The Cosmonauts

(via I Love Charts)

You know how long it takes to do simple? About ten times longer than fast and dirty.

Paul Giambarba

(via Minimal)

Mi abuelo, alguien de quien he aprendido muchas cosas, solía decir que “las cosas o se hacen bien o no se hacen”. Esa ha sido mi forma de entender el diseño desde que empecé, no sólo para ejercerlo sino también para enseñarlo.

He decidido volver a enseñar diseño de interacción.

Quiero volver a formar gente como creo que hay que hacerlo: sin prisas, enseñando con ejemplos, hablando, debatiendo y trabajando. Creo en la honestidad absoluta de enseñar ejemplos buenos y también errores, de hablar de lo que no funciona y de lo que sí, y también de invitar a gente mejor que uno mismo para que comparta sus formas de hacer. Quiero que mis alumnos practiquen, discutan, lean, salgan a la calle y observen para luego volver a practicar.

He estado dos años sin enseñar. No me sentía con ganas porque dudaba de muchas de las cosas que había enseñado antes. Tras dos años de trabajar muy duro he desterrado alguna creencia y he reforzado unas cuantas certezas. Primero pensé en organizar un curso de dos días, algo intensivo. Lo descarté porque realmente no sería capaz de transmitir todo lo que quiero transmitir. Si hay que enseñar diseño, hagámoslo bien.

En noviembre volveré a reunir a un grupo de 6 u 8 personas jóvenes que quieran crecer como diseñadores de interacción y que estén dispuestos a venir al estudio todas las tardes de los viernes durante 5 meses. Les enseñaré lo que sé, les haré trabajar duro y les trataré como si fueran mi proyecto más importante.

Empezaremos en noviembre. Dentro de poco tendré una web con todos los detalles: fechas, temario, precio, plazas) y podré empezar a seleccionar a los alumnos. Mientras tanto, si te interesa escríbeme a javier@vostok.es.

SUMMARY IN ENGLISH: I’m back to teaching interaction design. Starting this November I’ll repeat the Programa Vostok course I taught twice some years ago. It will be a 5 month course with classes every friday afternoon in Madrid. Classes will be in Spanish. Contact me if interested: javier@vostok.es

We like the iPad. We like elegance, simplicity and practicality and no iPad sleeve out there gave us that. So we decided to make our own and –if you like it– share it with you.

A few things that were important for us and wanted to abide by:

• It had to be handmade. We wanted good quality. Done with great care and attention. And the right tailor for that was jositajosi.
• It had to be pretty but practical. And what’s the iPad’s biggest hassle? Fingerprints. So choosing the right material was important. Solution: corduroy is perfect to clean glass. Slightly rugged but very gentle.
• The interior had to offer extra cushioning for ultimate protection and had to contrast with the outer cover (navy blue). Solution: a thin but resistant cushioning in Vostok blue.
• It should offer free-standing support. The sleeve is perfect to rest the iPad horizontally on top of it, the corduroy counterbalances the roundness of the base and keeps it steady.

It’s 35€ and can be shipped to anywhere in the world. Have a look:

You can buy it at vostok.es/ipadsleeve

In this video Timo gives us an update on the iPad app for Planetaki and shows us a preview of what’s to come. We hope to have it ready in a month.

In short:

• new design
• improved legibility
• ability to read posts offline
• fixed theme but customizable backgrounds

Most of you know that we collaborate closely with Floresfrescas.com. So it won’t come as a surprise to you that we received a beautiful assortment of flowers the other day and we couldn’t help but make a video of the unboxing. Perhaps some of you already know what it feels like to receive one of these babies. By the way, we designed and defined the identity of Floresfrescas.com and how it’s applied to their boxes.

We invited Victoriano to come over and have a coffee and he made some pictures of us in exchange. Too bad Timo was in Germany that day. Here are the pics:

Today is Canada day. We salute all canadians around the world especially our own Mark McKay who’s in Canda right now and will be there for a month. We’ll sure miss him.

So, to commemorate such a grandiose day here is our favorite canadian hymn ‘Canadian, please’ by Gunnarolla. To celebrate, people have been remixing the original video.

