Red Monkey: Design Archives

April 12, 2010

iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch and Flash

I've really grown sick of the constant whinging about Apple's iPhone OS not supporting Flash. There are actual real reasons that don't have to do with some spat with Adobe (who now makes the Flash program) or making cold, hard cash.

Think about the websites which are currently built in Flash. Many of them rely on a programming event "mouseover." On a touchscreen, where is your mouse? Can you hover over something with your mouse on a touchscreen? How sensitive does the touchscreen have to be in order to differentiate between hovering your finger lightly over something and pressing down for a button action?

Touchscreens are an awesome thing to me, but they are still a fairly young technology and simply don't have all the capability that we have via a computer. It's not so much a fundamental flaw of the modern touchscreen as it is a developing tech - we're just not there yet. (And should we be or should we be searching out new paradigms?)

Now, what would be more frustrating to you as a user? Seeing a little brick icon on a bunch of sites because they use Flash or attempting to interact with a site, but not being able to make it work - and having no idea WHY it wasn't working? Frankly, I like Apple's solution once I thought about it.

Maybe I get this because I'm a web designer who knows Flash. I'm no great ActionScript programmer, but I know the basics and have made my share of animated Flash banners using ActionScript rather than keyframes. But I've heard a lot of grousing from other web folk who really ought to know better.

All of the grousing that iPhone doesn't support Flash, the iPad's mere existence on the face of the planet, Adobe's premature development of a Flash to iPhone conversion ...

... it all sounds like sour grapes from people who couldn't tell the difference between a shriveled, sour grape and a plump, sweet grape if the good grape ran off the vine, onto the table and did a dance routine right in front of them.

Instead, they'd complain that now even grapes want their fifteen minutes on So You Think You Can Dance and begin naming all the reasons why the grape should be smashed and made to feel inferior instead of marveling at the fact that the grape is freaking dancing in front of them.

Thoughtful criticism is an important part of life.

Constant complaining because every little thing doesn't suit your every little need shouldn't be a part of our lives at all.

Criticizing the iPad for not being "as good as a netbook" is lame. It's not a netbook. It's an iPad. It's not really an e-book reader; it's not really a computer or laptop or netbook; it's kind of but not really an overgrown iPod touch. It's a new thing. There's not exactly a comparison for it just yet. Relax. What does it matter to you if this product fails or becomes the new big thing? Why the hatred?

Why snap to instant judgments?

That said, I'm also sick of Adobe's attitude. (For the non-designers, Adobe makes the Flash program)

When Apple first launched OS X, they did it in a way that really impressed me because it offered both users and developers time to get used to the OS before requiring upgrades to all of your programs. There were three ways to develop a program - but at first, this didn't impact users at all. You could load a program in "Classic" mode and continue to use all of your old programs you'd already bought and paid for. Developers could use an intermediate way of producing code that would make a program work in OS X without relying on Classic. And finally, developers could write a program "native" to the new operating system. The best choice would be a native program because those would run the most smoothly. Classic programs would have to be "translated" to run and like a kid's game of "Telephone," that usually leads to odd snags. The same with the intermediate solution.

But Adobe waited forever before finally writing their software native to OS X.

The iPhone OS / Flash debacle is honestly more of the same. Adobe seems to believe that "translation" is a good and acceptable way to code rather than writing programs in native languages. Personally, I feel that's a flawed way to code.

Let's put it this way - all computers speak machine language, a series of 0s and 1s indicating "on" and "off." A particular type of computer uses a language optimized to the hardware to translate from human coding to machine language. So, we have human thought to programming language to machine language to action. Plenty of room for translation mistakes already. But if you choose to write your program in a format not native to that machine and its hardware, you're introducing yet another translation to the equation and increasing the likelihood of mistranslations and errors ... or just slow-downs as the machine tries to translate so many levels.

