Product Management UX/UI & Interacion Blog — Frank derFrankie Neulichedl

Google Currents available outside of USA - finally

We all hoped that Currents is the Flipboard for Android, and it wasn't, but more importantly it wasn't available internationally and lacking content. Maybe with the increased user base it will get better, and if you are interested in reading what I share on Currents just follow this link:

https://www.google.com/producer/editions/CAow9MIp/frankie_surprise_yourself

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Google Currents goes international - Official Google Mobile Blog News, features and tips from the Google Mobile team

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Responsive Design breakpoint traps

Allessandro has made a good write up about responsive web design and analyzed some examples - the only problem I have is that he falls into the device/breakpoint trap as many do - me included. Most responsive website just look great at certain screen sizes - a normal Laptop Screen, the iPad, the iPhone ... everything in between looks often akward.

If the design has fixed widths then we generate white space (therefore the many minimal designs) or if we have fluid designs, we get strange overlays when sidebars don't move to the right place or we have too long text lines, that make the content unreadable.

And there will be more viewers with odd screen sizes than we have now in the future - so most of the responsive websites of today will be redone in a couple of years when they become unbearable.

Another downfall of responsive is that it's not so easy to optimize the user experience because you are bound to the same structure. If you have to load a new page on the desktop, you have to load it on the mobile view as well. I'm still on the boat of having separated mobile sites if you have major functionality changes ... if not than responsive is good enough. #responsive #design #webdesign

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Responsive Design: One Design for Each Job: Not Enough! For any web designer, thinking responsive means accepting a new challenge: to be creative not only to produce something that works well on desktop PCs, but also on tablets and smartphones; to create n...

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Preview 150,000 Fonts directly in Indesign

A new plugin from Fonts.com allows you to try out fonts directly in Indesign before buying them. This could be a great tool for all Designers who do Identities, as they might want to "feel" and "see" if a font suits the design and the client. My first question is if it allows to create PDFs or to print out Pages to present them to the client - if not they are missing an opportunity, but it is still a great tool and we might not need to use the online previews anymore.

#indesign #plugin #typography #fonts #preview

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FontGazer – Fonts.com Plug-in for Creative Suite Preview the entire Fonts.com inventory of over 150,000 fonts in your Adobe InDesign document with the free FontGazer plug-in.

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Buy your competitors and shut them down - old ways of doing business in the web ...

To all you who call the web a hotbed for innovation - the business practices are just the same as in the old school offline world. Facebook for example has become big enough to swallow all upcoming and already established competitors. After acquiring Friendfeed, now Instagram. Both tried to be more than just blogging / photo sharing services - they are social networks. So what's next - Path? Reddit? Who cares.

The important thing is that we are in full transition from the early days of social networks to a mature market. Services will be launched just to be appealing to the big 3 (Facebook, Twitter, Google) and this strategy will fail, making the big 3 just bigger.

#facebook #instagram #socialmedia #business

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Breaking: Facebook's Buying Instagram for a Billion Dollars Mark Zuckerburg just announced that Facebook has agreed to buy mega-popular photo sharing service Instagram for $1 billion. Facebook's been on a buying spree of late, and has been beefing up its own a...

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Designers think and design for the future, and learn from the past

Seth Godin has written a long and thoughtful peace about the current and future evolution of the internet, mobile computing and the internet of things. It's an important read also for designers, who see their challenges in the problem they are solving right now, or the client they are working for (at least it looks like it). I think it's important because designers in their core have always worked with "data" and brought this data into a meaningful form. Data is according to Seth the key of a future proof and sustainable technological future and we as designers are the ones that can help make sense out of this data.

http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2012/04/06/apple-cloud/?single_page=true

#internetofthings #data #inspiration

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Apple and the Cloud: A Cautionary Tale | Xconomy The consumer's electronic world as we know it today is shared between Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and a handful of other popular brands. Most offerings

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Content aware photo retouching on your Android device

Are you already caught in the Instagram craze? Do you want to edit your photos before enhancing them with Instagram? Why not use one of the proposed Apps by Instagram themselves. The most interesting one is the content aware retouching App called TouchRetouch. Give it a try.

#instagram #android #photography #retouching #app

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Photo Tips: Android Photography Applications We’ve researched applications available for Android that can help you enhance and improve your photographs. Here are a few apps for simple and quick image editing to get you started! Photo Editing For...

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Free Open Source Crowdsourced translation service

I talked about crowdsourcing translations already a couple of times. Along with the Google Tool, and Getlocalized I found this service which is free for open source projects. Since I open source my projects I will definitely try this service out, as it looks quite established.

#trasnlation #localization #opensource #free

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Crowdin.net - Collaborative translation tool Crowdin.net is the on-demand software localization tool that makes translators collaboration efficient and smooth. Our online collaborative tool supports localization of web applications with absolute...

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Animated Fonts, the next frontier

Typography is a beast - everyone uses fonts, they are integral part of every operating system and application, and still in 2012 the art of making type look good is in the hand of the creator. And here are now animated fonts to make it even harder beyond the new challenges that web fonts bring. Animated fonts make fonts even stronger in character and make them express a style and a story.

This will make it difficult to use these fonts beyond the classic script fonts or as a demo. One of these demos is Typogami. I think zou can just use it for a documentary about origami - at least in the animated form, but still - great idea and execution.

Download it for free on their Facebook page and read more about the font following the link.