Very sharp article by Alberto Romero (Denegro) about the use and misuse of available space in Gmail for iPad: Back to sidebars and popups.

It left me thinking about Planetaki and its iPad version, whether it should have a sidebar or not.

This is the kind of stuff Mark tells you to justify his totally unacceptable levels of coffee consumption:

(original at Homeowners Insurance)

Hi Everybody,

I just wanted to say thanks for sending a t-shirt all the way to Alaska! You have a great portfolio. Keep rockin’ the minimalism.

Mikaela

No, thank you Mikaela!

Hoverboard. Nils Guadagnin. Back to the Future!

And if you believe (as I do) that Back to the Future is one true source of innovation and inspiration, check this delightful poster by Justin van Genderen:

In the end we came up with a pretty good compilation of design films. Thank you. We’ll make a selection and post the final movie list soon. Finally, I guess you’ll all agree with me that Mr. Guersenzvaig deserves that premium account. Congratulations to you, sir!

We hope you’ve all made good use of those Filmin codes and that you’ve liked the experience.

Alicia Chen did the Chinese (Mandarin) translation of Planetaki and now it’s available for you to use.  You can switch languages from the “preferences” link on the top right-hand of your planet. FYI: Planetaki is also available in Spanish, English, French, Italian, Galician and Romanian.

Here’s the announcement in video. Enjoy (especially after 32s).

Thank you Alicia :)

We’re looking to translate Planetaki to the following languages:

• Russian
• Hindi
• Dutch
• Arabic
• Greek
• Turkish
• Korean
• Polish
• Slovenian
• Bulgarian

Planetaki’s a small startup with little funds so we can’t pay you for your job, but we’ll give you a cool gift and you’ll have your name on the credits :) If you’re interested give us a shout hello@vostok.es

So far, the lanaguages available are:

• Spanish
• English
• French
• Italian
• Galician
• Romanian

And the ones that are in process, and you’ll be able to use soon, are:

• Chinese (Mandarin)
• German
• Portuguese
• Euskera
• Catalan

This is the kind of mess you get when you create an account at Eskup and first log in:

For those of you who don’t know, Eskup is a kind of social network, twitter-like, microblogging plattform which merges Elpais.com content with user generated microposts. Kind of like the dull answer to “how do we, newspaper, take advantage of social media?”

El Pais seems pretty excited about this. Their excitement is directly proportional to my skepticism. They’ve done a great deal of programming for this and they’ve taken risks, which is good. But they URGENTLY need to rework the design and functionality so the product is more understandable and easy to use. Otherwise it will be another missed atempt at redefining online journalism in Spain.

My name is Timo Taglieber, and I’m developing the Planetaki iPad App for Vostok. I came to Madrid just for this project, and it’s been great so far. In the following, I’ll describe some of my experiences here as a developer.

Before starting my ‘mission’ here at Vostok, I had a bit of experience with the C language, and felt comfortable with Python, Java and PHP. So naturally, it was time for something new. I had no contact whatsoever with Mac development, and took the opportunity to dive into it.

I recently bought an iPod Touch, so that at least the iOS and its user interface wouldn’t be completely new to me. Now it was time to go behind the scenes of shiny buttons and polished layouts: I started to build the iPad Application for Planetaki.com from scratch. Here are some of the obstacles I encountered.

Problems and solutions

• While the web version of Planetaki is rendered by browsers, we wanted to build a native interface. This means that some things you take for granted when web designing simply don’t exist on the iPad. Where you just scroll down in your browser window to read the content of your planet, I created a table view with customized cells for each blog post. Since there is no automatic rendering of flowing text (we can’t know the height of a post beforehand), a few tricks were necessary: The HTML content of a post is injected into a web view, and those objects are capable of determining their height with Javascript. This allows us to dynamically redraw the scrollable list of posts with correct proportions.
• Before testing on the actual device, we weren’t sure if the planet screen with its many web view objects would render fast enough. Luckily, it did. As soon as the loading of images in posts will be implemented, which is notorious for being slow on the iDevices, we will see how good this solution really is – Fingers crossed.
• Multithreading was another new thing I had to dig into. The user interface can’t be blocked while new posts are being downloaded, so this needs to happen in the background. After messing with notification sending between threads, and thinking about smart ways to design all that, I read some really good advice: One usually doesn’t need as much concurrency going on, as one initially thinks.. So avoid the traps of thread programming wherever possible (Thanks, SQLite.org!). Using a NSOperation and keeping it small and simple was the way to go.
• Memory management is tricky if you have to do it manually. There’s no garbage collection with iOS, so the retaining and releasing of your objects has to be balanced. Occasionally, you have to make sure there are no memory leaks in your code, and if otherwise, get rid of them. It can be done and you get used to it, but it certainly adds to the overall complexity.