So Adobe thinking that a Flash to iPhone export option was a good idea was, in my opinion, a fundamentally flawed thinking process. At best, it would create a flood of mostly-functional apps for the iPhone (and iPod touch and iPad). More likely, it would flood the marketplace with bug-laden, slow apps which did not please the customer, partly due to the translation issues and partly due to the number of additional non-programmers who would have access to a fairly easy way to slap some pieces of programming together and calling it an app.

Is Apple's move about the bottom line? Yeah, it's about money. Is it about some long-standing dispute with Adobe? I don't think it is, at least not in the way that some think. It might be a reaction to Adobe's perceived programming philosophy, but I think that's rooted in bringing about Apple's tag line ... "it just works."

And you can't say, "it just works" if the software is terribly buggy and mistranslated ....

Posted by Red Monkey at 7:37 AM | Comments (0) | Design | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | StumbleUpon Toolbar Stumble

March 15, 2010

New Look Coming

About two years ago, I designed a totally different look for Red Monkey and have had too many other projects going to ever implement it. Yesterday I got a bee up my butt and coded most of it for the main page. I need to finish up the footer and then decide what I'm doing on the archive pages (I'm thinking of dumping the category pages as they're just too damn long and useless - unless someone knows a *good* MT plug-in for pagination?). I'm guessing I'll have it up by the end of the week.

If you want a sneak peek at the work in progress ... check it out here.

Posted by Red Monkey at 5:17 AM | Comments (1) | Blog | Design | StumbleUpon Toolbar Stumble

March 9, 2010

My First Munny

So, there are these things called Munnys which are just vinyl "shapes" that you can buy and decorate yourself. Or, if you're more into collecting than doing it yourself, you can collect various artists' renditions of Munnys. (Or Dunnys or any of the other critters they make.)

There's a huge Flickr group of customized Munnys if you want to click through. But here is a regular white Munny ready for customizing:

So I decided it was time to try my first foray into the fine art of Munny-making. My first one is quite simple, but something that was quite meaningful to me. I still have a larger white one to decorate as well as a large glow-in-the-dark one. I'll get more creative with those, I'm sure. I'd like to do some sculpting on one of them, at the very least.

This one is based on a Sunface Kachina doll. We lived in Albuquerque for all of three months when I was three years old, but I was fascinated by the culture then and remain so. The face is a typical Sunface - eagle feathers bordering and the red and yellow quarters. The face is sometimes white, sometimes turquoise. On this Munny, the eagle feathers are white leather. A leather loincloth and belt have also been glued on. I've contemplated doing a kind of "sandpainting" design on the back of the head ... that seems to be a Munny tradition of sorts to do an elaborate paint job on the head ... but in the end, I think I prefer the simplicity of this design as it is. Maybe I'll do another Pueblo/Hopi/Navajo-area-inspired design later on.

March 7, 2010

The Designer Man

The Designer Man
(sung of course, to the words of the immortal Billy Joel's Piano Man)

It's 7 o'clock on a Saturday
The regular crowd's still in bed
Photoshop's sitting next to me
Making love to the beachball of doom.

He says, "Son, how good is your memory
Are you really sure how this goes
Which filters you used on which layers to complete
This logo of a dog wearing clothes.

{Bridge}
La lala didi da
Lala didi da, da dum dum dum

{Refrain}
Make us an image, you're the designer man
Make us a website tonight
Well, we're all in the mood for drop shadows galore
And you've got Photoshop, right?

Now John at the bar was a friend of mine,
He got me my wifi for free.
And he's quick with a joke or Clients from Hell quote
But there's something he'd just rather see

He says, "Dude, I believe this whitespace must go"
And the smile ran away from my face
"Well I'm sure that you could fit more up in here
Like a picture of my bar out in space"

{Bridge}
La lala didi da
Lala didi da, da dum dum dum

Now Paula's a real estate agent
Who never has time for a brief
And she's talking brochures with Comic Sans headers
And printing it all on a leaf

And my kid sister is practicing Illustrator
As the businessmen slowly get stoned
Building contests and spec work for crappy designs.
WIthout Twitter I'd feel damn alone.

