
By the way, Firefox is my system default browser. The team has put in a ton of work to make it fast and stable.
How people interact with their world.
By the way, Firefox is my system default browser. The team has put in a ton of work to make it fast and stable.
Built in Drama, which is a nice new macOS app. It doesn’t have the scriptability that Kite does, but I like the UI and drawing capabilities more than Principle.
Part of me hopes that Apple’s Pro Workflow group is exploring something like a Touch Pad (not Bar) for use with desktop apps. A multi-touch panel that augments the keyboard, mouse, and trackpad that can be used to execute application-specific actions using an interface provided by the application. It could be a great way to provide color pickers, shuttle controls, etc. The kind of things the Touch Bar provides on the laptops, but with greater potential because of the less restricted height. Fingerprint authentication would be nice to have too, I suppose.
As a designer and photographer, I was particularly interested in Finder’s new Gallery View. While the functionality is solid, there is room for improvement, particularly in pointing device and keyboard interactions.
If you are a designer and currently use just a mouse or just a trackpad, you are missing out. Assuming sufficient desk space (and hands), you can use the trackpad with one hand to pan and zoom in design apps while simultaneously using the mouse with the other to drag or resize objects (though screen update performance ranges from a bit janky to pretty smooth, depending on the app). Once you’ve tried it, you won’t want to go back.
I’ve always found metadata interesting for the possibilities it presents to retrieve and explore information based on attributes, so I’m glad Apple added the ability to display more file metadata in Mojave’s Finder. The problem is that you can’t do much with it aside from view it and select an individual label or value. Below are videos of prototypes I built in Kite for how it could evolve to be more useful.
Assuming an image has GPS coordinates embedded in its Exif metadata, it would be nice to be able to show the image on a map without having to add it to Photos to use the Places view within that app.
It would be great to be able to create a Spotlight-powered Smart Folder based on metadata displayed in Finder’s Preview pane. Currently, the process of creating Smart Folders from image metadata (other than the basics like filename and type) involves opening the “Other…” menu in the Spotlight query builder, scrolling to or searching for the metadata type you want to use, then clicking OK. It’s pretty well tucked away and the list of available metadata is extensive.
For example, say I want to create a Smart Folder of all the images captured with my Olympus and exported to JPEG. As you can see below, it’s potentially a fairly easy process when you can start with metadata that’s already displayed.
At narrow pane widths, the Search Quick Action would collapse into the Other menu.
I first thought of this design for Capture One, but it can fit into most any app that displays metadata in a label-value list and lets you build collections based on metadata.
Rather than simply displaying a folder’s icon at a larger size when selected in Gallery View, Mojave’s Finder could give users a peek into the folder (information scent) by previewing the folder’s contents. In the case of populous folders, the items shown at the front could be based on the date last opened or modified to increase the odds they are more recent in the user’s memory.
While this example only shows images (for which I think the feature would be most useful), it would work with any file type providing QuickLook previews.
I imagine I’m not the only Sketch user who maximizes their document window. Unfortunately, this creates an interaction problem with Sketch’s scrubby steppers.
When the window is maximized (full-screen or zoomed), the Inspector is very close to the edge of the screen, meaning there isn’t much room to travel to increase the value by clicking and dragging a stepper to the right. As of version 51.2, the value stops increasing once the cursor reaches the edge.
Instead, Sketch should detect that the cursor has hit the edge of the screen and keep increasing the value as long as the cursor remains at the edge. Infinite depth!
Originally a few tweets, posted here for posterity. I filed a feature suggestion with the Sketch team.
It has been great to watch Sketch evolve from a fairly simple drawing application (DrawIt, originally) to a key part of many digital designers' workflow and the center of a design tool ecosystem. Having been a heavy Fireworks user, I see a lot of it in Sketch.
The Bohemian Coding team was obviously aware of Fireworks and the community around it. One of the first Sketch plugins I knew of was Ale Muñoz's Sketch Commands, which he originally developed for Fireworks. He has since joined the Bohemian team. Bohemian Coding also asked illustrator and designer Isabel Aracama to create a vector illustration showing that Sketch could be used for such things. Prior to its demise, she was a vocal promoter of Fireworks. If you didn't know Fireworks could handle complex vector illustration, check out her work.
Fireworks wasn't just for slicing images. A number of features made it a good tool for designing any pixel-based interface, features that are among those designers coming from Photoshop to Sketch have found particularly welcome.
Fireworks allowed you to creates pages within your design file of different resolutions. Ultimately, it's not as flexible as the Page > Artboard (or infinite canvas) arrangement in Sketch, but it was a lot more flexible than Photoshop allowed at the time. This made it easy to design different parts of interfaces while having access to the same symbols and styles.
