Developing Perspective

00:00:00 ◼   ► Hello and welcome to Developing Perspective.

00:00:01 ◼   ► This is the third in the series of interviews

00:00:03 ◼   ► I'm doing with designers, developers, people

00:00:05 ◼   ► who make applications, where we can hopefully

00:00:08 ◼   ► expand beyond just my experience and learn

00:00:10 ◼   ► from other people's mistakes, other people's successes,

00:00:13 ◼   ► but just really hopefully round out some of the content

00:00:17 ◼   ► I talk about here in Developing Perspective.

00:00:19 ◼   ► Today I'm delighted to have Rob Ryan of MartianCraft with me.

00:00:23 ◼   ► We're going to talk a lot about tools

00:00:25 ◼   ► that he uses for design, for his design process,

00:00:28 ◼   ► and a lot of just sort of how design interacts

00:00:31 ◼   ► with development.

00:00:33 ◼   ► And a lot of people who listen to Developing Perspective

00:00:36 ◼   ► tend to be more on the developer side of the spectrum.

00:00:39 ◼   ► But this is kind of a good discussion

00:00:41 ◼   ► of kind of what it is like to bridge that gap

00:00:43 ◼   ► and to work between the two.

00:00:45 ◼   ► And let's get to it.

00:00:46 ◼   ► Like I've said before, these interviews series

00:00:49 ◼   ► aren't 15 minutes.

00:00:50 ◼   ► So they break from the typical mold.

00:00:52 ◼   ► They're about an hour long, just to let you know.

00:00:54 ◼   ► Enjoy.

00:00:55 ◼   ► All right, I'm here with Rob Rhine.

00:00:57 ◼   ► Rob, why don't you introduce yourself?

00:00:59 ◼   ► Hi, I'm Rob.

00:01:00 ◼   ► Alright, Rob, and thanks for taking the time for being with us. I was wondering if you could tell us,

00:01:04 ◼   ► start off by telling us a little bit about

00:01:06 ◼   ► your background, sort of how you got to where you are today.

00:01:09 ◼   ► Well, I'm a, uh...

00:01:11 ◼   ► I guess I'm a designer and developer. I think my Twitter

00:01:15 ◼   ► bio that I use for everything now is kind of designer, developer, writer, so

00:01:21 ◼   ► I went to school for computer science, so I guess my

00:01:24 ◼   ► background where i go home as a developer but i've been a

00:01:27 ◼   ► designer for about

00:01:28 ◼   ► ten years as a professional and uh...

00:01:31 ◼   ► you know most of the writing and you just you know typical writing you know

00:01:34 ◼   ► emails proposals

00:01:35 ◼   ► stuff like that but i have

00:01:37 ◼   ► fantasize about writing other things are at least i write other things maybe one

00:01:41 ◼   ► day i fantasize about sharing those things with people

00:01:44 ◼   ► one day but uh... mostly uh... designer developer

00:01:47 ◼   ► i'd like to do both

00:01:48 ◼   ► it's been going right now you

00:01:50 ◼   ► your staffs were where you are right now

00:01:53 ◼   ► So you're the CEO of Martiancraft?

00:01:56 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, I'm in charge of,

00:01:58 ◼   ► I run Martiancraft right now.

00:02:00 ◼   ► All those three things I mentioned,

00:02:03 ◼   ► it kinda taxes both of those.

00:02:06 ◼   ► I do a fair amount of writing proposals,

00:02:08 ◼   ► client interactions, interacting with our guys,

00:02:11 ◼   ► doing things, setting direction.

00:02:13 ◼   ► But I actually get to do a fair amount

00:02:15 ◼   ► of design and development.

00:02:17 ◼   ► I don't do as much development day-to-day

00:02:21 ◼   ► on projects now as I used to.

00:02:23 ◼   ► Obviously when we started the company,

00:02:24 ◼   ► I was one half of the development team.

00:02:28 ◼   ► Now we're much bigger.

00:02:30 ◼   ► But I do get to do a fair amount of design.

00:02:33 ◼   ► And not just the in Photoshop, flipping bits,

00:02:37 ◼   ► although I did a fair amount of that even this morning.

00:02:40 ◼   ► Opening up, but most of just direction,

00:02:44 ◼   ► gearing people towards things.

00:02:46 ◼   ► I'm this close to telling people

00:02:49 ◼   ► when they ask me what I do now

00:02:51 ◼   ► that I just I built it for a living.

00:02:52 ◼   ► Are we allowed to curse on this?

00:02:55 ◼   ► You bleep that out.

00:02:56 ◼   ► - I mean, bleep that out.

00:02:57 ◼   ► - All right, I'll try and avoid saying

00:02:58 ◼   ► too many potty words then.

00:02:59 ◼   ► I build stuff.

00:03:02 ◼   ► And it just is a simple way to just say

00:03:05 ◼   ► I like building things and I like all aspects

00:03:08 ◼   ► of building things.

00:03:09 ◼   ► And so as an owner of a company that kind of

00:03:14 ◼   ► allows me to control much more of that process

00:03:16 ◼   ► than I was if I was just a developer or just a designer

00:03:20 ◼   ► are just uh... you know copywriters something like that

00:03:24 ◼   ► so uh... yeah i'm uh... the c_e_o_ of

00:03:26 ◼   ► martian craft i guess the way to put it which makes apps for

00:03:31 ◼   ► uh... almost any primarily consulting company we do uh...

00:03:35 ◼   ► apps for the discerning client i think is what we say uh... we do a lot of

00:03:39 ◼   ► apps for uh... fortune five hundred companies uh...

00:03:42 ◼   ► bunch of companies who don't like us to talk about

00:03:46 ◼   ► us writing apps for them in public so

00:03:48 ◼   ► I can't talk too much about our clients, but needless to say,

00:03:52 ◼   ► we do everything from your mom and pop, someone's got an idea,

00:03:57 ◼   ► they want to see it pushed through,

00:03:59 ◼   ► to much bigger corporations that are

00:04:02 ◼   ► looking for their mobile presence in the store.

00:04:05 ◼   ► We'll do design and development work for them.

00:04:09 ◼   ► That's cool.

00:04:10 ◼   ► So when you sit down and do your job,

00:04:12 ◼   ► when you're wanting to be productive

00:04:13 ◼   ► and really want to get into the zone and do work,

00:04:17 ◼   ► Can you tell us a little bit about the environment that you go into to do that,

00:04:20 ◼   ► both sort of physically, the tools and software that you use?

00:04:23 ◼   ► I know you're sort of blessed to have a wife who's an architect who designed an

00:04:27 ◼   ► office for you.

00:04:28 ◼   ► And so you have a pretty tailored environment for doing your work.

00:04:31 ◼   ► Yeah, I've got a pretty sweet pad to do work.

00:04:35 ◼   ► Most guys talk about, you know, their cave or doing it. And I was fortunate enough.

00:04:40 ◼   ► My wife is an architect. Her father owns a construction company,

00:04:46 ◼   ► So they just, you know, I just kind of offhand one day said, boy, it'd really be nice to have a desk like this or do this.

00:04:52 ◼   ► And, you know, they were just like, well, that's great.

00:04:54 ◼   ► Let's do that.

00:04:54 ◼   ► And so, uh, when I started working from home, when I quit my, uh, my full-time employment and, uh, started doing this full time, my wife thought it was important that I have a wife, uh, an office with a door.

00:05:07 ◼   ► And so we, uh, carved out part of a unfinished part of our basement and she kind of finished it out and built the suite office.

00:05:14 ◼   ► But really, actually it's funny, sitting here in your office, it's something that I actually

00:05:21 ◼   ► come here and work here, I try and work here twice a week.

00:05:23 ◼   ► So really getting in the zone is not so much the space or the equipment, it's just, it's

00:05:29 ◼   ► a mindset.

00:05:30 ◼   ► And like, I'm a big headphones person.

00:05:33 ◼   ► I mean, there's a lot of people in our field, they have headphones.

00:05:36 ◼   ► And music is really what helps me get into the zone.

00:05:39 ◼   ► Some people can listen to podcasts or they can, you know, we have a guy that works for

00:05:43 ◼   ► for us to watch movies while he's coding.

00:05:45 ◼   ► I don't understand how they do that.

00:05:47 ◼   ► For me, it's music that kind of gets me into that mood.

00:05:53 ◼   ► And particular genres or types of music that you lean towards?

00:05:57 ◼   ► I'm pretty eclectic.

00:05:58 ◼   ► I like all kinds of music.

00:06:00 ◼   ► But when I'm trying to work, it's usually soundtracks.

00:06:04 ◼   ► In fact, movie soundtracks-- and when I say soundtracks,

00:06:08 ◼   ► not a compilation of a lot of pop artists

00:06:11 ◼   ► put a bunch of songs that don't appear in the movie. I'm talking about the actual score that

00:06:14 ◼   ► you hear behind it. So to clarify for some people when I say soundtrack, so the canonical example,

00:06:20 ◼   ► you know, Star Wars, you know, you listen to the opening Star Wars, you know, the opening crawl

00:06:24 ◼   ► and everything's happening, and the music that's going on, that's the type of music.

00:06:27 ◼   ► And in particular, I've gotten, I've had an affinity recently where I listened to,

00:06:33 ◼   ► oh, and I can't even think of the name of the word for it. I was gonna say they're called

00:06:37 ◼   ► called transitionals or periodicals,

00:06:39 ◼   ► but they're not all periodicals.

00:06:40 ◼   ► But there's motivational numbers that,

00:06:43 ◼   ► there's companies that write music for movie trailers,

00:06:47 ◼   ► and it's a specialized thing.

00:06:48 ◼   ► Like if you see a lot of trailers,

00:06:50 ◼   ► they won't play the music from the movie,

00:06:52 ◼   ► 'cause most of the time when they're,

00:06:54 ◼   ► they're in the process of making the movie,

00:06:55 ◼   ► when they release a trailer,

00:06:56 ◼   ► the soundtrack's one of the last things you do.

00:06:58 ◼   ► So they have these people that create

00:07:00 ◼   ► these two-minute blurbs that just kind of tell this arc.

00:07:03 ◼   ► And it's actually kind of fascinating,

00:07:05 ◼   ► I have CDs of these where this company,

00:07:08 ◼   ► these different groups that create this music.

00:07:12 ◼   ► And what's interesting about it is there's an arc

00:07:14 ◼   ► within two minutes.

00:07:15 ◼   ► Most classical orchestral music,

00:07:18 ◼   ► it takes 10, 15, 20 minutes to develop these arcs.

00:07:21 ◼   ► Or in movie music, you'll be over a series of several tracks

00:07:26 ◼   ► where you'll introduce a character,

00:07:27 ◼   ► you'll introduce their theme.