#typography #animation #font #free #origami

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Typogami: A Free Animated Typeface Inspired By Origami If you like typography and origami, this should set your heart ablaze: Typogami has letters that look like they’re made from folded paper. Still not smitten? It’s customizable and animated. Designed b...

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Project Google Glass - everybody mocks it, so it will happen

The augmented reality glasses from Google have made waves in  a sense that everyone is mocking them - which means that they are on the right path. Just think about all the bluetooth guys talking to the air or everybody with  headphones on - they are normal today but have been mocked before. Reshared post from +Project Glass

We think technology should work for you—to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don’t.

A group of us from Google[x] started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment. We’re sharing this information now because we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input. So we took a few design photos to show what this technology could look like and created a video to demonstrate what it might enable you to do.

Please follow along as we share some of our ideas and stories. We’d love to hear yours, too. What would you like to see from Project Glass?

+Babak Parviz +Steve Lee +Sebastian Thrun

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European Mobile Apps Contest - aka Hackaton

Luxembourg has launched some campaigns to gather geeks and talent into the small state. They want to become the Silicon Valley of Europe, next to London and Berlin. This App Contest is part of these campaign. It's a 36 hours coding and design challenge attached to a conference. The program looks promising and I will follow up with more news from good old Europe.

#challenge #app #mobile #europe #luxembourg

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Apps Foundry Contest CODE, GRAPHIC AND UX DESIGN

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6500 Plus Ones in a couple of hours - welcome Instagram for Android

The Gorilla has landed and all social media outlets will be dominated by Instagram for the next few hours, days, weeks. Instagram shows that you can have instant success in Google Play if you have already a brand, and even if there are enough similar apps.

It also shows that you can get thousands of prositive reviews even if you don't optimize the experience for Android - or do we see some market manipulation here?

What i need now is a way to filter my Google+, Twitter and RSS feed to avoid to see hundreds of the same posts. Any suggestions?

#android #instagram #photography #branding

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Instagram Instagram – A beautiful way to share your world. It's fast, free and fun! 

 Instagram – A beautiful way to share your world. It's fast, free and fun!

Pick from ...

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E-Book on Wordpress Multi Site Installation

I would have loved to have this guide when I started moving all the sites I own to one single installation. Not just download, but donate a small amount ) "Setting up Multisite requires just a little more savvy, and the information is all over the place. This ebook strives to pull it all together, explain you what skills you need to get started, and move you to the next step: running your own Network."

#wordpress #multisite #ebooks

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WordPress Multisite 101 - Ipstenu on Tech If you only knew how many times Andrea and I sat and complained “There should be an (updated) ebook!” you'd wonder why it took us so long. Setting up a new WordPress install is pretty easy. Settin...

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Do we need human readable HTML and CSS?

The lack of visual design tools for web designer brings some strange side effects - like morecss.org "MORE simplifies CSS to make it more intuitive, allowing you to write human readable code that fits with the way you think. MORE runs on both the client-side and server-side (Node.js)"

I'm not a friend of adding functionality to the markup through an additional library. Why? Because it renders the code completely reliant on the library and it breaks if the library is not present. If I need to move the site to a new CMS or want to reuse some of the code, I need to make sure that the library works. I would prefer that it would compile to standard CSS, much like other approaches do.

The advantage of human readable CSS on the other hand is not really an advantage. You have to know CSS anyway, so reading CSS is not solved by this solution. Writing "more" CSS is in this case not an advantage, let's write LESS instead.

As for human readable HTML - or Marksdown as it is called. I like the idea but still find it not really user friendly to write - no really, I know HTML and Markdown seams forced.

What I do like about Markdown is, other than morecss, is that it should remain readable many years from now. Text files are the most stable file format and marking up text as little as possible is a good idea. HTML will be readable as well, so I there is no real need to use Markdown, but if you life in the text editor, it might be an option for you.

#markdown #css #morecss #workflow #compatibility #coding

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More CSS #header colour: cmyk(one-hundred-and-eight, eighteen, zero, forty-five) !unimportant; #header width: twenty-five-and-three-quarters percent !unimportant; #about h2 span background-attachment: scroll !...

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Edding850 by Büro Destruct - Interesting font and interesting way to get it

Edding850 by Büro Destruct - Interesting font and interesting way to get itTo get this bold display font you need to write something on a virtual wall - and just like the real Edding (or sharpy as you might call it in north america) it cannot be deleted.

More Information on the project here: http://www.creativeapplications.net/webapp/edding-850-font-by-buro-destruct-collaborative-realtime-text-editor/

#font #creative #free #download #idea

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An edding can write anywhere I just wrote this on type-fortype.com. For every post on the collaborative text document, you’ll get something in return: the edding850 typeface.

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Gmail Tap, or how even old technology can look like a innovation

I like Google's April Fools Day jokes. There are many and they are often not so easy too spot. I like this one especially because it pranks Apple's presentation videos and how Apple tries to upsell small innovations with limited features as the holy grail of simplicity.

"A dash and a dot, to communicate with the world, what could be easier"

Right, so have a good one and start improving your morse skills right now.

PS: It's not a complete aprilfools - you can download the Keyboard for your Android here http://goo.gl/IZN16

#satire #aprilfools #google #gmail #android

Reshared post from +Gmail

Tap into the future of productivity with Gmail Tap for Android and iOS. Double your typing speed with this revolutionary new keyboard. #gmailtap

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2012/03/introducing-gmail-tap.html

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