Last week, Facebook launched a new app, Paper, that acts kind of like a Flipboard for your Facebook feed. It's a gorgeous app, but ran into some issues both in terms of trademark issues and usability problems. Still, I think it's a bold step forward, and—even though I'm not interested in using it in the short term—I think it offers a look ahead to where interaction design on iOS can and should go.
Not to bury the lede, but the other big news last week was that Microsoft announced that long-term company insider, Satya Nadella, was to become the CEO. I have mixed feelings about this, but I think that they could've done far, far worse. By all accounts, Nadella is a very smart, capable, and technical guy. Given Ballmer's lack of success (or capability) in technical direction for the company, I think this is a net positive for Microsoft. But, I don't see how this helps revive Microsoft's moribund market share in the mobile space (then again, could anything?), point Microsoft in a direction that will help it after the PC market really starts declining, or fix their mobile strategy. Still, Nadella comes from the enterprise space, where Microsoft is still doing incredibly well.
John Gruber published a thoughtful article last week giving his thoughts on the direction he thinks Microsoft should go. I'm mostly inclined to agree with him, although I don't see how Microsoft can maintain their historically fat margins by doubling down on Azure alone. Perhaps nothing will allow them to do that. Only time will tell.
Until next time,
Aaron
What We're Reading
- Tales From The Crash Mines: Issue #1
- "Satya Nadella needs to find Microsoft's new 'a computer on every desk and in every home running Microsoft software'. Here's my stab at it: Microsoft services, sending data to and from every networked device in the world. The next ubiquity isn't running on every device, it's talking to every device."
- Apology
- What was it like to help develop Paper?
- Facebook Develops A Photoshop For Interaction Design, And It's Free For Anyone To Use
- Repairing Our Broken Specs Repository
- The Real Story Behind Apple's 'Think Different' Campaign
Control of the Week
DoImagePickerController
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An image picker controller with single selection and multiple selection. Support to select lots photos with panning gesture. MIT licensed. |
Weekly Roundup
ABFillButton
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An UIButton subclass that allows you to represent a fill percentage stylishly. MIT licensed. |
ABFullScrollViewController
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Custom ViewController to hide the toolbar when user makes scroll. Like Facebook, Safari, Twitter... MIT licensed. |
Rotating 3D Views
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A single class (140 lines) that lets the user scroll through 4 views as shown as sides of a 3D box. If you know how to use container views, it's easy to add a nice "page" view controller but in 3D. License unspecified. |
MKUnits
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Provides units of measurement of physical quantities. MIT licensed. |
MRSwipeTableViewCell
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A UITableViewCell that allow swipe left to reveal a background view with parallax effect. MIT licensed. |
STPTransitions
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Unified, easy API for custom iOS view controller transitioning. MIT licensed. |
PDKTStickySectionHeadersCollectionViewLayout
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UICollectionView Layout that makes section headers stick to the top of the collection view, over its section cells. MIT licensed. |
AFWunderlist
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A Wunderlist API wrapper for Objective-C MIT licensed. |
SBInstagram
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Easy Objective-C framework to show an instagram feed on iOS MIT licensed. |
DropdownMenu
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DropdownMenu is a navigation controller for setting the view of a ContainerViewController using a dropdown menu. Dropdown menus are in many situations superior to the more commonly used slide menu, and can also be a good alternative to tabs when you want to reduce visual distractions yet make less often used functions easily discoverable. This implementation is inspired by the menus used in the iOS7 apps from DropBox and Vine. MIT licensed. |
SCWaveformView
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A blazing fast customizable waveform view. Extract the audio section of an asset (which can be both video or audio) and display a waveform. Compared to other libs that are found on the web, this one does not do much memory allocations. Only one pass is also done to create the waveform. Main features:
Apache 2.0 licensed. |
CRFAQTableViewController
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CRFAQTableViewController allows you to quickly and easily display a clickable interface to navigate question and answer style content. MIT licensed. |
XML-Reader
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XML Reader for OS X that allows you to preview a XML url as well as convert it to JSON format. MIT licensed. |
RMPickerViewController
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This is an iOS control for selecting something using UIPickerView in a UIActionSheet like fashion MIT licensed. |
ASCScreenBrightnessDetector
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ASCScreenBrightnessDetector lets you easily detect screen brightness changes and provides some useful delegate methods. MIT licensed. |