00:07:28 ◼   ► But with this trailer music, it's everything in two minutes.

00:07:32 ◼   ► They introduce the piece,

00:07:35 ◼   ► they introduce the arc, they kind of go through this motion,

00:07:37 ◼   ► and then they kind of settle it out,

00:07:39 ◼   ► and all of them kind of end in these kind of,

00:07:41 ◼   ► you know, like brooding music,

00:07:42 ◼   ► where you can just see, you know,

00:07:43 ◼   ► coming soon, May 2012, or whatever it is.

00:07:47 ◼   ► And I've found, iTunes has a couple groups that do that,

00:07:52 ◼   ► that have that type of music,

00:07:55 ◼   ► and I've found that it's actually been really interesting

00:07:57 ◼   ► for development, because a lot of times

00:08:01 ◼   ► I'm jumping in and out of things,

00:08:02 ◼   ► like I've got an answer in email,

00:08:03 ◼   ► something's blowing up on a project and then when I go back to you know I open

00:08:08 ◼   ► Xcode I've got to kind of you know get back into the mood and that music is

00:08:12 ◼   ► kind of it's just it just wipes my memory it's just like okay whatever I

00:08:15 ◼   ► was going on I could just dive in and think about what I'm thinking about and

00:08:18 ◼   ► it's this sounds cheesy but it's got a heroic quality to it like you know you

00:08:23 ◼   ► feel like I'm epically coding away an Xcode or something. Sure I do the same

00:08:26 ◼   ► thing I listen to some of this some of the sound the soundtracks I listen to

00:08:30 ◼   ► It makes you feel like you're saving the world.

00:08:33 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:08:34 ◼   ► You're fighting pirates or, you know.

00:08:36 ◼   ► - It all depends on me fixing this bug

00:08:40 ◼   ► 'cause that's what the music says.

00:08:41 ◼   ► - Well, you were the one in Pandora that said in Pandora,

00:08:44 ◼   ► you have this station, what was it, Epic Soundtrack?

00:08:46 ◼   ► - Epic Soundtrack.

00:08:47 ◼   ► - Yeah, you type Epic Soundtrack into Pandora

00:08:50 ◼   ► and I've gotten a couple people on that

00:08:52 ◼   ► and it's like a default.

00:08:53 ◼   ► If I just don't, I don't know what I want to listen to,

00:08:55 ◼   ► I can go into Pandora and enter that

00:08:57 ◼   ► and you'll hear a lot of, you know,

00:08:59 ◼   ► Hans Zimmer and James Horner soundtracks.

00:09:01 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:09:02 ◼   ► And you realize how similar many movie soundtracks are from those--

00:09:06 ◼   ► Yeah, especially with certain artists.

00:09:08 ◼   ► I mean, I've gotten to the point now where I can listen to a soundtrack

00:09:12 ◼   ► I've never heard, and I can tell you which composer it is,

00:09:16 ◼   ► because they each kind of have these affectations or styles.

00:09:19 ◼   ► And a lot of people think it's a bad thing to get tiring of it,

00:09:24 ◼   ► but with John Williams, I think you've got hundreds and hundreds

00:09:29 ◼   ► of movies that he's now composed for.

00:09:31 ◼   ► And imagine if Beethoven, if you had 100 symphonies by Beethoven,

00:09:36 ◼   ► you know, how amazing it would be.

00:09:37 ◼   ► Yeah, sure, they would all blend together after a while,

00:09:40 ◼   ► but you would see, well, what was he feeling like that day?

00:09:42 ◼   ► Or what was he thinking that day?

00:09:43 ◼   ► And it's this neat little time capsule, whereas with Beethoven,

00:09:47 ◼   ► we know we only got nine symphonies.

00:09:49 ◼   ► And there's a brilliance about it, but the movie composers

00:09:54 ◼   ► are much more prolific, I guess.

00:09:57 ◼   ► So when you're actually working what kind of what are sort of the tool set that you find yourself you sort of leaning towards like

00:10:03 ◼   ► What programs are you using on a daily basis when you work? I mean Xcode and Photoshop are kind of the the givens I

00:10:10 ◼   ► You know Xcode obviously if you're doing any type of Mac or iOS development you're using Xcode

00:10:16 ◼   ► There are people I know that have other ways to do it, but I've and I've tried them all

00:10:21 ◼   ► You just keep going back to Xcode. There's just when you're

00:10:26 ◼   ► Similar with Photoshop, I've experimented a lot and I keep telling Gus Mueller I'm going

00:10:32 ◼   ► to write this article about how I designed my last app in Acorn and it was actually really,

00:10:36 ◼   ► it worked really well and I really enjoyed it, but I find when I need speed, when I need

00:10:42 ◼   ► to do something quickly, I go back to Photoshop or I go back to Xcode.

00:10:46 ◼   ► There's just something you want to remove as much friction as possible and for me, things

00:10:51 ◼   ► are so much speed driven.

00:10:52 ◼   ► I mean, as a contractor, you're getting paid for your time.

00:10:56 ◼   ► And one of two scenarios is this.

00:10:58 ◼   ► Either they're paying you by hour,

00:11:01 ◼   ► so you want to be as efficient as possible,

00:11:03 ◼   ► so they're getting their money's worth for that hour,

00:11:05 ◼   ► because you don't want to rack up too much time

00:11:07 ◼   ► without producing enough product,

00:11:09 ◼   ► or they're not going to be happy

00:11:09 ◼   ► and they're not going to go back to you.

00:11:11 ◼   ► Or it's a fixed price product

00:11:12 ◼   ► where they don't care about your efficiency,

00:11:14 ◼   ► but you care about your efficiency

00:11:15 ◼   ► because you can bankrupt yourself on a project.

00:11:18 ◼   ► So for me, it's always geared around speed.

00:11:21 ◼   ► it's being as fast as possible and again going back to some of the distractions that I run

00:11:25 ◼   ► into it's like when I dive in I need to go and do something and I might have an hour

00:11:30 ◼   ► I might have 30 minutes and so it's always Photoshop and Xcode they're always open on

00:11:35 ◼   ► my computer the beauty of having a Mac Pro is you just never close applications there's

00:11:43 ◼   ► a couple other I use Xscope it's a application by the icon factory I use that a lot the recent

00:11:51 ◼   ► version, they have the mirroring mirroring tool where you can

00:11:55 ◼   ► mirror something to your device. And I know there are other tools

00:11:58 ◼   ► that do it live view as one and there's all these differences,

00:12:00 ◼   ► but I just find x scope seems to work most like how I want it to

00:12:05 ◼   ► work. And there's some other nice utilities they have in

00:12:08 ◼   ► there. If you're want to check different color weaknesses, you

00:12:11 ◼   ► can test it on the screen. I also think they're mirroring,

00:12:15 ◼   ► they do something right with the color profiles. So if you've ever

00:12:20 ◼   ► looked at something on your 27 inch cinema display

00:12:24 ◼   ► and then looked at it on the iPhone,

00:12:26 ◼   ► the color representation is different.

00:12:28 ◼   ► - Sure.

00:12:28 ◼   ► - Things seem a little brighter and a little less saturated

00:12:32 ◼   ► and a little less contrasty, to use a real bad word,

00:12:36 ◼   ► on the iPhone itself.

00:12:39 ◼   ► And so there's something that they do with their mirroring

00:12:44 ◼   ► that kind of compensates for that and it looks right.

00:12:47 ◼   ► So when you look at it,

00:12:49 ◼   ► when you're looking at a mock-up on your display

00:12:52 ◼   ► and/or on your device, it looks like it will when you kind of slice it up and

00:12:56 ◼   ► put it in Xcode.

00:12:58 ◼   ► Whereas I think Live View had problems with, you know, color correction.

00:13:02 ◼   ► That could be an early version. I'm not meaning to say anything about Live View.

00:13:05 ◼   ► I use Xscope. I also, I mentioned Acorn earlier, I actually use

00:13:11 ◼   ► Acorn as just kind of my quick edit tool. I won't...

00:13:14 ◼   ► It's kind of funny, I don't do anything lightweight in Photoshop because it's

00:13:18 ◼   ► such a bear.

00:13:19 ◼   ► that I only use it for design, so I usually only have mockups. If I do any type of photo

00:13:24 ◼   ► editing or if I need to crop something or if I need to annotate something or draw a

00:13:28 ◼   ► couple shapes over it or mask something, I do all of that in Acorn. Because by the time

00:13:33 ◼   ► I finish typing "Acorn" and hit enter and launch, Acorn's launched. Whereas Photoshop,

00:13:38 ◼   ► it's like, if it crashes, you've got to go get a cup of coffee when it launches. CS6

00:13:44 ◼   ► is better but it's still not as fast.

00:13:47 ◼   ► So I usually have Acorn open.

00:13:50 ◼   ► TextMate is kind of my--

00:13:53 ◼   ► and all these people that are going crazy over--

00:13:55 ◼   ► TextMate's dead and all that stuff.

00:13:57 ◼   ► I still use whatever 153 or whatever the latest version is.

00:14:01 ◼   ► And it worked just as well today as it did six months ago.

00:14:04 ◼   ► So I assume I'll keep using it until OS 10.15 comes out

00:14:10 ◼   ► and it doesn't run or whatever.

00:14:12 ◼   ► Yeah, it's like plain text is still plain text.

00:14:14 ◼   ► It hasn't changed.

00:14:15 ◼   ► Yeah, and I wish I had some cool little nifty utility

00:14:19 ◼   ► that I use all the time that I don't-- but I'm pretty vanilla

00:14:24 ◼   ► when it comes to that stuff.

00:14:25 ◼   ► I mean, I don't overuse the launcher or anything like that.

00:14:30 ◼   ► I don't have text expander scripts or anything like that.

00:14:33 ◼   ► I'm fairly manual on that type of stuff,

00:14:35 ◼   ► because I'm moving a lot between--

00:14:38 ◼   ► I have to manage two machines, and I have

00:14:40 ◼   ► to manage state on two machines.

00:14:41 ◼   ► I travel enough where I've got my laptop and I have my Mac Pro at home and I have to transfer

00:14:48 ◼   ► between those enough that I just don't worry about having too fidgety of a setup.

00:14:54 ◼   ► There's got to be five or six apps that I have to run and beyond that I don't mess with

00:14:59 ◼   ► it too much.

00:15:00 ◼   ► So you deal with a lot of email, doing a lot of client relations, you just do that in regular

00:15:06 ◼   ► mail?

00:15:07 ◼   ► Yeah, I use regular vanilla mail.

00:15:08 ◼   ► I used the Gmail client online.

00:15:11 ◼   ► I used the web client for a long time until finally,

00:15:13 ◼   ► whenever it was that version of Safari would randomly,

00:15:17 ◼   ► you know, just reload your tabs for fun.

