Back in October of 2012, I wrote about how smartphone screen had steadily grown with the current king being the Samsung Galaxy S III with a 4.8-in, 1,280 × 720 display (the best-selling smartphone during third quarter of 2012). However, the big news out of the Consumer Electronics Show recently held in Las Vegas was […]
Posts Tagged ‘innovation’
Developer Tutorial: Gyroscopes! Gyroscopes Everywhere!
Being on the bench gives a man more time to do what he truly enjoys: mindlessly playing around with new technologies, APIs and generally making a lot of cool stuff that doesn’t really do anything. Enter…the gyroscope! What is a gyroscope? No, it is not a telescope that automatically zooms in on the nearest Greek […]
Customer Perspective: Some Do Prefer Blondes
For years, Starbucks has served only dark roast coffee drinks, implying that the dark roast was a better roast and appealed to everybody. I’ve previously written about a very interesting TED talk where Malcolm Gladwell discusses the trend toward understanding customer preferences instead of relying on one absolute “best” product. Gladwell actually mentions coffee at about the […]
Custom maps with MapBox
A couple of years ago I was working on a small project where the client wanted to visualize data from their field operations on a map. Nothing overly complex – just locations, custom icons, radius of operation for that location, etc. Easy, I thought. We’ll use a system like Google Maps. Except the client wanted […]
Front-end Developers are UX Designers too
A little while back I wrote this nugget of wisdom: Creating a great user experience extends beyond the research, beyond the wireframes, and even beyond the visual design. All that hard work is ultimately for nothing if your website or web application isn’t fast. Why? Because if your site doesn’t load quickly, your users will […]
Square and the End of Cash Registers for Companies Big and Small
The first time I saw someone use Square was last year during a brief shopping excursion in Chinatown. I was in San Francisco for a User Experience conference and had a few hours free to explore. I had just found what I would refer to as the “cutest iPhone case ever” shaped like a bright […]
[Video] Touch Display Technology Changes How You Feel About HCI
Tactus Technology has introduced a new way to interact with your phone: The Tactus Tactile Layer. This morphing layer of magic goo [paraphrasing] can raise up to form actual tactile buttons on your device, and disappear again when not needed. Previously, the only form of realistic haptic feedback available to touch devices was to have […]
3 Frameworks for Creating Reusable Style-based iOS UI Components
Web developers are familiar with the importance of Cascading Style Sheets when developing HTML5 apps. The basic premise is simple, standard look and feel of the elements can be described separately in a CSS definition file and without changing a lot of other code, or simply by applying a different CSS file, you can alter […]
Rapid, responsive prototyping with HTML frameworks
“To design responsively, one must prototype responsively.” – Martin Ridgway, 2013 Quoting myself. A good start. But honestly, the statement above is important. After all, how best to communicate principles of responsive design but to do it as early in the engagement as possible? However, prototyping should be fast and iterative. As of January 2013, […]
Robots Will Take Our Jobs
Wired has an interesting article on the in process robotic revolution that promises to change our definition of a job as much as the industrial revolution did to end the agricultural era. One key aspect is the simplification of robotics and their ability to work closer to humans. Baxter (below) is an example. It’s a […]
A Little More on Web Fonts
Arial, Verdana, Georgia, Times New Roman, Courier New, Impact, Trebuchet and <shudder>Comic Sans</shudder>. Those are the basic web-safe fonts we’ve all been using for the majority of our text-based content since the dawn of time. Or at least, since the Web came along. If you wanted something “fancier” for your text, you had to use […]
Responsive Design (+1 General Blog Title)
I mainly write this post to the designers of our team here at Perficient, but developers can read it, too. I stumbled upon a random website by complete happenstance and not because I’ve ever been there before, and I was struck by its responsive layout. CSS Tricks This is the kind of design I feel […]