Hi, I'm Vijay, Creative at dffrnt.com. My work has been featured on Lifehacker and I used to run the extremely popular Gintama daisuki blog under the pseudonym vijei.
The designers of the Phelps farm tractor in 1901 based their interface on a metaphor with the interface for the familiar horse: farmers used reins to control the tractor. The tractor was steered by pulling on the appropriate rein, both reins were loosened to go forward and pulled back to stop, and pulling back harder on the reins caused the tractor to back up
iOS Mail - The icons represent instructions on how to fold a paper airplane.
/via michaelgrothaus
Rechner: World’s first gesture based calculator app for Apple iOS by Berger & Föhr.
Flick Scrolling
You might wanna watch the video above, but in short: When scrolling content on a touch-screen, instead of letting momentum stop the scrolling, you can decide exactly where it should stop. It stops at the point where you flicked it.
It would be great for things like books, blogs, timelines or anywhere where you don’t fly over, but continuously wanna “move forward”. Kinda like paging but within and long scroll. Some apps have a page up/down feature, but I don’t really use it because it moves always the whole height and might cut off a picture or so. With this “flick scrolling” you can decide to where it should move to. The last paragraph or beginning of a picture.
Why not just use pages or cards? Yes, that works sometimes, but not always, especially not when you have no control over the content. iA wrote a good post about it: Scroll or Card? With flick-scrolling you get the joy of “card flipping” without the cards.
Here the two demos from the video so you can try it out (only tested on iOS).
Warning: I’m not really a programmer so the demo is just a hack to demonstrate how it could work. Would need some improvements. And of course, performance would be better if it would be implemented natively.
One thing I’m not sure about.. there is the possibility that you intend to do a flick scroll but end up doing a normal scroll or vice versa. You can judge for yourself in the demos. Maybe the detection could be further optimized or here some other possibilities (Let me know if you can think of more).
- Use a two-finger scroll. But then you can’t use just your thumb which makes it not that useful.
- Split up the screen into two areas, for example left for normal scroll and right for flick-scroll.
Credits: Demos use the iScroll4 library and in the timeline demo, the “scrollToElement” feature is used, which is a pretty cool one.
Terrific job. Want.
iOS - autocomplete text has the same typeface and style as the underlying text field
/via Idan Gazit
Not centered. Phail!
Design lessons from popular iOS game “World of Goo”.
Neat new Wikipedia app for iPad and iPhone — Wikiweb.
Google Maps - The street view icon on Google Maps has a surfboard and tropical shirt when in Hawaii.
/via fewbutripe
I keep my OS X dock on the left side of the screen so this won’t really mean much to me long-term, but the new dock design in Mountain Lion is much nicer. I played around with it for a bit on my MacBook Air, and one nice change is even though it still reflects things on the screen like a jackass, the effect is far subtler.
Agreed. It is much nicer — though I too am a left-edge dock kind of guy.
Doodle - Compresses dates that you did not select times in like an accordion. Clicking on the accordion expands the entire calendar.
/via Ben
This. This is why I love OS X and the Apple ecosystem with its products, users, developers, engineers and designers - insane attention to detail from end to end, starting from Apple all the way up at the top down to the lowly one-man and two-man teams making OS X apps. Computing the way it should be.
Pixelmator - The eyedropper tool shows you what color you picked inside the pipette.
/via Michiel