00:15:19 ◼   ► And for grins, if you have too many tabs open

00:15:22 ◼   ► and you go back to that tab and it's like,

00:15:24 ◼   ► I'm gonna refresh it because I didn't,

00:15:26 ◼   ► I wanted to free up this memory.

00:15:28 ◼   ► And when it started doing that, I kind of said,

00:15:30 ◼   ► okay, I need to get away from the web client.

00:15:32 ◼   ► And someone said that in mail and Lion was a lot better.

00:15:37 ◼   ► And ironically about the same time,

00:15:39 ◼   ► I met the product manager at Apple for the mail application.

00:15:43 ◼   ► And we just was randomly in town, had drinks with him,

00:15:47 ◼   ► and we were talking through things.

00:15:48 ◼   ► And he was talking about some of the stuff that went into it.

00:15:51 ◼   ► And I'll give it a try.

00:15:51 ◼   ► And it took a couple days to kind of get used to it.

00:15:55 ◼   ► And for me, it's the way I manage Gmail is built around Gmail.

00:16:00 ◼   ► You know, the whole, and when I say Gmail,

00:16:02 ◼   ► I'm not talking about necessarily the application,

00:16:04 ◼   ► but the way Gmail organizes mail, you know,

00:16:07 ◼   ► where you get a bunch of mail in and you say,

00:16:09 ◼   ► okay, do I care about this? No. Archived, you know, do I need to respond to it, flag it and, you know,

00:16:15 ◼   ► we're star it, as it were. And, you know, the idea is, you know, I have kind of, you know, I'm, I'm

00:16:20 ◼   ► ingesting incoming mail, and then I go back later in the day and kind of say, okay, I need to work

00:16:24 ◼   ► through all those starred emails and kind of just, you know, get them out of my inbox. But whenever

00:16:29 ◼   ► they're done, they just go into an archive folder. And then if I need to find anything, I search and

00:16:34 ◼   ► line mail was able to address that.

00:16:36 ◼   ► I, it was Matt Gemmell that had a tip

00:16:40 ◼   ► on how to use mailbox favorites and mail.

00:16:44 ◼   ► And so I just created a favorite for my,

00:16:48 ◼   ► a favorite for my all mail inside of my, my Gmail folder.

00:16:54 ◼   ► And I just move things into that directly.

00:16:56 ◼   ► I think it's, you know, it's control command the number.

00:17:00 ◼   ► So I think if it's, if you put it

00:17:01 ◼   ► in that little favorites bar,

00:17:03 ◼   ► I think it'll give you that shortcut.

00:17:04 ◼   ► So it's like control command two, as I know is archive.

00:17:09 ◼   ► So in my mind, it's like, whenever I'm done with an email,

00:17:11 ◼   ► it's like control command two and it's gone.

00:17:13 ◼   ► And then I remapped a couple,

00:17:16 ◼   ► I remapped the delivery key command,

00:17:20 ◼   ► I think it's like shift command D and it just feels weird.

00:17:24 ◼   ► So I changed that, I remapped that to command enter.

00:17:28 ◼   ► And so it's like, whenever I'm done.

00:17:29 ◼   ► And I always liked that.

00:17:30 ◼   ► And I think it was entourage of all applications.

00:17:33 ◼   ► I used for my full-time job on Teraj, when you would send an email, the Microsoft email

00:17:38 ◼   ► program, it was like, you know, command enter. And there's just something about that. I would

00:17:43 ◼   ► use two hands and it would just feel great. It was like put an exclamation point in an

00:17:47 ◼   ► email when you were done. And so I remapped the delivery key to that in mail.

00:17:52 ◼   ► Yeah. There's something very satisfying about that keyboard shortcut. I think it's because

00:17:58 ◼   ► it's almost like you wind up when you hold down the command and you can bang on the end.

00:18:02 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:18:03 ◼   ► You send that last email and it's like, "Hell yes, I'm done."

00:18:09 ◼   ► It's really hard not using the F word, by the way.

00:18:11 ◼   ► It's probably the longest I'll ever go without saying the F word.

00:18:14 ◼   ► Well, there we go.

00:18:17 ◼   ► Just for all the kids out there.

00:18:18 ◼   ► Yeah, for all the kids.

00:18:19 ◼   ► In case one of my kids ever listens to this and they're like, "I get yelled at by my wife."

00:18:24 ◼   ► There you go.

00:18:26 ◼   ► So in terms of-- I think you can come at app development

00:18:31 ◼   ► from an interesting place, because you straddle

00:18:36 ◼   ► the world between making things look good

00:18:40 ◼   ► and making them be well-designed,

00:18:41 ◼   ► as well as being able to actually build that as well.

00:18:45 ◼   ► And a lot of people I know who are in this,

00:18:47 ◼   ► they tend to-- it's like they're very much in one of those camps.

00:18:51 ◼   ► There's kind of like the-- it's like, I'm a designer.

00:18:54 ◼   ► I just deliver pixels.

00:18:58 ◼   ► That's their world.

00:18:59 ◼   ► And then there's the people who it's like, well, I

00:19:01 ◼   ► can actually build things.

00:19:02 ◼   ► And I was thinking that interesting.

00:19:04 ◼   ► And I was curious if you had experiences

00:19:06 ◼   ► for how having both sides of that, one side

00:19:10 ◼   ► informs the other, rather than having to sort of have them

00:19:13 ◼   ► be two different parts of--

00:19:14 ◼   ► Yeah, I think it's unfortunate that they're actually

00:19:17 ◼   ► seen and taught as two different disciplines.

00:19:20 ◼   ► that something that, how you build something

00:19:23 ◼   ► and how it works is different.

00:19:26 ◼   ► And it's unfortunate because,

00:19:29 ◼   ► it seems to be a US thing.

00:19:33 ◼   ► Like in the US, we as a culture don't value design.

00:19:37 ◼   ► We don't value good design.

00:19:39 ◼   ► My wife would say, we all live and work in decorated sheds.

00:19:43 ◼   ► There's nothing that, our American sensibility says

00:19:48 ◼   ► that design is how it looks, that it's this decoration or this veneer.

00:19:52 ◼   ► And you know, everybody likes to quote Jobs, who

00:19:56 ◼   ► I'm sure quoted a designer, a well-known designer that said, you know, "Design's how it works."

00:20:00 ◼   ► But I mean, that's really true.

00:20:04 ◼   ► The canonical example when you're... And I took design classes

00:20:08 ◼   ► in college. I didn't just study CS, but it was

00:20:12 ◼   ► some weird crazy name like "Introduction to Human-Computer Interaction," which

00:20:16 ◼   ► like, you know, that robot from Short Circuit and R2D2 are humping or something.

00:20:21 ◼   ► What does that mean?

00:20:22 ◼   ► But what it really was is just an engineering word for design, was how do these things work.

00:20:29 ◼   ► And we read this, Don Norman's fantastic with the design of everyday things.

00:20:34 ◼   ► And one of the examples he uses is he's like a hammer.

00:20:36 ◼   ► A hammer is a great design, a great piece of design, but no one thinks of a hammer as

00:20:41 ◼   ► being a beautiful object or as being a pretty object or something that's well designed.

00:20:46 ◼   ► but from a design standpoint, it's perfect.

00:20:48 ◼   ► There's one way to grab it that works.

00:20:50 ◼   ► If you grab it by the claw or you grab it by the front,

00:20:53 ◼   ► it feels unevenly weighted, it doesn't feel right.

00:20:56 ◼   ► You're like, this is not the way I'm supposed to use this.

00:20:58 ◼   ► You grab it by the one end, it has the right weighting.

00:21:01 ◼   ► And just almost by grabbing it,

00:21:02 ◼   ► if you don't grab it stern enough, it'll drop.

00:21:04 ◼   ► And you figure out, holy crap,

00:21:06 ◼   ► if I put something beneath this, I can smash it,

00:21:08 ◼   ► or if I can hit a nail into this,

00:21:11 ◼   ► the end of this board.

00:21:12 ◼   ► It's perfectly designed,

00:21:13 ◼   ► there's no other way that you can use it.

00:21:15 ◼   ► And that's a great, a well-designed object.

00:21:19 ◼   ► But I think the joke would be,

00:21:22 ◼   ► is if Apple designed a hammer,

00:21:23 ◼   ► it would be made out of aluminum,

00:21:24 ◼   ► it would be shiny and glossy,

00:21:26 ◼   ► and it would be aluminum and white plastic.

00:21:28 ◼   ► Well, that doesn't matter whether you get that

00:21:31 ◼   ► or whether you go to any hardware store

00:21:33 ◼   ► and grab the same old hammer.

00:21:34 ◼   ► They're gonna work the same,

00:21:35 ◼   ► and they're gonna work as well.

00:21:36 ◼   ► Because the design of the hammer,

00:21:38 ◼   ► not the material it's made out of,

00:21:39 ◼   ► not the way it looks,

00:21:41 ◼   ► has nothing to do with its design.

00:21:43 ◼   ► the design is how are you supposed to use a hammer

00:21:46 ◼   ► and you've designed it so there's only one way

00:21:48 ◼   ► you can use it and use it appropriately.

00:21:50 ◼   ► And that's, when you get into software,

00:21:54 ◼   ► I think you can't separate those two.

00:21:57 ◼   ► I think in order for something to work well,

00:22:00 ◼   ► you have to be strong on the engineering side

00:22:03 ◼   ► as well as the design side.

00:22:05 ◼   ► Like it's kind of ironic that we kind of have

00:22:10 ◼   ► this hero worship of designers right now,

00:22:13 ◼   ► but your standard designer, I think, as you see our field,

00:22:17 ◼   ► as far as I'm concerned, can't do anything.

00:22:19 ◼   ► I mean, they can specify something very well,

00:22:22 ◼   ► but what you have at the end of their product, you can't use.

00:22:26 ◼   ► And so its design is essentially useless

00:22:29 ◼   ► because it's not something that you can use.

00:22:31 ◼   ► Now, I'm not saying designers are useless,

00:22:33 ◼   ► and in a large team where you're trying to build

00:22:35 ◼   ► something very ambitious and very large,

00:22:37 ◼   ► designers are necessary, and you have to have some people

00:22:40 ◼   ► that are focusing on the design

00:22:41 ◼   ► and some people that are focusing on making it better,

00:22:44 ◼   ► and I get that.

00:22:45 ◼   ► But in a smaller team, or in an indie team,

00:22:47 ◼   ► or a team of one, you've gotta think of both of them

00:22:51 ◼   ► interchangeably, and you can't have something

00:22:55 ◼   ► with just a Photoshop document.

00:22:58 ◼   ► A Photoshop document is nothing more

00:23:00 ◼   ► than a Photoshop document.

00:23:02 ◼   ► But an Xcode project can be something that you can use.

