Binary Bonsai

Other than the recessed headphone jack (possibly the stupidest design decision in the history of ever), there’s only a single thing about the iPhone annoying me on a daily basis, and which, together with the non-glove-compatibility of the interface, has convinced me that yes, the iPhone was most definitely ‘Designed by Apple in (sub-tropic) California’.

The remote control ‘clicker’. It catches on to zippers like a Turkish vendor on a tourist. The shape along with the location along the wire, makes it perfect for incessantly snatching onto anything and everything semi-solid in the neck area, which in my case happens to be the zipper to my jacket.

Had the clicker been entirely smooth, from end to end, this wouldn’t be a problem. And no functionality need be sacrificed. Everyone gets what they want, we all become friends and world peace ensues.

Thank you Steve.

I’m not going to make a big splash here, but I’ve activated ahead of time, the design I’ve been working on, mostly because I grew bored with the previous one faster than I thought I would. As you can see, this one is quite low-key and set entirely in Helvetica Neue, with exception of the header logo of course, which I drew in Photoshop one sunny sunday a couple of weeks back.

I wanted a more ‘serious’, almost book-like feel for the site, to complement my writing — and to be honest, to lend it some seriousness I can’t manage to bring to the table on my own — and hopefully this design manages to do something along those lines.

It is however a work in progress, but as usual I don’t have the time just now to get everything up and running as I want it; yet another case of me being better at dreaming up ideas than coding them up. And as such, it’s got plenty of errors, and some of the recent entries have hardcoded widths for videos and what not (thanks Flash), don’t worry, life goes on.

I hope you like it.

Please, fellow interface designers, look into your hearts and face the fact that pagination navigation has newer stuff on the right and older stuff on the left. Not the other way around.

Consider a blog like a diary. You start writing on the first page and then go towards the right. And since the first page of a blog is the latest entry, to go to the older entries, you have to press the arrow that points to the left.

Left = Old.

Except if you read right-to-left, in which case:

Please, fellow rtl interface designers, look into your hearts and face the fact that pagination navigation has newer stuff on the left and older stuff on the right. Not the other way around.

Consider a blog like a diary. You start writing on the first page and then go towards the left. And since the first page of a blog is the latest entry, to go to the older entries, you have to press the arrow that points to the right.

Right = Old.

Thank you.

Early this year, I spent some time with a bunch of other people setting up a direction for Habari’s administration interface. It was mostly blue-skying, but loving interface design as I do, it felt like time well-spent.

In fact, it felt good.

It was a little early to start implementing stuff like that, when the platform itself hardly even existed at the time. So I went off and spent most of my time on K2 instead. But now that K2 is nearly done, I’ve started working on Habari designs again, and just submitted my first major patch (with no assurance it will be accepted of course).

Habari is like the promised land in terms of the kind of interaction design I’ve wanted to see in WordPress for years. It’s like a digital catharsis to finally apply these thoughts and frustrations.

It’s based on, and comes pretty damn close to these reference mockups, and looks like this in motion (Full resolution):

Whether all of this will work in practice, no one knows, but it sure feels good.

I played the 1995 game, The Journeyman Project 2 (trailer) and quite enjoyed it; though as with all adventure games, I was stuck too often and for too long. However, there was one damn cool thing that came of that game, and that’s the chameleon jumpsuit. Oh mama! Too bad it looks like crap whenever it moves.