Engineers vs. Designers

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Scrivs, on engineers and the importance of design.

Since its beginning, Google has been very engineer-driven and it showed in most of their products. They weren’t aesthetically pleasing by nature, but they got the job done. […]

Apple, Facebook and Twitter on the other hand are very designer-driven. […] The difference between these three companies and Google though is that the designers and engineers seem to work in harmony. They understand the importance of the other and great products are produced as a result.

 

the iPad does more than a desktop browser.

There’s this complaint that I keep hearing over and over: they say that because iPads are capable enough of browsing the web just as a desktop browser does, touch layers like Onswipe and similar solutions are unnecessary.

I think they are completely missing the point.

It’s like saying to Netscape back in the nineties. Why are you guys doing a browser? The modern PC has a command line that is more than capable to render telnet text messages.

The iPad presents a new paradigm. It’s about touching, pinching and swiping. The web today as it is, does not offer an optimal experience for touch browsing. Native apps are setting the bar very high, while the web is still this set of clunky blocks of text built for a mouse and keyboard era. You know why? Because it’s hard stuff.

That’s why we do what we are doing. Not dumbing down the web for a less capable device. We are going to level up the web for the next generation of devices.

It’s hard stuff, but someone has to do it.

Post by Andy Hertzfeld

Aside

Andy Hertzfeld clarifies his role at Google+

A few people always get too much credit, while most people get too little, that’s just the way it has always worked.

It’s expected that superstars and CEOs will always get all the credit so it’s interesting that a legend like Andy is taking the time to give due credit to the team. A good lesson to learn on my way to stardom.

Designing GitHub for Mac — Warpspire

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Kyle Neath has a great writing about the process of designing GitHub for Mac

For a long time I assumed OS X developers would see the immense market for an awesome Git application. Unfortunately for everyone involved, every OS X application that’s showed up over the years gave up and tried to turn CLI commands into buttons.

This is going to be a text book example of how a great UX hides complexity.