00:23:05 ◼   ► It may not be something you wanna use,

00:23:07 ◼   ► it may not be the best tool,

00:23:09 ◼   ► but it's something that you can use,

00:23:10 ◼   ► and therefore its design utility is higher than a Photoshop document.

00:23:17 ◼   ► You know, I can't even look at a Photoshop document on my phone.

00:23:21 ◼   ► An Xcode project is meant to be run on my phone.

00:23:23 ◼   ► So it's unfortunate that they're separated.

00:23:28 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:23:29 ◼   ► I wish they were more integrated.

00:23:32 ◼   ► And the type of people that we tend to hire--

00:23:36 ◼   ► what I say is I hire opinionated developers.

00:23:38 ◼   ► And what I'm really saying is I hire developers who have a design sensibility.

00:23:43 ◼   ► They can look at something and say, "This is a bad idea. This isn't going to work the way they think it's going to work."

00:23:48 ◼   ► And they may not know how to fix it, and you may need a designer to come in and think of other ideas,

00:23:53 ◼   ► but they know it's wrong. And so I think at a first level,

00:23:58 ◼   ► I think you have to have that. You have to have that kind of eye, not only eye towards it,

00:24:03 ◼   ► towards it but to know it's not right.

00:24:05 ◼   ► And then it's like...

00:24:06 ◼   ► - They have good taste.

00:24:07 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's kind of good taste, but I mean, there's, you know, movie critics don't necessarily

00:24:12 ◼   ► have good taste, but they know a bad movie when they see it.

00:24:14 ◼   ► And it's, you know, I think there's, you know, you just have to have that to know it doesn't

00:24:19 ◼   ► look right, it doesn't feel right, and you need to change it.

00:24:21 ◼   ► I don't know how to change it or don't know why it's wrong, but I just know it's wrong.

00:24:25 ◼   ► And that's kind of step one.

00:24:26 ◼   ► And then step two is thinking about, okay, what are ways that we can change it?

00:24:30 ◼   ► What are ways that we can make it right?

00:24:31 ◼   ► And that is what designers, if they have a superpower,

00:24:35 ◼   ► that's what they're great at.

00:24:36 ◼   ► And if you follow any designer on Twitter,

00:24:38 ◼   ► you know it because they complain nine times out of 10.

00:24:41 ◼   ► Nine times out of 10 tweets isn't bitching

00:24:44 ◼   ► about how the world is wrong because the exit signs

00:24:47 ◼   ► at the wrong height and it's in a font

00:24:48 ◼   ► that's hard to see in daylight.

00:24:51 ◼   ► A quote unquote normal person looks at that and says,

00:24:57 ◼   ► I get it, it's an exit sign.

00:24:58 ◼   ► It kind of looks like all the rest of the exit signs.

00:25:00 ◼   ► I know what's the big deal.

00:25:01 ◼   ► It's a designers are very good at that.

00:25:04 ◼   ► But so I think it's really just merging.

00:25:06 ◼   ► I think we should sit somewhere in the middle.

00:25:08 ◼   ► I think everybody should kind of have it.

00:25:10 ◼   ► So I don't see myself as unique or special in any way.

00:25:14 ◼   ► And there's certainly plenty of people

00:25:15 ◼   ► that are much better than I am

00:25:16 ◼   ► and much smarter than I am

00:25:17 ◼   ► that do both design and development.

00:25:19 ◼   ► I mean, Mike Rundle, I think is one

00:25:22 ◼   ► of the premier examples of that.

00:25:23 ◼   ► He's actually a very good developer

00:25:25 ◼   ► and he's actually an exceptional designer.

00:25:27 ◼   ► You know, another example would,

00:25:29 ◼   ► I mentioned his name earlier, Matt Gemmo.

00:25:31 ◼   ► And Gemmo is interesting because, I mean,

00:25:34 ◼   ► when you talk about visual taste or aesthetic taste,

00:25:38 ◼   ► I mean, his website is not very, I mean,

00:25:39 ◼   ► even his blog is better 'cause he's using a default template

00:25:43 ◼   ► that looks like it was designed by a designer.

00:25:45 ◼   ► But if you look at his company website,

00:25:47 ◼   ► I mean, it's not a paragon of great design.

00:25:50 ◼   ► And I don't think my, or I shouldn't say great design,

00:25:52 ◼   ► great aesthetic.

00:25:53 ◼   ► And I think Matt would tell you that.

00:25:55 ◼   ► And he's almost a perfect case that says,

00:25:57 ◼   ► design and aesthetic are separated and it doesn't matter.

00:26:00 ◼   ► If you use the app that you just built,

00:26:02 ◼   ► Sticky Notes, I think, or Sticky Notifications,

00:26:05 ◼   ► that's what it's called, yeah, Sticky Notifications.

00:26:08 ◼   ► It's a very lovely and very well-designed app.

00:26:10 ◼   ► There's some very clever copywriting in it.

00:26:12 ◼   ► It works very well, it's very obvious,

00:26:14 ◼   ► and it's very, very easy to use.

00:26:17 ◼   ► But there's nothing in that that is aesthetically amazing.

00:26:21 ◼   ► You know, like I look at it and I'm kinda like,

00:26:22 ◼   ► wow, those notifications kinda have little blurry edges.

00:26:25 ◼   ► You know, there's certain little details that a, you know, quote-unquote Photoshop designer would look at and cringe

00:26:33 ◼   ► But it doesn't matter, you know it or it doesn't matter to an extent and so I think

00:26:39 ◼   ► With design people make a lot of mistakes

00:26:43 ◼   ► They can't separate the aesthetic from the you know

00:26:47 ◼   ► kind of how it works functional part of it and

00:26:49 ◼   ► You can't ignore either I think a great product has all of these working in tandem

00:26:54 ◼   ► but I think a lot of developers are put off by design

00:26:59 ◼   ► because they think, "I've got to be good at Photoshop,"

00:27:01 ◼   ► or, "I have to understand gradients and shadows

00:27:06 ◼   ► "and lighting and all of that stuff,"

00:27:08 ◼   ► when you really don't.

00:27:09 ◼   ► You just need to understand how to make something,

00:27:11 ◼   ► to think about how do I make something simpler.

00:27:14 ◼   ► And that's where I think they really are the same.

00:27:16 ◼   ► So I talk about how people, they diverge,

00:27:19 ◼   ► but really where I think they're the same

00:27:20 ◼   ► is if you take a developer and you say,

00:27:23 ◼   ► you show 'em a piece of code,

00:27:25 ◼   ► the first thing a developer's gonna look at is,

00:27:27 ◼   ► can I make that smaller?

00:27:28 ◼   ► Can I make that less?

00:27:29 ◼   ► Can I write it in less lines of code?

00:27:31 ◼   ► Can I make it more efficient?

00:27:33 ◼   ► How do I cache in certain places

00:27:35 ◼   ► to make it more responsive?

00:27:38 ◼   ► A good developer thinks like that.

00:27:40 ◼   ► A designer looks at a design and says,

00:27:42 ◼   ► how can I make this simpler?

00:27:44 ◼   ► How can I make it more minimal?

00:27:45 ◼   ► How can I make it more efficient?

00:27:47 ◼   ► It's the same things.

00:27:48 ◼   ► It's the same process.

00:27:51 ◼   ► It's the same.

00:27:52 ◼   ► at something and you're trying to make it smaller, faster, more efficient, and easier

00:27:56 ◼   ► to understand.

00:27:57 ◼   ► And when you look at it that way, what a developer does, what a good developer and a good designer

00:28:01 ◼   ► do are the same thing.

00:28:03 ◼   ► It's just what realm do you learn in.

00:28:05 ◼   ► So the only thing I think that I've done is I've put the time in to understand how to

00:28:10 ◼   ► use a graphics program.

00:28:13 ◼   ► And so because I think most people have an idea in their head, how do I, how should this

00:28:21 ◼   ► or how should it be, but they don't necessarily

00:28:24 ◼   ► have the skills to get it out.

00:28:25 ◼   ► They need to work through someone else,

00:28:27 ◼   ► or they just haven't put the time to learn

00:28:30 ◼   ► the techniques to do it.

00:28:31 ◼   ► I mean, I'm not a great drawer.

00:28:32 ◼   ► I'm a terrible, terrible drawer.

00:28:35 ◼   ► And it's where I run into the most trouble.

00:28:38 ◼   ► It's like where I reach the edge of my design skills

00:28:41 ◼   ► is like, I've got this great idea,

00:28:43 ◼   ► but I just cannot figure out how to draw it.

00:28:46 ◼   ► I can't get the light source right,

00:28:48 ◼   ► or it doesn't look right, or when I,

00:28:50 ◼   ► I can't maneuver it or finagle it.

00:28:53 ◼   ► And so I tell myself it's not a design skill

00:28:55 ◼   ► I need to learn, it's just I just need to go

00:28:57 ◼   ► take a drawing class or learn how to draw better.

00:29:00 ◼   ► But design and development, I think,

00:29:02 ◼   ► are things that are separated that should not be separated.

00:29:05 ◼   ► And you shouldn't start one and then the other.

00:29:07 ◼   ► I think right from the beginning,

00:29:09 ◼   ► you should be thinking about both.

00:29:10 ◼   ► And Norman, going back to Don Norman,

00:29:14 ◼   ► he would say that you always are thinking about both.

00:29:16 ◼   ► That developers, it's not that they don't think

00:29:19 ◼   ► about design is that they do consider it,

00:29:22 ◼   ► they just don't think about it in the right way.

00:29:24 ◼   ► Or they don't value it as much as they should.

00:29:27 ◼   ► But you're still making decisions.

00:29:28 ◼   ► I mean, when you place a button,

00:29:29 ◼   ► you've gotta put it somewhere,

00:29:31 ◼   ► you've gotta make it a certain size,

00:29:33 ◼   ► you have to put a label on it.

00:29:35 ◼   ► And there are some developers that truly don't care.

00:29:38 ◼   ► Like we have a guy, Mike, who works for us

00:29:41 ◼   ► that'll just tell you, he's like,

00:29:42 ◼   ► "I'm a boxes and squares kinda guy."

00:29:44 ◼   ► He's like, "You're gonna get solid colors and boxes,

00:29:46 ◼   ► "and I'm not gonna think about it."

00:29:48 ◼   ► And he almost tries to say he intentionally doesn't think about it.

00:29:51 ◼   ► But even if you look at what he does and the types of things he does, he still puts

00:29:56 ◼   ► a lot of thought into how someone going to use this and that's design.

00:30:01 ◼   ► Yeah, that's it.

00:30:02 ◼   ► It we're thinking about the same problem at the end.

00:30:05 ◼   ► So I don't, I don't know if I answered your question at all, actually, but it's a,

00:30:10 ◼   ► it's a rant of mine that I go off on from time to time.