Fireworks allowed you to nest symbols, and scale and style them without affecting other instances. If configured with 9-slice scaling, you could stretch symbols without distorting the areas outside the center slice.
Buttons were a special symbol type in Fireworks, allowing you to create a base button and reuse it with custom label text. Within the symbol, you could create up, down, and hover states.
Rich Symbols were a pain to create, but provided some of the same functionality as Symbol Overrides do in Sketch. The prolific John Dunning wrote some tools to ease the process, but Fireworks was a bit buggy in handling custom Rich Symbols.
If you needed to share your symbols, you could just export a symbol library file.
Plugins (known as Extensions in Fireworks) were an under-promoted feature in Fireworks. As designers find with Sketch, plugins can dramatically increase your efficiency. One of the first plugins I installed whenever I set up Fireworks was John Dunning's QuickFire, which put all the commands of other plugins a few keystrokes away rather than buried in a submenu of the Commands menu, much like Sketch Runner does in Sketch. I used Ale Muñoz's Orange Commands, John Dunning's keyboard resizing commands, and Matt Stow's math resizing commands a lot to improve my workflow.
The Twist and Fade plugin included with Fireworks is similar to Looper for Sketch.
If you are primarily concerned with testing whether a navigation scheme makes sense, simple click-through prototyping is quite useful. It doesn't let you work with user input beyond clicks or transition smoothly between states and views, but it can help you address problems in layout, contrast, and labeling.
In Fireworks, you would draw arbitrary polygonal hotspots or place button symbols, then specify a page within your Fireworks file to which they should point. You couldn't specify a transition (push left, right, cross-fade, etc.); everything just swapped. You could export to HTML (which created an image map) or to a clickable PDF with everything rasterized. The prototyping functionality in the recent v49 release of Sketch is not terribly different, but it represents what Emanuel Sá referred to as “the tip of the iceberg.”
I'm glad that David Malouf had adopted Fireworks for the team at my first job working as a designer. It served me well from 2006 until Adobe announced the end of development in 2013. Reading the writing on the wall, I switched to Sketch, even before it had many tools for reuse like symbols and shared styles. If they can just get that guide space measurement feature implemented…
I know there are FPS-inspired shortcuts for assigning resizing constaints to layers in Sketch, but I’d like a way to simply copy those for one layer and paste them onto another.
I’ve opened a few Sketch documents lately that specify fonts I didn’t have installed. Something like the TypeKit integration in Adobe’s Creative Cloud apps could smooth the process of acquiring missing fonts.
James Young pointed me to the FontBuddy plugin by Anima.
I would really like to be able to interact with applications in a simultaneous multi-modal fashion, taking advantage of pointing device, keyboard, voice, and gestures. In some cases, I'd like to direct speech commands to a background app while pointer and keyboard focus remains in the front app. Sometimes you need information from an app, not necessarily to use it.
Say I’m chatting with a friend to schedule dinner next week, but I don’t remember my schedule. Calendar is open and visible in another region of the screen, but it’s showing the current week. Assuming the Mac is always listening for the Siri invocation command, I just say “Hey, Siri, go to next week in Calendar” rather than switching to Calendar, navigating to next week, then switching back to the chat. This scenario is depicted in the video below.
Speedy interpretation of speech commands is crucial to these interactions feeling fluid and natural. Incorporation of a speech co-processor (as with the iMac Pro) allows Macs to always listen for the “Hey, Siri” prompt rather than having to invoke Siri through the menubar item or keyboard shortcut.
If Apple builds a display (still hoping for a 40-inch 8K) to pair with the forthcoming Mac Pro, they should include the dot field hardware that enables Face Unlock on the iPhone X. Provide that on the Mac, but go further by using it to recognize hand gestures made in the space between the user and the display. It could also potentially be useful for those with motor impairments as a way to use blink patterns to execute commands. Maybe it could even be used as a way to translate sign languages to text, without having to wear a special glove.
I wrote years ago about visual gesture interpretation, for which there now seems to be capable hardware. More recent thoughts on gestural interaction from David Rose and IDEO.
Say you drag a few images into one of Affinity Photo’s merging tools, only to realize you opened the wrong one. The commands are grouped in the menu, two have keyboard shortcuts right next to one another, and the tools have similar layouts, making this a fairly easy mistake to make.
Rather than having to hit Cancel, open the intended merge tool, then relocate the images you want to merge, what if you could just switch to it, with the images you added still in place?
I'm looking forward to Affinity Publisher!