Category: Design

iLounge Editor-in-Chief, Jeremy Horwitz:

In any case, the white iPhone 4 is as safe of a purchase today as the black version is—if you’re still considering the purchase of an iPhone 4, there’s no strong reason other than aesthetic taste to choose one color over the other. Late though it was, Apple appears to have fixed or significantly mitigated the engineering issues that plagued the white iPhone 4, leaving only the black pill-shaped proximity sensor as an awkward little scar on an otherwise beautiful design. That little cosmetic blemish aside, this model is as good of a pick as its black predecessor, and worthy of the same ratings and recommendation.

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Chairmen Gruber, in a conversation on Tweetbot:

In a sense, then, perhaps there is something droid-like about the Android user experience. Not in the artistic, warm, humanist way that the Tapbots aesthetic is bot-like, but in the cool, rational, science-not-art, thinking-as-opposed-to-feeling sense of artificial intelligence. The difference between iOS and Android, design-wise, can be summed in a single word: magic. iOS aims for it. Android doesn’t want it.

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Joshua Topolsky:

In a sketch supplied to us by a source, the home button is doing double duty as a gesture area; this falls in line with testing we’ve seen for gestures on the iPad, and our sources say that gestures are definitely coming in a future version of iOS. The home button will likely be enlarged, but not scrapped altogether. Furthermore, we’re hearing that the screen on the device will occupy the entire (or near to it) front of the phone, meaning almost no bezel. Our source says the company is doing very “interesting things” with bonded glass technology, and has been exploring designs where the earpiece and sensors are somehow behind the screen itself, making for a device where the display is actually edge-to-edge. Regardless, the sketch we’ve seen suggests the screen will go up to 3.7-inches while keeping the current resolution, and at that size, pixel density goes from 326 to 312 (a drop of 13ppi). That means that Apple can still tout Retina Display technology (the claim is that anything above 300ppi means the pixels aren’t distinguishable at 12 inches). Rumors have been suggesting that the size would bump up to 4 inches, but at that size with the current resolution, pixel density drops to 288, making it harder for Apple to use the RD branding.

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Amen, Ben. Amen.

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Crazy times.

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David Ferguson:

I sat down one day with one thing on my mind. I was going to find a way to easily put weather on my desktop using GeekTool. I had seen others in the past that had gotten weather data on their desktop. When I began looking around for it though, I found that some of them required a degree in command line kung-fu to get it to work. I didn’t want to jump through all of those hoops, just for the weather. I knew that there had to be an easier way. GtWthr is what I came up with.

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Ben Brooks linked to this awesome collection of screen captures of made-for-movies computer UIs. Most of them are fantastic — and terrible — all at once.

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My friend PJ McCormick, on the designer-client relationship:

Don’t fool yourself into thinking that pricing your work so low is a personal decision that only has an impact on your firm. Because it doesn’t.

Every time you hawk a logo for a couple hundred bucks or throw in a web site for free to get a promised bigger project from a client, you’re making a decision that effects all of us.

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Rob Waugh at Mail Online on Apple’s Jonathan Ive:

Ive is renowned for having an ‘alchemical’ sense for engineering, and the limits of what one can do with metal. As design expert Stephen Bayley puts it: ‘He thinks and thinks about what a product should be and then worries it into existence.’

Ive’s lab is Apple’s inner sanctum. Here, touch screens control the glass-sided machines in which new products take form. Desks are bare bar the aluminum sheets that slot together to form the familiar lines of iconic products such as the MacBook Air.

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Joshua Schnell:

Stephen and I have been going back and forth about the next iPhone for a couple of weeks now. I tried to convince him to hold off on the Verizon iPhone 4 until Apple announced the new iPhone, and he argued that the iPhone 5 would be similar to the iPhone 3G to iPhone 3GS update. Neither of us have any inside information on what to expect, but he may have just scored the first point in our ongoing battle.

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Here’s their in-progress teardown.

Check out that battery.

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