00:30:13 ◼   ► And one thing I was curious about, so I think a lot of, most of the people who

00:30:17 ◼   ► who listen to developing respective are,

00:30:20 ◼   ► would consider themselves developers first and foremost,

00:30:23 ◼   ► I think, in terms of that's,

00:30:24 ◼   ► I mean that's largely how I would consider myself.

00:30:27 ◼   ► That's where my training and skillset is, and--

00:30:30 ◼   ► - Your comfort area.

00:30:31 ◼   ► - That's, you know, yeah, or at least that's my area

00:30:33 ◼   ► of strength and aptitude, I'd say.

00:30:35 ◼   ► And I was curious, for you though, in terms of if,

00:30:38 ◼   ► one of the things that I've certainly been focusing on

00:30:40 ◼   ► probably, sort of once I got,

00:30:43 ◼   ► so once I got to a certain point of skill with

00:30:46 ◼   ► development was how do I then develop the design part of my application development.

00:30:54 ◼   ► And so what I'm trying to make, rather than just making it work, how do I make it work

00:30:59 ◼   ► well, be good from a user experience perspective, and also look fairly good, aesthetically.

00:31:06 ◼   ► And I was curious, what recommendations or starting points do you think you'd have for

00:31:10 ◼   ► someone who wants to improve themselves in that area?

00:31:14 ◼   ► Well this is, because of the timeliness of this,

00:31:16 ◼   ► this is gonna be a pretty charged statement

00:31:20 ◼   ► considering the lawsuit that was just settled.

00:31:23 ◼   ► But the answer to that is the copy,

00:31:25 ◼   ► is to look at an application that either

00:31:30 ◼   ► is accomplishing something you wanna accomplish

00:31:32 ◼   ► or does something that you find interesting

00:31:35 ◼   ► and unique and copy it.

00:31:38 ◼   ► And when I say copy it, I mean photocopy it.

00:31:40 ◼   ► I mean look at it in minute details,

00:31:43 ◼   ► look how it behaves in very insignificant ways

00:31:46 ◼   ► and try and build something that works

00:31:48 ◼   ► and acts exactly like it.

00:31:50 ◼   ► I'm not saying you should ship something like that,

00:31:52 ◼   ► but when you're trying to figure out

00:31:54 ◼   ► how to think about these things and what to look at,

00:31:58 ◼   ► copy something that's good.

00:31:59 ◼   ► Just, and a great example,

00:32:02 ◼   ► a lot of good artists and designers do this.

00:32:06 ◼   ► I mean, that's traditionally how artists are taught.

00:32:10 ◼   ► when you're trying to learn kind of what's your own voice,

00:32:13 ◼   ► what's your own style, it used to be,

00:32:16 ◼   ► traditionally, artists would apprentice with masters.

00:32:19 ◼   ► And what they were doing in their apprenticing

00:32:20 ◼   ► is copying the style of the master.

00:32:23 ◼   ► So when the master's painting something

00:32:25 ◼   ► or working something out, you're looking at it and saying,

00:32:27 ◼   ► okay, I'm gonna paint it exactly the way that they paint it.

00:32:30 ◼   ► A modern example of this, I mean,

00:32:34 ◼   ► a designer, Louis Mantea, that a lot of people talk about,

00:32:37 ◼   ► one of the things that he does all the time

00:32:38 ◼   ► he traces things when I'll see him, you know, he'll be at Disney World and he'll see something

00:32:44 ◼   ► that's interesting him, he'll take a picture of it and he'll trace it in Illustrator or

00:32:48 ◼   ► in Photoshop and just draw it and just go in and the thing is, is he's done this for

00:32:53 ◼   ► so long that now as he's tracing things he's adding his own style and he's saying, "Oh,

00:32:59 ◼   ► that's interesting, I'm going to change that corner, I'm going to change the way he resolved

00:33:02 ◼   ► these two lines or I'm going to change the way this is lit or the way it's shaded in

00:33:08 ◼   ► in a subtle way that he finds more pleasing.

00:33:11 ◼   ► And that's really, when you get down to the really,

00:33:14 ◼   ► really great designers, what they're doing

00:33:16 ◼   ► is they're looking at these very, very small details

00:33:19 ◼   ► and saying, I'm gonna have something that looks

00:33:21 ◼   ► a very close approximation to something,

00:33:24 ◼   ► but I'm gonna slant it in a way that feels

00:33:26 ◼   ► and looks right to me.

00:33:28 ◼   ► And so, for someone who has no idea how to do this,

00:33:32 ◼   ► I mean, and iOS is perfect for this.

00:33:35 ◼   ► I mean, there's tons of little details.

00:33:38 ◼   ► I'm doing this on an app right now.

00:33:39 ◼   ► I'm looking at how does the Compose screen

00:33:43 ◼   ► on the mail application work.

00:33:45 ◼   ► It seems pretty simple.

00:33:46 ◼   ► We use it all the time.

00:33:48 ◼   ► There are tons of details.

00:33:50 ◼   ► So for one example is when you go in to type in

00:33:53 ◼   ► and you're filling out an address,

00:33:55 ◼   ► they swap in a table view

00:33:57 ◼   ► that has your auto-complete details.

00:33:59 ◼   ► And you look at it and you say,

00:34:00 ◼   ► well, that's just pretty standard.

00:34:01 ◼   ► It's just a standard table view cell

00:34:03 ◼   ► and I'm layering those things in there, but it's not.

00:34:07 ◼   ► It's subtly transparent.

00:34:09 ◼   ► It's de-emphasized.

00:34:10 ◼   ► They also emphasize the cell that you're typing in.

00:34:13 ◼   ► They put a little drop shadow right underneath it

00:34:15 ◼   ► so there's a perceived order.

00:34:17 ◼   ► They use a certain text size.

00:34:20 ◼   ► They don't use a predefined cell.

00:34:21 ◼   ► They use a custom cell.

00:34:24 ◼   ► There's a certain way it's hidden.

00:34:26 ◼   ► There's a certain way when you show it

00:34:27 ◼   ► and when you don't show it.

00:34:28 ◼   ► You know, when you go all the way back at the end

00:34:30 ◼   ► and you clear out a selection,

00:34:32 ◼   ► that disappears and they re-pop the key.

00:34:33 ◼   ► You know, you make the keyboard go away.

00:34:36 ◼   ► You know, there's all these things.

00:34:37 ◼   ► When do you bring the keyboard up?

00:34:38 ◼   ► How do you bring this in?

00:34:39 ◼   ► Is there a fade?

00:34:40 ◼   ► Do you animate into showing that

00:34:42 ◼   ► or do you show it immediately?

00:34:43 ◼   ► It's one screen that you could sit down

00:34:46 ◼   ► and take an entire day trying to replicate exactly,

00:34:49 ◼   ► to get it exactly like it is.

00:34:51 ◼   ► But in doing that, you're thinking about

00:34:54 ◼   ► why did they make these decisions?

00:34:56 ◼   ► Why did they do the things that they're doing?

00:34:59 ◼   ► And you start to think about it.

00:35:00 ◼   ► And then the next time you go to build something like that,

00:35:02 ◼   ► you think about it.

00:35:03 ◼   ► And you think, well, what did they do there

00:35:06 ◼   ► and would I do the same thing here?

00:35:09 ◼   ► Does it apply here,

00:35:10 ◼   ► or should I do something subtly different?

00:35:12 ◼   ► And it's paying attention to those details.

00:35:14 ◼   ► It's looking at an application through a microscope

00:35:18 ◼   ► that is really how you get better at design.

00:35:22 ◼   ► It's not teaching yourself Photoshop.

00:35:24 ◼   ► I mean, Photoshop has a high learning curve,

00:35:28 ◼   ► and it's difficult, but it's not impossible.

00:35:30 ◼   ► And I would say to anyone, any would-be designer,

00:35:33 ◼   ► again, not to plug Acorn again,

00:35:35 ◼   ► I just happen to really like it, but buy that, it's 50 bucks.

00:35:39 ◼   ► And you can learn that, and you'll know

00:35:40 ◼   ► a layered image editor.

00:35:42 ◼   ► In fact, buy that and buy, I think it's Pixelmator,

00:35:44 ◼   ► which is its other competition.

00:35:46 ◼   ► You can buy both of them, and you're still out

00:35:47 ◼   ► less than 100 bucks, and nowhere near

00:35:51 ◼   ► the expense of Photoshop.

00:35:52 ◼   ► So you can get the basics out of that

00:35:55 ◼   ► without necessarily using Photoshop,

00:35:58 ◼   ► but that's not the quarter design.

00:36:00 ◼   ► The quarter design is figuring out

00:36:02 ◼   ► how do all these individual things work,

00:36:04 ◼   ► and not at a macro level, but at a micro level.

00:36:06 ◼   ► Very, very tiny.

00:36:08 ◼   ► What are these little tiny interactions that they do

00:36:11 ◼   ► and why do they do it?

00:36:12 ◼   ► And then from there, you can kind of figure out,

00:36:15 ◼   ► you kind of build a recognition for it.

00:36:18 ◼   ► And then after you have that recognition,

00:36:20 ◼   ► as you start to think of your next app or your next ideas,

00:36:23 ◼   ► you start, you know, those ideas show up again.

00:36:26 ◼   ► You're like, maybe I should do it this way

00:36:27 ◼   ► or maybe I should do this.

00:36:29 ◼   ► And then over time, you start to get a feeling for,

00:36:31 ◼   ► this is better, I think this is right,

00:36:33 ◼   ► or I think this is the way we should do it.

00:36:36 ◼   ► And what you've developed by that point

00:36:37 ◼   ► is your own opinion, your own perspective.

00:36:40 ◼   ► And that's when you're a designer, to me.

00:36:42 ◼   ► That's when it's like, okay,

00:36:43 ◼   ► when you start having your own opinions

00:36:45 ◼   ► and you can have an informed opinion about,

00:36:47 ◼   ► well, I did it this way instead of this way

00:36:49 ◼   ► because you're a designer,

00:36:51 ◼   ► not when you've mastered lighting in Photoshop

00:36:54 ◼   ► or a 3D program, which I've done neither.

00:36:58 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, it's interesting.

00:37:01 ◼   ► I find for me, like I recently went through

00:37:02 ◼   ► a whole big redesign for audio books.

00:37:05 ◼   ► And you were certainly--

00:37:06 ◼   ► - I was aware.

00:37:07 ◼   ► - You were aware and involved in a lot of that.

00:37:08 ◼   ► And it's this funny thing of when you get to a point

00:37:11 ◼   ► that you start noticing things

00:37:15 ◼   ► that you didn't notice before.

00:37:18 ◼   ► And in some ways it's infuriating because--

00:37:20 ◼   ► - Sure.