Resources

A few words about the resources i’m using:

The IRC-Channel #iphonedev on freenode.net turned out to be quite helpful. Don’t be scared by a rude tone and people throwing ‘RTFM’ around, there are actually some seasoned developers how can provide new insights and perspectives. Sometimes, just not being alone with a problem is enough drive to keep going and eventually crack it.

Programming books (Objective-C, Cocoa) didn’t really do it for me. They seem to cling to successive example apps which they develop throughout the chapters, making them more and more complex. What I was really looking for were minimal examples, solely focused on one problem at a time with any other clutter removed. It sounds simple, but there are way too few of those around. I’m the type of learner who seeks those example to compose my own solutions bit by bit, instead of reading up on something for hours first. You might call this the ‘Google Generation’, but this method is quite efficient for technical things.

What’s next

As the project keeps growing, also does the overhead of maintenance and administration (probably true for most complex system). The cogs and screws of the machine need to be readjusted constantly. I’m happy that at this point the basic infrastructure works, and all basic problems are solved. You can see a schematic overview of the units of Planetaki for iPad below. The light gray boxes are external libraries, and PlanetUpdater is the background process mentioned before.

Now we ‘just’ need to do visual fine tuning, complete the communication with the Planetaki API, do some testing, and prepare for submission to the App Store. Stay tuned!

Written by Timo Taglieber

Hooray! We just got our copy of Designing Obama, a project that came out from Kickstarter in which we appear as Silver contributors, and it really is a great book. Here it is

We recently noticed that some people miss filling a gift card when sending flowers through floresfrescas.com. We know they miss them because some users later complain about not having that option. This is the solution Mark Mackay came up with:

These are some of the principles we’ve applied here:

• Place the alert as close as possible to the spot where the decision has to be made.
• Add visual feedback that something important is going on (the message flashes) so it is noticeable.
• Change the form (size, color and text) of the confirmation element to make sure the user notices the alert

Here’s the full scene:

If we knew that not noticing the cards was too frequent we’d consider haing another step in the process just for filling the cards. But we are unsure about that and there is no easy way for knowing this (no, usability tests don’t work for that because users pay extra attention when observed). So instead of redesigning the process making it more effective and painful we went with this “user interface hack”.

We want to build the best list of design (interaction, information, industrial, product design and architecture) movies and documentaries of all times. Here’s the deal: write down in the comment section the name of a film or doc that’s somehow design related and, in return, we’ll give you a code to watch any movie in Filmin‘s (Spain’s best streaming service for indie film) catalog for free.

We also have a promo code for a premium account at Filmin (any movie, any time anywhere) which we’ll give to the person who makes the best list (it’s ok to repeat some movie suggested by someone else). Easy peasy japanesey. A neat gift for little effort.

These are the movies/docs we have so far:

Kitchen Stories (Bent Hamer, 2003)

The Fountainhead (King Vidor, 1949)

Tucker: The Man and his Dream (Francis Ford Coppola, 1988)

Helvetica (Gary Hustwit, 2007)

Powers of 10 (and other films by Ray y Charles Eames, 1977)

The RTVE series ‘Elogio de la luz‘, each episode covering an architect

The Belly of an Architect (Peter Greenaway, 1987)

Sketches of Frank Gehry (Sydney Pollack, 2005)

Play Time (Jacques Tati, 1967)

Full disclosure: We’ve done Filmin’s web redesign and we love it (the service, not the redesign. Well… both). We’ll go into details in a future post.