{Refrain}
Make us an image, you're the designer man
Make us a website tonight
Well, we're all in the mood for bevels and gloss
And you've got Photoshop, right?

It's a pretty good gig when clients behave
And the AD gives me that smile
'Cause he knows that it's me they're all coming to see
And I won't have weekends for a while

And their brief reads like a carnival ride
And the Art Director smells like a scotch
And clients smile their best, and refuse to write checks
And say "Dude, we should pay you HOW much?"

{Bridge}
La lala didi da
Lala didi da, da dum dum dum

{Refrain}
Make us an image, you're the designer man
Remove this skyline tonight
Well, we're all in the mood for rotating logos
And you've got Photoshop, right?

Posted by Red Monkey at 8:11 AM | Comments (0) | Design | StumbleUpon Toolbar Stumble

July 18, 2009

Amazon.com Critique

I have grown to have a love/hate relationship with Amazon.com over the years. I refused to use them at first, because, frankly, why pay to have a single book shipped when I could pick it up at Barnes & Noble? Seemed silly to pay for it being delivered and for having to wait for the book. I can remember a time when I liked the layout of their website - it was cutting edge. And it seems that the more Amazon.com has become a site for everything including the kitchen sink, the more I shop at Amazon.com and the less I like the website itself.

Their search feature is good. Their so-called AI which makes recommendations for you based on your purchases and browsing history is pretty good. (Hey, for all the complicated code that has to go into building that, I think it's a minor miracle, myself. Even when it suggests that I might want to buy an iPod after looking at cases for the iPod I just bought from them - it's still pretty damn impressive overall.) Their main homepage is nice. The nav is mostly decent.

But two things irritate me to no end about the Amazon site. One is their product pages SUCK. I cannot emphasize that enough. It's like every executive with their pet theories got together and laid out the page ... and then allowed the designers and UX folks make it look purty. My biggest gripe is the page is just too long. Yes, people have learned to scroll down a webpage to find further information (there is often a great fear at e-commerce companies that users do not scroll and thus anything important has to be "above the fold," or within roughly the top 600 pixels of the webpage), however, needed information should be close at hand.

In my opinion, for a site like Amazon, their first block below the persistent navigation bar is good - they have the product image, stock status, purchase options, price - and then a right hand block with Add to Cart, Add to Lists (wishlists), more purchasing choices, lists, share. To even out the left side block with the right side, Amazon has chosen to put "Frequently Bought Together." Now, this is a good feature and I like seeing it. It probably should be up near the top. But I really think given the range of products they have, that block should be further down and the paragraph product description should be there instead.

The problem for Amazon is one that plagues the web in general - it's more than information overload, it's like trying to cram all of Wikipedia into your head at once (with all the good and bad of Wikipedia). Tech details, mechanical details, What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?, short form product details & average customer review & Amazon sales rank, related products, Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought, you might be interested in these sponsored links, tags customers used, huge section for reviews, customer discussion and forums.

Wait, we're not done. I just thought we needed a paragraph break.

Then there's Amapedia Community, Listamania, So You'd Like to ..., Look for similar items by category, Advertisement, feedback, a section encompassing Where's My Stuff, Shipping & Returns, Need Help?, then Your Recent History and finally now ... the footer.

As I said, a big part of Amazon's product page issue is information overload on steroids. Their product descriptions come from the manufacturers or from the marketplace sellers which means some are two sentences ... and some are literally a full web page's worth of information in and of themselves. In my opinion, Amazon needs copy writers employed to specifically standardize a short-ish paragraph about the product and put it up at the top of the page next to the product image. If there's a plethora of additional information to be had, they need to have a "read more detail" link and put that information somewhere else - preferably not actually on this ridiculously long page.