00:37:21 ◼   ► - In some ways I was blissfully ignorant before

00:37:25 ◼   ► of many of the mistakes that I was making.

00:37:28 ◼   ► And that was very liberating.

00:37:30 ◼   ► I didn't feel bad when I made many of these mistakes that I was making.

00:37:34 ◼   ► Or even mistakes is maybe not the right word.

00:37:36 ◼   ► But it's just-- there's all these little things.

00:37:39 ◼   ► I mean, at this point for me, a lot of my--

00:37:42 ◼   ► even basic design for me is like, are things aligned correctly?

00:37:46 ◼   ► Are they consistent?

00:37:47 ◼   ► Is the sizing and proportions right?

00:37:50 ◼   ► Those types of things, which are different.

00:37:51 ◼   ► And so my UIs reflect that in the sense that I have very simple and plain UIs,

00:37:58 ◼   ► especially in audiobooks, like those types of things,

00:38:00 ◼   ► where making it look good is not so much a question

00:38:03 ◼   ► of having it be fancy.

00:38:05 ◼   ► It's not--

00:38:06 ◼   ► - No, exactly.

00:38:06 ◼   ► - It's not super textured and all these things

00:38:08 ◼   ► that are harder to get right.

00:38:10 ◼   ► - Well, and you mentioned something,

00:38:12 ◼   ► you kind of built it out.

00:38:14 ◼   ► I mean, there's these kind of design basics

00:38:16 ◼   ► that you can have, these basic,

00:38:17 ◼   ► not rules of design, but kind of the basic elements

00:38:23 ◼   ► of design in, you know, you said it, size, proportion,

00:38:27 ◼   ► hierarchy which hierarchy and proportion kind of go together

00:38:30 ◼   ► uh... harmony

00:38:31 ◼   ► there's always a big spin texture is one of them

00:38:34 ◼   ► but texture is not everything

00:38:36 ◼   ► and a lot of people even think that color and texture go hand in hand

00:38:40 ◼   ► and why i thought was interesting with what you

00:38:42 ◼   ► ended up we go where you landed with audio books

00:38:45 ◼   ► as he is shipped away a lot of the texture

00:38:47 ◼   ► and a lot of the veneer and went to something that's

00:38:49 ◼   ► very almost black and white and very subtle

00:38:53 ◼   ► more beautiful because it was more

00:38:56 ◼   ► aligned, it was more regular.

00:38:57 ◼   ► I mean, you can get accomplished so much in a design

00:39:02 ◼   ► by just making something regular.

00:39:03 ◼   ► A lot of people ask me what is the best design

00:39:09 ◼   ► iPhone app that I had ever seen,

00:39:10 ◼   ► and for the longest time I said it was Things,

00:39:12 ◼   ► the iPhone to-do list, and a lot of people

00:39:15 ◼   ► kind of looked at me, it wasn't the answer

00:39:16 ◼   ► they were expecting, and I said what was beautiful

00:39:18 ◼   ► about what Things did is they took the default Apple style

00:39:23 ◼   ► and they tweaked it just a little bit,

00:39:24 ◼   ► and they made just a little bit of subtle improvements

00:39:28 ◼   ► to where when you were using things,

00:39:30 ◼   ► you didn't feel like you left that Apple universe.

00:39:33 ◼   ► You weren't transported into another alternate reality

00:39:36 ◼   ► where we're gonna use yellows and blacks

00:39:38 ◼   ► and all of these things.

00:39:40 ◼   ► It was iPhone blue and iPhone gray and it felt right

00:39:45 ◼   ► and that takes a lot of effort.

00:39:48 ◼   ► A lot of people just think it's easy

00:39:50 ◼   ► because when they think of the hard parts of the design,

00:39:53 ◼   ► they think of the texture and of the color.

00:39:55 ◼   ► But those decisions are almost inconsequential.

00:40:00 ◼   ► You can make those decisions at the end.

00:40:03 ◼   ► You can change the texture at any point,

00:40:05 ◼   ► and you can change the color at any point.

00:40:08 ◼   ► And as long as you're working with it,

00:40:11 ◼   ► color can affect some things,

00:40:13 ◼   ► but by and large, you can make those decisions

00:40:15 ◼   ► throughout the entire process

00:40:16 ◼   ► and not drastically alter the design of the application.

00:40:20 ◼   ► And in a lot of ways,

00:40:21 ◼   ► you can do too much work on texture up front,

00:40:24 ◼   ► alter your design, and then throw a lot of that away.

00:40:27 ◼   ► It's really, and I'm not to say that it's a last

00:40:29 ◼   ► or it's a finishing touch, but in a lot of ways it is.

00:40:32 ◼   ► There's a, my wife, architect, watches a lot of HGTV,

00:40:38 ◼   ► and she watches a lot of Food Network,

00:40:40 ◼   ► and I think the show's on the Food Network.

00:40:42 ◼   ► It's a show called Restaurant Impossible,

00:40:46 ◼   ► and it's a guy, big, brutish guy.

00:40:48 ◼   ► He goes in and he fixes restaurants.

00:40:50 ◼   ► It's like one of those two days, $10,000.

00:40:53 ◼   ► And they redo the restaurant.

00:40:54 ◼   ► He redoes the menu and does all these things.

00:40:56 ◼   ► But one half of that show is geared towards

00:41:00 ◼   ► redoing the design of the restaurant.

00:41:03 ◼   ► And it's everything from how they lay things out,

00:41:05 ◼   ► to how many people they sit, to the aesthetic,

00:41:07 ◼   ► the color on the walls, and the veneers,

00:41:11 ◼   ► and treatments throughout the restaurant.

00:41:14 ◼   ► I bring that up because one of the better designers,

00:41:19 ◼   ► whenever we watch the show and we get to the end and we're watching what they did, my wife and I

00:41:22 ◼   ► always like what this one particular designer did and I can't remember her name. But she's on

00:41:27 ◼   ► a commercial during these shows for, I think it's Sherman Williams, and she's talking about tips for

00:41:35 ◼   ► a better design, how to better design your space. And it's funny because she was talking about a

00:41:42 ◼   ► paint company, but what she said is that the last thing she does is pick the color of the walls.

00:41:48 ◼   ► And yet for most people, that's the first thing they do.

00:41:50 ◼   ► Whenever they go in and strip out all the stuff

00:41:52 ◼   ► in their space and they want to redesign it,

00:41:54 ◼   ► they think, well, what color are we gonna paint the walls?

00:41:56 ◼   ► And this one was saying, no, it's the last thing that I do.

00:41:59 ◼   ► And a lot of it is because the first thing you want to do

00:42:03 ◼   ► when you strip a room bare and you're rebuilding it

00:42:05 ◼   ► is you want to think about how you're gonna use it.

00:42:07 ◼   ► You want to think about what types of spaces

00:42:10 ◼   ► do you want to set up?

00:42:11 ◼   ► How do you want to arrange seating?

00:42:13 ◼   ► How do you want to arrange storage?

00:42:14 ◼   ► How do you want to arrange things

00:42:15 ◼   ► that you're gonna hang on the wall?

00:42:16 ◼   ► what pieces of furniture will you have?

00:42:19 ◼   ► And then you start adding in some of the visual artifacts.

00:42:22 ◼   ► Like you might see a set of curtains that you like,

00:42:25 ◼   ► or a carpet or a rug that you'll lay down.

00:42:28 ◼   ► You might be changing the floors.

00:42:30 ◼   ► All of these things which will affect

00:42:32 ◼   ► the overall aesthetic of the room.

00:42:34 ◼   ► And what you ultimately want is the color of the wall

00:42:36 ◼   ► to blend in with that.

00:42:37 ◼   ► You don't want the color of the wall to determine that.

00:42:40 ◼   ► Because the color of the wall

00:42:41 ◼   ► is what you have the most of in the room.

00:42:44 ◼   ► - It's easiest to change too.

00:42:46 ◼   ► But yeah, it's the easiest thing to change.

00:42:47 ◼   ► It's the cheapest.

00:42:48 ◼   ► If you put up a color and it doesn't work,

00:42:49 ◼   ► it's like you go to Home Depot and spend 50 or 100 bucks

00:42:52 ◼   ► on a couple gallons of paint, and almost anybody can paint.

00:42:56 ◼   ► Now I think doing painting well is a different story,

00:42:57 ◼   ► but anybody can paint.

00:42:59 ◼   ► And it's not that big of an expense.

00:43:03 ◼   ► But I think a lot of people do that

00:43:05 ◼   ► with texture in iOS devices.

00:43:07 ◼   ► Texture should inform the design.

00:43:10 ◼   ► It should help it, it should aid it,

00:43:11 ◼   ► maybe add a little bit of whimsy or fun to the design,

00:43:14 ◼   ► shouldn't be the purpose of the design.

00:43:16 ◼   ► So if you're putting a wood background in the background,

00:43:19 ◼   ► it's like, well, why is it a wood background?

00:43:21 ◼   ► What's the point?

00:43:21 ◼   ► Does it work with the aesthetic?

00:43:23 ◼   ► But I think some people just say, well,

00:43:24 ◼   ► I'm going to put a wood background on there.

00:43:26 ◼   ► And then they just kind of move from there.

00:43:28 ◼   ► So--

00:43:29 ◼   ► It's almost like the dark side of copying too much, right?

00:43:34 ◼   ► Where you're saying the best way to learn is to copy.

00:43:37 ◼   ► And I think often what you'll see,

00:43:38 ◼   ► though, is people getting a little too--

00:43:41 ◼   ► they'll see an app that was very, like that was successful

00:43:44 ◼   ► and does some of these, you know, to take some, take some

00:43:47 ◼   ► bold moves from them, the aesthetic side, and then they

00:43:50 ◼   ► just copy it exactly, even though it doesn't make sense.

00:43:52 ◼   ► Perfect app for this, the app that this has happened to so

00:43:55 ◼   ► many times, and the app was Path. Path came out and Path

00:43:59 ◼   ► had a lot of innovative, clever, fill in your adjective. I

00:44:06 ◼   ► mean, a lot of it depends on opinion, but they had some very

00:44:08 ◼   ► interesting design ideas when path 2.0 came out. They had that

00:44:12 ◼   ► radio man radio menu and the lower left, they had the scroll

00:44:17 ◼   ► indicator that would show you the time that we rotate and do

00:44:20 ◼   ► all this fancy stuff. And they had a very nice overall

00:44:23 ◼   ► aesthetic to the app. They had a lot of things going on on that

00:44:26 ◼   ► app, and it worked very, very well for them. And they were

00:44:30 ◼   ► able it was it was very successful. And, you know, they

00:44:33 ◼   ► also did the what is it the like hide and seek, like underneath

00:44:38 ◼   ► - The sliding panels.

