need to perform a full-width swipe gesture and wait two seconds for their fake page to turn in their fake book.”
Chris Clark: “Overdoing the interface metaphor” (commenting on Marco’s post)
“Forcing stupid interactions upon a user just to stay true to your visual metaphor is criminal, and Marco’s example of the Mac OS X Calculator is right on the money.”
Neven Mrgan: “How Real?”
“Remember Mac OS X v10.0? It was to be a significant departure from the flat, dull look of the OS’s of the time. It overdid that: the buttons cast comically large shadows; the pinstripe texture is crazy opaque; everything is far too shiny. Today, Mac OS X is flatter, with tasteful touches of depth and volume. To get here, they had to start there.
“Until books are completely re-imagined as objects (and I’m not holding my breath) people will expect them to look like facing pages, double-sided, picked from a shelf. Five hundred years of tradition mandates this. We start there, and we go more elaborate (as books add video, interactivity, etc.) and less so (as no-longer-necessary conventions get dropped.)”
Mrgan always has good perspective.
