Tyson Rosage on the new MySpace:

My biggest skepticism rests in their ability to main and iterate on a design that was not done in-house (it was done by josephmark.com.au). After all, Myspace has always been an entertainment company, not a technology company. The entertainment industry has always been known for thinking that they can just throw money at a problem and things will just work out.

I had a similar feeling when I saw the promotional video revealing the new design of MySpace.com earlier this week.

With this new approach MySpace's goal appears to be a platform that puts the sole focus on musicians and artists (something in line with their original mission statement I guess). Almost to the point where a regular user feels second-class.

Aesthetically it looks good. It would have been surprising if they had gone through all that effort to redesign the platform to have it come out looking bad. However tacking on Twitter and Facebook connect that lead to the promise of a personal profile doesn't hold much weight for me in terms of being a social network. Sure the aggregate aspects of artist/song listening statistics could be potentially interesting, but none of these things really guarantee an engaging experience with friends.

Ended up at Fort Funston this past Saturday after my housemates suggested we take a quick detour past the beach. The breath-taking views, peppered with arcane World War I bunkers made it quite an interesting visit.

Galen Wolfe-Pauly, on products and their users:

Objects tell people what to do with them through their design. When something fits nicely in to your hand it's telling you to hold it. When something is expensive it's telling you to be careful with it. Software doesn't appeal to our intuition the way physical objects do. Software as a service has the potential to change continuously, in many cases taking the things you made with it along for the ride. At its best software gives us new ways of organizing our thinking, and it's exciting to try out new services for this reason. Part of what a good service should offer is a sense of how it will evolve either alongside your data or as a steward of it. Whether you're a free user or a paying user is only part of the picture: what matters is being able to have a clear sense of the institution you're participating in.

Galen Wolfe-Pauly is one half of Sharing State, a small content-aggregation service that I received access to last week (thanks again for the invite Joshua). I really appreciate the approach that the team has taken in presenting themselves. Not only is their product taking a very utilitarian, but nonetheless engaging, approach to interaction design, I found their journal entries just as interesting as their product development.

I appreciate their philosophy regarding the importance of the user. That while building a product or service takes a lot of time and effort, the ability to analyze, consider and iterate on the larger aspects of how you connect with each user is just as, if not even more, important.

My first cousin Brian, who I hadn't seen in over 15 years, flew across to spend some time with me during my first weekend in San Francisco.

On the Saturday we went hunting for the Golden Gate bridge. Renting some bikes at Golden Gate park we traveled for a solid 2.5 hours enjoying the beautiful views and forrest-encompassing roads to be met at the end by the monstrous fog-laden structure.

So I arrived in the United States. After quite the uneventful 12 hour flight. Regardless, it's good to be back.

Things feel quite different compared to 10 years ago and since I have never visited the West Coast before it's a whole new experience. People still can't seem to understand the New Zealand accent very well though.

Haven't had much opportunity to see any sights just yet, but hopefully in the coming weeks.

Messed about with this icon for the past week too. Illustrator's workflow feels more logical at times, using objects and groups more predominantly than many, many, layers.

Even though I haven't invested much time into icon design or vector illustration, I quite enjoyed it. I may add in some more detail soon.

The Betaworks-acquired Digg.com unveiled v1 of it's re-imagined design and layout this week to some rather mixed opinions. While most seemed concerned about the future compatibility of the old data I noticed a few interesting thoughts concerning the company's new approach.

loceng:

It's almost like they don't care about all factors that matter when doing a major relaunch of a site; It reminds me of the lack of care that came to be with the big initial design revamp that caused the exodus of Digg users, including myself. A UI that looks good doesn't mean it functions well.

While crafting a well-appreciated experience takes a decent amount of time, the Betaworks team seemed to have the exact opposite. While the platform is not yet grounded in a particular vision or focus I applaud their efforts so far in the time they've had and welcome the redesign.

ColinWright:

I hate these huge, slabby, infinitely scrolling displays of photos/images with precious few items on the screen. It's a lot of work to try to find any sensible number of items of interest.

debacle:

It's great for pictures. In fact, it's better than great for pictures - you can digest thumbnails dozens at a time, and decide what you really want to look at.

While the old style layout had it's usefulness this may just be a case of legacy users versus new adopters. The current layout is definitely geared more towards the later, since many aggregation sites these days are purely visual.

I wouldn't be surprised though if the option of a list-view crops up on the site, or once the third-party API rolls out.

AlexanderZ:

I have to agree, I like it. While they certainly have their work cut out for them on re-building the community and on the technical front, this redesign shows a willingness to be different from the other news aggregators.

This is the part I am most excited about. While the site currently represents lean scaffolding in appearance (I was quick to criticise the lack of the classic Digg colors, but have since gotten used to it), if the current team can quickly iterate on how the information flows, with the knowledge from the user-base's reaction, the potential for this rebirth could be quite exciting.

Mark Wilson on Google Handwrite:

Handwriting recognition is the flying car of the user interface. It’s a liberating idea, but it is and will always be logistically unwieldy in the face of faster, safer alternatives. It’s time to end our romanticism with handwriting and just call typing the standard.

If I am wanting to perform a query to get a piece of information I'm not out to have a nostalgic or whimsical time. More often than not I will be in a rush or out and about, where typing and walking with a virtual keyboard is hard enough at the best of times.

I can never really grasp why Google approach product development in the ways which they do. A good product or service is built around observing interactions and society at large. By picking apart aspects so they can be improved, added to or stripped down. Not by throwing something at a wall to see what sticks (when it's obvious in this case that it won't).

Google do probably have some reasoning behind such a product that makes perfect sense. One may also argue that their intentions are to learn towards the deeper aspects of research. Either way, at this point in time it seems Google are simply inventing services because they can, not because there is the necessity to solve a problem.

Chris Morgan:

CSS's "transparent" may not be transparent, especially on diagonal borders. You might not realise it, but transparent is defined as rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)—transparent black. In WebKit browsers with no anti-aliasing (I believe they're finally in the process of rectifying this omission), this doesn't matter. However, in browsers with anti-aliasing of diagonal borders (IE9+ and Firefox), this can have serious implications.

The problem that Chris talks about is that Firefox detects two overlapping borders and interpolates between them. This results in producing an anti-aliased 1px diagonal line.

As it stands, many, many things use transparent black when they shouldn't. And very few people understand why.

This is the part that interests me the most. For I have paused many times before, thinking along similar lines, after writing background-color: in a stylesheet.

Why is it that transparent is exercised by browsers as an adequate parameter for a background's color? Similar to what Chris seems to be implying, it feels rather ambiguous and unnecessary. I personally try to avoid using it myself wherever possible, sticking with none or by specifying a certain alpha level with the rgb() syntax.

Earlier this week The Verge posted an interview with Oliver Reichenstein who expressed some interesting opinions concerning the use of interaction design metaphors.

Metaphors are good if they simplify things. Metaphors that draw attention to themselves are detrimental, and double metaphors in a user interface are suicide bombs.

After reading this it got me thinking about how the desktop environment as a concept and metaphor is beginning to feel quite redundant in light of recent design changes to modern operating systems.

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An article that I read today on Mac World paints a very clear picture of the tech industry's current situation.

Nobody wants to live in a world where a company (no matter how big or small) can spend years developing a product only to have it cloned by a rival and not reap the rewards of its work. Likewise nobody wants to live in a world where every new product developer thinks they must reinvent the wheel from scratch or be litigated out of existence.

Makes you wonder what the future will bring right?