Or, of course, they could use Ajax or any one of a number of javascript libraries to allow the information to be hidden until the users clicks something. Target does this with their little tabs. An example is when I used their top navigation menu and hovered over Electronics and then chose PS3. In order to maximize that space "above the fold" Target has given you three tabs. PS3 games, PS3 consoles, PS3 accessories. You can very quickly, at a glance, choose what you're looking for. Now if I click on the PS3 console link, I'm given a further choice - a Quick Info choice, or the standard click the title of the item to go to the main product page.

Quick Info pops up on the page immediately. No real load time to go to a whole new webpage. Now I get a larger image of the item, pricing, add to cart options along with add to wishlist options (and the option to find it at your local Target). You also get the stars rating for reviews and a tab of details, which scrolls down for everything you need. And, should this Quick Info not be quite enough - or just enough to wet your whistle, there's a link to View Full Details.

It's all quite sleek, it looks clean and easily understandable.

Amazon's on the other hand, drives me up the wall every time I'm looking for information on a product I want to purchase from them. First, I have to scroll down the left nav to find Electronics and then Video Games. That page leads me to a cacophony of stuff. The left nav again saves the day and I can click under Consoles to choose Playstation 3. But that landing page is primarily a cacophony of stuff for PS3 and not the game system itself. Instead, I have to use the left hand nav again, look under Hardware and click Consoles. Isn't that what I just did in the previous step? Apparently not quite. Now, I'm finally presented with the choices to buy a PS3. Lots of steps. And, then, of course, the product page is quite long as I've already mentioned.

A screenshot of an Amazon page reveals that it is a whopping 7,419 pixels in height. Most people are running a monitor with a screen resolution of about 1024x768 pixels, which tends to make the average browser's window perhaps about 650 pixels high. That comes out to about 11.5 "pages" of information to scroll down with Amazon.

Target's product page is perhaps half the length of Amazon's, with about 3578 pixels in height, which comes out to about 5.5 "pages" of information to scroll through.

Think about the old Sears catalog that we all loved to pour over as kids. Yes, we get more information now, that's true. But is it all really useful information? Just because we don't have a perceivable bottom-line price on publishing a web page versus publishing a catalog on paper and mailing the durn thing out doesn't mean there is no bottom-line price. I think there's a huge toll taken on people looking at those pages. When you want the information, you go looking for it and certainly want it at your fingertips. But I think Amazon's 11.5 pages of information is excessive and ridiculous. The page looks busy and overfull.

Target, while giving a lot of the same information, uses space more efficiently. The layout contains a lot of whitespace and feels less crowded.

Amazon, on the other hand, has a website that reflects a very messy way of thinking, which I think is reflected in the company itself. They've grown too big to know what they are any more and so they try to be everything to everyone. The end result is things like the Kindle suddenly yanking books that were paid for OFF of people's devices (and returning their money as well) in order to keep publishers happy, but not their customers. (In fact, look at the mindset of Target's "guests" vs. Amazon's "customers" - it seems to make a corporate difference in the thoughts behind the sites.) Amazon is simply juggling too many balls and trying to continually add in the balls from all the jugglers around them. And that kid down the street. And you, do you have some juggling knives, rings? Amazon would like to juggle those too. And bowling pins. And maybe even some chainsaws like the guys who are The Passing Zone.

And now, here's a breakdown of Amazon's product page. I have taken a screenshot of an actual product page and then covered the various blocks with a solid colour. I then reduced the width to 400 pixels so it would fit here, and that scaled the height. I did the same for a Target product page.

Amazon

Target

Posted by Red Monkey at 8:31 PM | Comments (0) | Design | StumbleUpon Toolbar Stumble

June 8, 2009

Live Long and Prosper

So, what have I been so busy with that I had to give short shrift to my Hugo Awards logo entry?

Well, back in January a dear relative of mine announced his wedding intentions and I instantly volunteered to do the invitations. Click the image to see the invitation itself: