Some of my favorite little features:
Customizable Control Center
Offload Unused Apps
Drag & Drop
QR Code scanner built-in to the camera
Take a look at these iOS 11 Tidbits.
Category: Links
Website header design best practices
The more objects attract user’s attention, the harder it is to concentrate on the vital ones.
That quote pretty much sums-up design principles in general, doesn’t it?
UX Planet has some great advice about website header design, which by the way can also apply to email headers as well.
How to create engaging images for social media
David Ogilvy, the father of advertising, was famous for spending an inordinate amount of time on headlines.
Back then, social media didn’t exist. If it did, Ogilvy would probably give equal time to creating the perfect complementary image.
The Buffer.com blog has some great tips for creating social media graphics. The article is meant for non-designers, but if you’re new to social media marketing, it’s worth the read.
The Disappearing Computer: Past, present & future
Original uploader was Joi at English Wikipedia – Transferred to Commons., CC BY 2.0, Link
Tech was once always in your way. Soon, it will be almost invisible.
Walt Mossberg’s final article. It’s the end of an era, for sure. While many of his articles were a bit “beneath” my technical knowledge, I always loved reading his reviews of tech products from the perspective of the typical user. There’s a lot of tech in my life that I don’t know a lot about, and don’t care to know. I just want to know the quick & easy explanation of it to decide if it’s worth more research or use. Walt always made it easy—and that’s the highest compliment I can pay him.
In his last article, Walt takes a look at the past, present and future of tech. It’s a great read.
Bad design habits to drop
There are always exceptions to every rule, but there are very few exceptions to THESE rules. Great article by Ben Brychta over at Inkbot Design.
Amazon Prime coming to Apple TV this fall. Maybe.
The tech giants, who are increasingly competing for customers’ time, eyeballs and money, are close to an agreement to bring an Amazon video app to Apple’s Apple TV set-top box, according to people familiar with the two companies.
Ahhhh the famous “people familiar with” source. Those people seem to know everything. Accurate or not, this would be a huge win for Apple. HUGE. Perhaps even enough to move the Apple TV out of the “hobby” category.
Here’s hoping.
Apple’s AirPods: 98% Customer Satisfaction
Apple’s AirPods are an inarguable smash hit. I’ve not heard of a single person who owns a pair that says they don’t like them for any reason. In fact, they all rave about them.
If only you could by a pair.
Logo case study: the meatball vs. the worm
While the meatball is nostalgic, I’m partial to the worm. Although I suppose that if you cleaned up the meatball, it could be really striking. I guess that’s why both versions have a large fan base.
Google JPG is 35% smaller/higher-quality – but you’ll never use it
Google has come up with an algorithm that reduces JPGs by 35%, or maintains existing file sizes but dramatically improves quality. The new JPG is 100% compatible with existing programs and web browsers on all platforms. It’s 100% open-source and compatible with the current JPG standard.
And not a single person will ever use it.
Ok, maybe that’s a bit of a stretch. I’m sure some people at Google will use it. And probably a few geeks who like to tinker, but don’t rely on producing visual graphics for income.
Just because it’s free, or offers the end-user a better user experience, doesn’t mean it’ll actually be popular. Unless Google can convince EVERY LAST IMAGE EDITOR ON THE PLANET to use it by DEFAULT, it’s not going to matter. Google Maps is better than Apple’s iOS Maps. Wanna guess which map app is more popular on the iPhone despite that? Convenience trumps everything.
One has to wonder what the point is. Coming from Google, the angle they take is faster website loading.
I’m sorry, but having a 100kb JPG be reduced by 35% means absolutely nothing. The site is not going to load faster, because a 100kb JPG loads instantly to begin with. Ridding a site of Javascript for tracking and ad-serving is the only thing that’s going to speed up a website (something we know Google is never going to do). Heck, I get emails with 1MB animated GIF images in them that load virtually instantly.
But if Google can convince Adobe to use the algorithm as the default in Photoshop when saving JPGs, I’ll be happy to re-save a ton of old JPGs that are still 30MB in size due to their massive size and PPI settings.
What’s Apple’s next chapter in podcasting?
If I had to place a bet on a major change in Apple’s approach to podcasting, I’d place it on adding money to the equation.
Jason Snell over at SixColors covers a lot of Podcasting history in this article, and I think it’s all pretty much spot-on.
Apple has a virtual monopoly when it comes to Podcasting—pretty much owning the distribution of them with iTunes, and with a huge portion of the overall audience using an iPhone and Podcast app to listen to them. The only thing left for Apple to do in this arena is figure out a way to make more money.