Reading in 2020
2020 was a critical year for reading in many ways. Reading the right news at the right time from the right source, could save your life in 2020. Reading and consuming propaganda, on the other hand, could get you killed by a new virus or result in, you know, a failed coup.
2020 was also a good year for long novels, given the long periods of time cooped up at home. But on the other hand, with a raging pandemic, nationwide racial equity protests, deadly white nationalist violence, and an existential presidential election, it was kind of hard to stick to books.
Cross-Post: “Business Chat for iOS is coming: here’s what you need to know”
I enjoyed researching and writing this blog post at The Nerdery on the soon-to-be-released Business Chat for iOS. Really curious to see the reach and impact of this new platform.
Cross-Post: The Growing Importance of UX in Enterprise Software
This tweet from Sarah Doody and this mention in her newsletter [link no longer active] reminded me that I never cross-posted my blog post at The Nerdery about UX in enterprise software. Almost a year later, it still feels relevant, though I’d like to think at some point soon UX’s role in enterprise software will be so self-evident that this post could be seen as an artifact of a past time.
Below is a copy of the post.
Read more…“Radical Candor” Book Notes
I am not a manager, nor do I aspire to be one anytime soon. Radical Candor by Kim Scott was a book that I saw repeatedly being read at The Nerdery and I had heard good things about it. After listening to a podcast interview with the author, I realized that it wasn’t only about management, and that it could apply equally well to general workplace relationships. Here are some notes – abbreviated and not by any measure a thorough representation of the book, but nevertheless potentially helpful to others considering reading the book (and of course to my future self trying to remember what the book was about ?).
“Floating action buttons” on iOS (yes, they’re here)
December 2023 update: Apple newest app, Journal (press release | help content) features a prominent floating button in the bottom middle of the screen. Interestingly, however, this button style remains unacknowledged in the HIG page for buttons.
February 2023 update: Please note, this was originally written in December 2017. In the 5 years that have passed, Apple has not embraced the FAB as strongly as I predicted it might — it’s still more of an outlier on first-party iOS apps.
The floating action button (FAB) is one of the most distinctive components of Material Design.
Its intention when it first came out was to offer easy access to the primary action on a page, and it was positioned near the bottom of the screen in order to make it easy for smartphone users to utilize. There has been debate about its merits among designers, but it has stuck around and become more prominent, even in apps that aren’t designed by Google or that aren’t based in Material Design.
I’ve been collecting some examples of the FAB and FAB-like buttons on iOS. I find these particularly interesting because iOS does not offer a FAB or anything like a FAB as an out-of-the-box component. But with tall screens becoming more of the norm (first the iPhone Plus and now the iPhone X) I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if iOS 12 or a later version offered something like that for third-party apps. First-party iOS apps have traditionally placed common or primary actions in the navigation bar (see the Calendar app as an example). These aren’t very thumb-friendly.
But iOS and first-party iOS apps have made “thumb-friendly” changes in recent years. “Swipe to go back” is one of them (it debuted in iOS 7). The Maps app in particular was redesigned as of a couple years ago so that most of the UI is within reach of your thumb. And in two apps, Apple seems to be dipping its toes into what looks awfully like a FAB as defined by the Material Design guidelines.
Let’s a take a closer first at some of these first-party iOS apps that have adopted FABs.