Listening to this makes me feel so nostalgic for a time before all the notifications, tweets and emails. The 90’s. With no comprehension of time or the future, all you cared about was the now. The world was the road you lived on. Eating cookies. Your mom putting your suncream on. The tooth fairy. Going to sleep before the sun. Girls? pfft.. they smell. Sliding down the stairs in a duvet. Almost, just about reaching the tap in your kitchen. The fear on a sunday night or the rush of excitement when the tractor came to cut the grass. “Please rewind before return”.

I feel our generation is going to suffer from nostalgia more than any other in the history of humanity. Look at all this journalling we do everyday, it’s going to get pretty emotional. It’s so exciting to be living during the most disruptive time in human history; just don’t take that for granted, do something remarkable.

I can’t always put my finger on it, but I’ve had this peculiar feeling recently. I navigate between the same sites, occasionally clicking through to something new, but only for a brief moment in the grand scheme of it all. It feels so comfortable, but in an uneasy sort of way. Where has the wanderlust gone? I remember a time when you’d set off on the internet, as if on some kind of voyage. It was exciting and full of opportunity. Perhaps it was the very thing that gave the internet a bad name. The internet felt wild and untamed. What was once malleable now feels rigid, and thus fragile. The Iron Web.

We’ve created categories, boundaries and singular entities. We’ve designed it to be fragmented; we’ve built walls, put up fences and dug ditches. We’ve taken so much of what we know not to work in the history of humanity and we’ve forced it upon billions. Despite the incredible...

Yesterday, Scoble uploaded a short interview with GoPro’s Kris Jamieson, who helped make the skydive happen. Jamieson mentions at about 1:45 that the whole stunt was a ‘last minute’ thing. There’s nothing wrong with that, but when you think about it further it all starts to make sense.

The skydive was just a skydive. While impressive, it had nothing to do with Google Glass. it’s almost as if Google didn’t have anything worth showing, so they figured they could distract us with some fancy tricks and shiny stuff. Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t it just a camera attached to their heads?

Google obviously needed to do this; why else would they do it?

As a child of about 4 or 5, I think I was more aware of the Gulf War than other children my age. I had many friends in school that came to Ireland to escape the terror of the Gulf War. My dad, an Egyptian, would sit with a cigarette lit in his mouth as he watched reports from the Middle East. The oil fields would burn, I could smell the smoke. Stories from the indigenous perspective would be projected into our living room, translated by my dad of course. As an Irish–Egyptian I will always have a connection to the region.

About this time last year, I came across a short film that brought a lot of those feelings back for me. Perhaps it’s the nostalgia of the old grainy film; whatever it is, it’s a tragedy beautifully told. It’s difficult to explain the emotions when watching this film but If you’ve got 30 minutes, I recommend you watch this.

Perhaps this is nothing, but I might as well document it anyway. So I was browsing my news feed a few moments ago when I noticed MG had liked a few tumblr posts. So not one to ignore, I clicked through.

I opened a few extra tabs but when I opened the second thumbnail, a link to Path’s blog, I noticed the Facebook favicon in the corner.

This is the link from the image above:

http://blog.path.com/post/26045642389/pathspeaksmorelanguages?og=1&fb_action_ids=10101751342721963%2C10101751341574263&fb_action_types=tumblr-feed%3Alike&fb_source=feed_opengraph

I figured it was a bug, but then again this is Facebook, there’s probably something a little more sinister at work here. I opened a few more links to see if they behaved similarly. Strangely, they do display the Facebook favicon, but only for a fraction of a second before it’s swapped with the proper favicon. It’s barely noticeable...

After reading Andy Mangold’s critique of Dribbble, I think it’s time I share some ideas for a new kind of site. Please steal them.

1) Allow and encourage full-size 1:1 shots (no crops). Designers often have large displays so make use of that demographic advantage. This would force designers to share interfaces in their entirety; not just the pretty buttons. I’ve downloaded apps that looked pretty up-close but as it turns out they were horrible to use. Namely, Synthesizer 76, which was appropriately shit.

2) Speaking of interactions, a slideshow and timeline feature allowing designers to demonstrate interactions over time. Time is an important dimension of designing product. Especially helpful when demonstrating the flow of an interaction. A little like InvisionApp. Users could then easily comment on the quality of the interactions not just pixels, much like when you’re working with...

No member of staff would stand outside accosting passers-by with our menu.

Nobody would ever wait to be seated. Of course, customers would be walked to their seats, just don’t make them wait; esspecially when there are empty seats available.

All tables would be created equal. No ‘better’ seats.

No tables would wobble, ever.

Offer to take jackets/bags to the free cloakroom.

Nobody would have a view into the toilets when the toilet door is open.

Nobody would be able to hear hand dryers from the toilet.

In fact, they are never called toilets, they are called restrooms.

Push to exit restroom doors. Too many people don’t know what soap and water is. The last thing you want are customers thinking your food made them sick.

One server takes responsibility for your table. They ensure that your drinks are replenished and your food is exactly how you ordered it. They can enlist the help of...

We talk about building for the future, pushing the human race forward and leaving our dent on the universe. If there’s one thing I want to achieve during my fleeting moment, it’s for my grandchildren to grow up in a world where tobacco is not even a consideration. I want to eradicate the disease of tobacco addiction and confine it to the abstractions of the past; an old and antiquated practice and as bizarrely backward as this advertisement from the 40’s:

Or as strange as this video warning people of homosexuals:

Tobacco has killed more people than the bubonic plague. It kills more people each year than any current pandemic or inadvertently spread disease. Three times as many people die from smoking related illnesses each year than HIV/AIDS. We’re essentially producing HIV/AIDS en masse and selling it to kids. We can stop it all tomorrow. Imagine we had the ability to do that with...

Normally when you think of “bad design”, you think of laziness or mistakes. […] Dark Patterns are different – they are not mistakes, they are carefully crafted with a solid understanding of human psychology, and they do not have the user’s interests in mind.

WIKI.DARKPATTERNS.ORG

Let me draw your attention to a UI element within the iPod app that certainly doesn’t have the user’s interests in mind.

As the user navigates back through the hierarchy of songs, albums and artists, they are met with a ‘Store’ button. At first, this seems quite innocent. However, when you study it a little further you get the feeling there’s something else at work. The ‘Store’ button was not always here, this used to be a blank area; this signals something. It tells us that Apple want to increase iTunes activity at the point of music consumption. That’s still pretty reasonable; let me explain what’s really...

Before accepting Dustin’s offer to join Svbtle, I spent years trying to refine my blog. Much like a disgruntled teen, I struggled with my image. It took a long time for me to realize that more often that not it’s the subtleties — or should that be the svbtleties? — of an experience that define the experience. Every detail of the medium should exude the mentality of the message, it should be apparent while non-obvious. Having control of these details has long been dear to me, and with that I shall express my optimistic frustration with having relinquished the sovereignty of my blog over to the Svbtle network.

Format

With the increasing variety of screen formats, I find it difficult to reason a far-left aligned website. This, after the Kudos button, is perhaps my biggest concern regarding the Svbtle experience. With a left aligned website you’re forcing readers to turn their heads from...