Affordance

Dan Wineman has a great post on affordance.  You should read it in its entirety -- these would be 3 minutes well spent.

Affordance is one of the universal principles of design. Lego blocks' male/female surfaces naturally afford plugging them into each other. Door handles naturally afford gripping them and pulling the door open. It is a powerful principle when used properly.

And while the problem with the old (classic?) iOS was overusing (and abusing) skeuomorphism, the problem of iOS 7 may well be the lack of affordance. You cannot trade how surfaces look with how elements interact. They are not interchangeable. Interactions are dynamic -- they happen while you work with the interface...

But affordances can only help if they appear before you interact. You need to see the handle to mentally feel how to open the door, or even to know that it’s a door in the first place, regardless of how smoothly it’s going to swing open.

UX Tip Of The Day: Choose Wisely

Seriously. Everything Neven Mrgan writes, you should read. That is, if you care, even in the slightest, about anything design/UX in a mobile app context.

Here is his take on the Take / Choose Photo action sheet.

/It's a couple of weeks old post but I feel obliged to link it here./

Color Scheme Designer

All HTML 5 web app for designing / brainstorming color schemes.

I can't believe I find this just now. It's so freaking awesome!

Michael Heilemann On iOS 7

Thoughtful and worth reading criticism of iOS 7. If you are even vaguely interested in design and UX, you'll be fascinated by his points. And I do hope someone at Apple is taking notes too.

Triply. Design Iteration 3.1

Relatively minor improvements over the last one.
Tweaking the positioning, rounded corners, whitespace etc. As a whole much more harmonious look.

Here I decided to align and group the labels a bit. The flush left alignment creates connection between the items and frees up whitespace.

I got rid of the rounded corners as they conflicted with basically everything else in the design. Also, I made the white border a bit narrower to put more emphasis on the photo inside. And last, but not least, I removed the 'Trip to...' as it was redundant (the app is about trips so there is no need to throw that word all over the UI). This had the added benefit of creating a stronger visual left alignment (as the letter T was pretty weak for that purpose).

Triply. Design Iteration 3

White space. Thin, elegant typeface (yes, it's Helvetica Neue Ultralight). Overall, much of an improvement.

iCloud Backup

Marco Arment shares his grandfather's experience with Apple Genius and iCloud (and PC-related stuff in general). It's worth reading.

This rings so true (emphasis mine):

It’s easy for most of us around these parts to forget how badly technology still works for so many people. This is supposed to be the best we have today: an iPad, a routine OS update, an Apple Store, an automatic backup feature.

Too many things that are supposed to just work simply don't. And I am not blaming Apple here. They have been setting the bar in this 'it-just-works' thing for decades.

Scott Hanselman is right. Everything is broken. And nobody is upset.