00:44:39 ◼   ► - Yeah, the sliding panels.

00:44:41 ◼   ► And there's debate whether that came first

00:44:43 ◼   ► or Facebook came first, but a lot of apps started doing,

00:44:46 ◼   ► you know, all of a sudden after Path came out,

00:44:48 ◼   ► a lot of apps started doing the sliding panels,

00:44:50 ◼   ► and a lot of apps started doing radial menus,

00:44:54 ◼   ► and a lot of apps started doing

00:44:55 ◼   ► those little scroll view decorations

00:44:58 ◼   ► and all those different types of things.

00:45:00 ◼   ► And what they're doing is they're taking

00:45:03 ◼   ► a finished piece of that design,

00:45:06 ◼   ► pulling it out of the context of that finished piece of the design and putting it somewhere

00:45:10 ◼   ► else and it doesn't work.

00:45:12 ◼   ► And that's where I think Samsung copying Apple, that's what Samsung did.

00:45:17 ◼   ► They took certain finished pieces of Apple's product and said, "We're going to pull that

00:45:23 ◼   ► out wholesale and place it into another product that's completely different."

00:45:33 ◼   ► One of the big design differences between an Android device and an iPhone is that on

00:45:38 ◼   ► an iPhone you have one hardware button and that's it.

00:45:41 ◼   ► On the iPhone or the Android devices you have these soft buttons, or now I think they're

00:45:45 ◼   ► actually software buttons, in newer versions of Android, but you have these buttons at

00:45:49 ◼   ► the bottom and they're anchored to the bottom.

00:45:52 ◼   ► In many cases you can't move them.

00:45:54 ◼   ► So a lot of Samsung's code would put, you know, whereas the Android standard tab bar

00:46:00 ◼   ► would go at the top, in some of their applications, they'd move the tab bar to the bottom, like

00:46:05 ◼   ► a tab view controller works on the iPhone.

00:46:08 ◼   ► Well, not only was that kind of cribbing Apple and bad because they styled it to look like

00:46:13 ◼   ► Apple, it was bad because sometimes you go to hit a tab and sometimes you hit the back

00:46:17 ◼   ► button or the home button and it will close the app.

00:46:20 ◼   ► So it's one of those that I think when I say I'm copying something or photocopying something,

00:46:26 ◼   ► I'm saying, take something that's doing the same thing

00:46:29 ◼   ► you wanna do, take it in context,

00:46:32 ◼   ► and move the whole thing over, and then tweak it.

00:46:35 ◼   ► You know, it's like, copy exactly something that you like,

00:46:38 ◼   ► and then make subtle tweaks to make it work

00:46:40 ◼   ► in your environment.

00:46:42 ◼   ► Maybe you don't even ship it.

00:46:43 ◼   ► Maybe you're just understanding better

00:46:46 ◼   ► why they're doing what they're doing

00:46:47 ◼   ► and what the decisions they're making,

00:46:48 ◼   ► and maybe you have a better way to do the whole thing

00:46:50 ◼   ► that's completely different.

00:46:52 ◼   ► But copying is not necessarily bad.

00:46:55 ◼   ► even shipping a copy of something

00:46:57 ◼   ► is also so that you could argue

00:46:58 ◼   ► that things copied apples

00:47:01 ◼   ► you are style

00:47:02 ◼   ► yet they certainly extended augmented and a lot of ways that apple had not

00:47:06 ◼   ► it's always the eight apple style

00:47:09 ◼   ► but they understood why apple did what they did and they were able to build

00:47:12 ◼   ► something that work within that because they understood it

00:47:15 ◼   ► where i think samsung's big crime was the copied it and didn't understand

00:47:20 ◼   ► what they were doing

00:47:21 ◼   ► the copying the big part

00:47:23 ◼   ► of design no doubt and it exists

00:47:26 ◼   ► it's it's kind of

00:47:27 ◼   ► seen in a bad light in uh... the digital realm but um...

00:47:31 ◼   ► if you look at another very popular design field fashion

00:47:34 ◼   ► it's rampant

00:47:36 ◼   ► you know you and i i i think probably every piece of clothing we have

00:47:39 ◼   ► down or shoes or wallets everything

00:47:42 ◼   ► is a copy of some

00:47:44 ◼   ► high-end designer you know

00:47:45 ◼   ► some high-end designer one point like i

00:47:47 ◼   ► i carry the slum wallet you know it was like some from paul walk

00:47:51 ◼   ► pocket wallets

00:47:52 ◼   ► some crazy designer, you know, some high-end men's fashion designer for one award show

00:47:59 ◼   ► or something like that on TV said, "You know what? I'm going to design a swim wallet for this

00:48:04 ◼   ► celebrity, and I'm going to charge him $200,000, and he's going to show it to everybody at the

00:48:08 ◼   ► Oscars, and then people are going to want to come to me and buy this slim wallet because they're

00:48:12 ◼   ► going to want to see it." And then a year later, 40 clones say, "I'm going to build a slim wallet,

00:48:18 ◼   ► too, and they go and they design a slim wallet.

00:48:20 ◼   ► And then there's another set of clones beyond that.

00:48:22 ◼   ► The first set of clones are the higher end,

00:48:26 ◼   ► couture-like brands.

00:48:27 ◼   ► But then eventually some guy that sells wallets

00:48:31 ◼   ► at JC Penney's is gonna look at that and say,

00:48:34 ◼   ► "We're gonna design a slim wallet,

00:48:36 ◼   ► "and that's the one I'm gonna walk in and buy for $50

00:48:39 ◼   ► "that Tom Cruise had 10 years ago for $200,000,"

00:48:43 ◼   ► or whatever.

00:48:45 ◼   ► And I'm exaggerating this.

00:48:46 ◼   ► I don't know that slim wallets work that way,

00:48:48 ◼   ► but it's a typical example of how fashion is built upon copying.

00:48:52 ◼   ► And the idea is that in that instance,

00:48:54 ◼   ► the copying of that built up the reputation of the designer because the

00:48:59 ◼   ► designer, fashion is very ephemeral.

00:49:03 ◼   ► So if you design something and it becomes a trend and becomes a fad,

00:49:07 ◼   ► all these people are copying it.

00:49:08 ◼   ► You've got a pulse on what people are really into.

00:49:11 ◼   ► It's people are very interested to see what your next thing is.

00:49:14 ◼   ► On the digital side, that seems less like it.

00:49:17 ◼   ► It's like we kind of put the shell around Apple where we say they have to be there's some

00:49:22 ◼   ► unified source of inspiration and everybody else has got to go do something different when really

00:49:28 ◼   ► Apple and pushing design the way that they do

00:49:30 ◼   ► They're influencing the whole industry and instead of being angry about all these people that are copying them. They should be happy

00:49:37 ◼   ► You know if they're five or six

00:49:40 ◼   ► Strongest competitors are constantly copying what they did last year. They're always ahead

00:49:46 ◼   ► always. No one will ever catch up with them because no one is ever going to try and look

00:49:52 ◼   ► past them and leapfrog them. Why are they upset about that? That's what I don't understand.

00:49:57 ◼   ► I mean, because the copy. But anyway, I'm going off on a tangent about people being

00:50:03 ◼   ► upset. I think it's obvious that what Samsung did wasn't right. I don't understand why Apple

00:50:08 ◼   ► pursued them the way that they did.

00:50:10 ◼   ► Yeah. But it's interesting because I always think of these things, I think so often what

00:50:14 ◼   ► what you see with app development is--

00:50:17 ◼   ► there is a very sort of a fashionable--

00:50:21 ◼   ► or almost like seasons or whatever,

00:50:23 ◼   ► where these things are in vogue for a short period.

00:50:27 ◼   ► And often will-- or even what will often happen

00:50:29 ◼   ► is someone will create something that's novel and interesting.

00:50:33 ◼   ► And that then sort of gets added into the toolbox

00:50:38 ◼   ► that everyone else almost starts to assume,

00:50:41 ◼   ► even though

00:50:42 ◼   ► that didn't exist before. I mean you imagine things like

00:50:46 ◼   ► and I think Tweety is probably one of the best examples of an app that did this.

00:50:50 ◼   ► Pull to refresh or even the sliding or swiping on a

00:50:54 ◼   ► table on a table view cell

00:50:56 ◼   ► to view information about it

00:50:58 ◼   ► or there's, you think you were saying with Path, with the radial menus,

00:51:02 ◼   ► there's all these little things that you'll start to

00:51:04 ◼   ► that something will come up, someone will almost invent something

00:51:08 ◼   ► and it becomes fashionable to do that.

00:51:11 ◼   ► And in many ways, what I find is interesting with that

00:51:13 ◼   ► is it's good for that to then spread

00:51:19 ◼   ► throughout the app ecosystem.

00:51:20 ◼   ► Because from a user's perspective, it becomes simple.

00:51:25 ◼   ► It's like, oh, well, I know how that works.

00:51:27 ◼   ► I've seen that before.

00:51:29 ◼   ► And that's dangerous sometimes.

00:51:31 ◼   ► But I always find it reassuring often

00:51:34 ◼   ► as a user where I had these things come across

00:51:37 ◼   ► I'm used to how to interact often with like the little slidey panel thing if that's where

00:51:43 ◼   ► they're going to store their, you know, it's like you swipe from the left to the right

00:51:49 ◼   ► and the little thing appears and you choose the next menu.

00:51:51 ◼   ► It's like I've done that enough times now that I know how that works and I know how

00:51:57 ◼   ► to use it.

00:51:58 ◼   ► What's interesting about these things to me is that someone commented on this a couple

00:52:06 ◼   ► weeks ago, I think on Twitter, where they said, "The amazing thing about pull-to-refresh

00:52:12 ◼   ► is that Apple's now..."

00:52:14 ◼   ► Probably breaking in two weeks.

00:52:17 ◼   ► But Apple's...

00:52:18 ◼   ► It was in the keynotes.

00:52:19 ◼   ► Oh, it was in the keynotes.

00:52:20 ◼   ► All right, so they have the pull-to-refresh control in iOS 6.

00:52:25 ◼   ► And the interesting thing about that is that, that this person was bringing up, was that

00:52:29 ◼   ► Apple actually pulled something, an interaction that wasn't created by them, and they're now

00:52:35 ◼   ► now merging it back in, and how often does that happen?

00:52:38 ◼   ► All of the other interactions that you mentioned,

00:52:40 ◼   ► none of those Apple provides by default,

00:52:43 ◼   ► and none of those Apple does in their apps.

00:52:46 ◼   ► So it's part of the kind of setting these trends.

00:52:50 ◼   ► It's not Apple setting these trends.

00:52:53 ◼   ► In fact, it's Apple that's saying,

00:52:55 ◼   ► "No, we're thinking about the long-term health

00:52:56 ◼   ► "of the platform, and what are gonna be the things

00:52:59 ◼   ► "that you're gonna use now and in 10 years?"

00:53:03 ◼   ► So even in just a short five years of the iPhone, that we've had the iPhone, look at

00:53:08 ◼   ► apps that we had at the beginning of the iPhone and now apps that we have now.

00:53:12 ◼   ► And if you look at mail, mail is a very close sibling to what it was when it first came

00:53:19 ◼   ► out.

00:53:20 ◼   ► A lot of the basic interactions have just gone unchanged.

00:53:23 ◼   ► In that sense, it's a timeless design.

00:53:26 ◼   ► Unlike say the calculator, for example, that has subtly changed the look over time and

00:53:32 ◼   ► even interaction where you rotate it and it does all this stuff.

00:53:38 ◼   ► I think as we look back to some of these, I think if you ran the original

00:53:41 ◼   ► version of Tweety now, it would look old.

00:53:46 ◼   ► It would look out of style, even worse.

00:53:49 ◼   ► You know, out of style in the sense that when we look back to haircuts of

00:53:54 ◼   ► the '80s or when you look at bell bottoms or something like that and you say,

00:53:58 ◼   ► those are out of style.

00:54:00 ◼   ► I think that's what we're starting to see with applications,

00:54:02 ◼   ► which is a new thing for our field.

00:54:04 ◼   ► It's very odd in the sense that you can look at,

00:54:08 ◼   ► you know, you can run Microsoft Word 6 or Microsoft Word 5,

00:54:12 ◼   ► which ran on the Mac, and you would run it,

00:54:14 ◼   ► and it would look like a very close cousin

00:54:17 ◼   ► to the Word that we would run today.

00:54:19 ◼   ► It's mostly unchanged.

00:54:22 ◼   ► I mean, Microsoft went into this phase

00:54:26 ◼   ► where they're adding the ribbon

00:54:27 ◼   ► and they're doing all that weird stuff,

00:54:29 ◼   ► but if you look at it on the Mac,

00:54:30 ◼   ► before they added the ribbon, I mean,

00:54:32 ◼   ► I guess the last version was Office 10

00:54:34 ◼   ► or something like that.

00:54:35 ◼   ► It looked very close to the same word

00:54:39 ◼   ► that existed 20 years before that.

00:54:41 ◼   ► Whereas now we're now saying that apps

00:54:44 ◼   ► were getting into this fashionable sense.

00:54:46 ◼   ► And I think it's a good thing.

00:54:47 ◼   ► I think it's a reaction to how popular

00:54:50 ◼   ► the mobile platform is and just how much of a,

00:54:55 ◼   ► how vogue it's become.

00:54:59 ◼   ► you know that uh... you know the iphone isn't it thing to have you know now when

00:55:03 ◼   ► you see phones and t_v_ shows

00:55:05 ◼   ► each rare if they don't have an iphone

00:55:07 ◼   ► evidence it's product placement for something else that's product placement

00:55:11 ◼   ► for samsung galaxy s whatever the hell they're on now

00:55:15 ◼   ► and

00:55:17 ◼   ► it's so it's all you know everybody you just assume everyone's gonna have an

00:55:20 ◼   ► iphone it's like it's almost like that's replaced cell phone

00:55:23 ◼   ► it's a because of that now these absolutely use it was a dot

00:55:28 ◼   ► Alec Baldwin got in trouble because he was playing Words with Friends while the plane

00:55:31 ◼   ► was landing.

00:55:32 ◼   ► Everybody's like, "That jerk Alec Baldwin playing this."

00:55:35 ◼   ► My first thought was, "Oh my God, if I was the Words with Friends developer, I would

00:55:38 ◼   ► be like, 'Alec Baldwin's using my app?

00:55:41 ◼   ► Jack Ryan?'

00:55:42 ◼   ► That's awesome."

00:55:43 ◼   ► That was my first thought, and that's the thing.

00:55:46 ◼   ► We have commercials now where we celebrate app developers where they're seen as these

00:55:50 ◼   ► stars.

00:55:51 ◼   ► The story I like to tell my friends, a friend of mine is on Broadway.

00:55:56 ◼   ► he's not the lead for Phantom now, he's the understudy for the male lead for Phantom of

00:56:03 ◼   ► the Opera in Broadway. I mean, the Broadway production, been on forever. And my buddy,

00:56:08 ◼   ► his dream was to be on Broadway. He went out and now he's, when he was auditioning for

00:56:13 ◼   ► shows, he was auditioning for shows with these other celebrities and greasing elbows with

00:56:19 ◼   ► all these people. And I'm just thinking, "Oh my gosh, my wife would be going crazy." And

00:56:23 ◼   ► I pull out my iPhone and he's like, "Oh, what are you doing these days?" I'm like, "Well,

00:56:25 ◼   ► I write apps for the iPhone."

00:56:26 ◼   ► He's like, "Oh my gosh."

00:56:27 ◼   ► And he pulls his phone out,

00:56:28 ◼   ► and he wants to talk to me about nothing but apps.

00:56:30 ◼   ► He doesn't want to brag about how he met some famous actor

00:56:34 ◼   ► or actress or anything like that.

00:56:35 ◼   ► He wants to talk about all these apps.

00:56:36 ◼   ► And I'm a cool guy because I'm like,

00:56:38 ◼   ► "Oh yeah, I know the guy that wrote that.

00:56:39 ◼   ► Oh yeah, I had drinks next to, you know, with this guy."

00:56:43 ◼   ► Or something like that.

00:56:44 ◼   ► There's a celebrity aura around app development,

00:56:48 ◼   ► and maybe it's a bubble, maybe it'll go away.

00:56:52 ◼   ► I don't really remember seeing this with web developers,

00:56:55 ◼   ► and the whole web scene, but I think part of it,

00:56:58 ◼   ► that's what's driving this notion

00:57:00 ◼   ► that apps are fashionable now,

00:57:02 ◼   ► that we're gonna see things go in and out of fashion,

00:57:06 ◼   ► and it's why we're experimenting.

00:57:08 ◼   ► It's why Path did some of the things they did.

00:57:11 ◼   ► Path was trying to prove, hey, you should use us

00:57:15 ◼   ► instead of Instagram or Facebook or Twitter.

00:57:18 ◼   ► You should put all of your data in us.

00:57:20 ◼   ► And they did that by producing this very attractive,

00:57:23 ◼   ► very interesting, very fashion-forward iPhone app

00:57:27 ◼   ► that a lot of people copied.

00:57:28 ◼   ► And I think by people copying them,

00:57:32 ◼   ► that boosted their sense,

00:57:35 ◼   ► because now when you see that little clock in the corner,

00:57:37 ◼   ► it's like, oh, you've got the path scroll indicator style.

00:57:40 ◼   ► And that's really just one step away from saying,

00:57:43 ◼   ► oh yeah, I'm gonna Xerox something from you.

00:57:45 ◼   ► - Sure, sure.

00:57:45 ◼   ► - Or I'm gonna TiVo this show.

00:57:47 ◼   ► That very,

00:57:52 ◼   ► very seductive, you know, verb form of your product

00:57:56 ◼   ► that you want to get to.

00:57:57 ◼   ► And so I think it's a good thing,

00:58:01 ◼   ► but it's also, it has the downsides.

00:58:03 ◼   ► And I think if you go to, with all fashion,

00:58:07 ◼   ► you've got to think about it.

00:58:08 ◼   ► You know, you never know, are you gonna be the guy

00:58:10 ◼   ► that put high-waisted pants on women again,

00:58:13 ◼   ► or are you gonna be the guy that came out with, you know,

00:58:16 ◼   ► the revelation of jean jackets or something?

00:58:18 ◼   ► I don't, you know, I don't know.

00:58:19 ◼   ► I'm not a fashion guy.

00:58:21 ◼   ► I leave that to my wife.

00:58:23 ◼   ► So as we start straying away from the things--

00:58:26 ◼   ► [LAUGHTER]

00:58:26 ◼   ► How do we get our G check?

00:58:27 ◼   ► It's like the things that we're experts in

00:58:29 ◼   ► may be a good point to wind it down.

00:58:32 ◼   ► So I just wanted to thank you so much for taking the time.

00:58:35 ◼   ► Thank you.

00:58:35 ◼   ► I think it definitely informs the--

00:58:38 ◼   ► I know I've benefited from the time that we've spent together

00:58:40 ◼   ► in terms of being focused so much on the Xcode programming

00:58:47 ◼   ► part.

00:58:48 ◼   ► I think it's always good to have that balance.

00:58:51 ◼   ► It's like the other, it's just the other part of it.

00:58:54 ◼   ► And you can't, it's like, it's like,

00:58:55 ◼   ► it just, one wouldn't really stand well without the others.

00:58:58 ◼   ► - No, I agree, I agree.

00:58:59 ◼   ► And I think that's what hopefully it kind of came across

00:59:02 ◼   ► in all of this I was saying is that

00:59:04 ◼   ► it shouldn't be seen as the dark side,

00:59:06 ◼   ► but just the other side.

00:59:07 ◼   ► Just it's, there's another way to think about it

00:59:10 ◼   ► and another way, but they're really

00:59:12 ◼   ► all after the same purpose.

00:59:13 ◼   ► - Yeah. - You know,

00:59:14 ◼   ► it's all geared towards the same thing.

00:59:16 ◼   ► And I think there's even similar, you know,

00:59:18 ◼   ► problem solving techniques that you use.

00:59:21 ◼   ► Cool.

00:59:22 ◼   ► Thank you very much.

00:59:23 ◼   ► It was fun.

00:59:24 ◼   ► And appreciate your time.

00:59:27 ◼   ► Thank you for joining me for that interview with Rob.

00:59:29 ◼   ► Hopefully that was interesting and useful.

00:59:31 ◼   ► If you want to follow up with Rob or find him online,

00:59:33 ◼   ► he's in a couple of different places.

00:59:35 ◼   ► His website is blog.robryan.com.

00:59:39 ◼   ► For Martian Craft, the company that he manages and works for

00:59:43 ◼   ► that does excellent app development on iPhone, iPad,

00:59:47 ◼   ► Android, even do Mac, I think.

00:59:49 ◼   ► Probably some of the best guys in the business.

00:59:51 ◼   ► Reach out to them if you're actually

00:59:53 ◼   ► looking for custom design services or application

00:59:57 ◼   ► development.

00:59:57 ◼   ► That's martiancraft.com.

00:59:59 ◼   ► And he's on Twitter as Captain Taco, spelled C-A-P-T-T-A-C-O.

01:00:06 ◼   ► And links to all of these sites are in the show notes.

01:00:09 ◼   ► So otherwise, I hope you have a good rest of your day,

01:00:12 ◼   ► and happy coding.