The talented (experimental) interface designer Jinha Lee who is known for amazing projects like ZeroN and SpaceTop recently presented his latest work for Samsung.
It’s called MediaSquare and the idea behind it is to break the traditional ratio of one user per device. A TV would no longer be limited by a single remote for example. Just like having several keys for a single car, users could seamlessly access the TV through various controlling devices such as phones or wearables.
Although the example shown in the video above of people constantly switching music during a party is not the best example, I can see this providing a great experience for gaming or collaboration in general.

In a recent update to the Android app, YouTube has introduced a new main navigation: tabs!
The standard side navigation is gone. Yes, it’s that hamburger icon which is common for Android apps and adheres to the Material Design guidelines by the way. To me this is a welcome change considering tabs drastically outperform a side drawer when it comes to global navigation as Luke Wroblewski points out. It’s hard to deny that the previous iteration was bloated and difficult to use efficiently, especially if you were a power user.

Although Android apps frequently make use of tabs, they would be relegated to a secondary navigation. This is in contrast to its major competitor iOS, which has claimed tabs as primary navigation since its launch.

Is this move an exception in the Android universe, carefully guided by analytics or are we witnessing signs of regret in regards to a primary side navigation which may not be as obvious on first glance?
Only time will tell. In the meantime I’ll have to get used to how weird those tabs look on the iOS version of YouTube.

I’m an avid Spotify listener and even the recent release of Apple Music couldn’t sway me away. The team behind Spotify just keeps improving the product (and the brand) with well designed and relevant features. Songs matching your tempo while running or previewing songs on long tap are just some of my favourites from the past. Enter “Discover Weekly” which is essentially an entirely personalised playlist based on your own listening and on other user’s playlists with similar tastes. Apparently it’s supposed to become smarter over time and the more you listen, the better it gets.

One of the main reasons I started using music streaming services in the first place was for exactly that - music discovery. I really liked Rdio’s approach which Spotify kind of adopted but this new playlist is just brilliant and gives me something to look forward to every Monday.

It’s available across all platforms and behaves like any other playlist, except it resets every week so make sure to save the songs you like!

Yesterday I updated to Adobe CC 2015 and couldn’t wait to try out the much anticipated new features in Photoshop. This is coming from someone who uses Illustrator almost exclusively these days by the way. Without further ado, let’s have a look at what I thought were the most interesting ones.

Design Space

Design Space looks like it’s the slimmed down version of Photoshop, that screen designers in particular have been waiting for. You can toggle between the regular view and the new mode quite easily which is neat. In order to have access to this new space, you have to switch it on in the preferences panel as this is still considered a “technology preview feature”.
Since a video tells more than a thousand words, I encourage you to check out this screencast commented by Photoshop Senior Product Manager Zorana Gee:

Artboards

You’ve seen them in Illustrator and you might have seen them in Sketch. Now they’re finally available in Photoshop. What I like about their implementation is that the Artboard panel is similar to Sketch which is what I’m used to. Besides that, nothing much to see here so move along.

Stacked layer styles

Similar to Illustrator’s Graphic Styles panel, Photoshop now allows you to have as many as 10 instances of gradient overlay, colour overlay, drop shadow, inner shadow and stroke. You can add these either to a single layer or a layer group and edit them at any time. I’m surprised there is a cap, but it makes sense from a performance perspective.

Export as

This option is replacing the well-known Save for Web which is labeled legacy and should disappear fairly soon. I used plug-ins like PNG Express or Slicy for exporting PNG’s in the past, but this should do just fine when it comes to automated exporting, without having to rely on third party software. Be warned that it doesn’t allow to export slices anymore if you’re into that kind of thing.

Glyph panel

Some may not even care about this addition at all, but if you appreciate typography you will love the glyph panel which allows you to browse all available glyphs in a font, view alternatives and basically have fun with OpenType features. InDesign has it, Illustrator has it and Photoshop was long overdue.

Why Photoshop though?

I’d argue that Adobe has been focusing their attention on the wrong software for the past couple of years. Killing off Fireworks a while back infuriated many web designers, many of which have since moved on to the competition. Now turning Photoshop into something it wasn’t meant to be in the first place is a huge undertaking. At least it shows that the company has been actively listening to the community, even if all the new Sketch evangelists this might come as too little too late. However I’m very surprised that product isn’t getting more attention from Adobe. Seriously.
What about Illustrator? A few improvements could really push it over the top and make us forget about Photoshop entirely. It’s arguably the best software (next to Sketch) to address mobile and responsive web design that we have right now.

Consider this:

• Artboards have been around since 2009
• It has Layers just like Photoshop
• It has Graphic Styles
• It has Symbols
• It is vector-based

Khoi Vinh recently conducted an unofficial survey among design teams in New York City on the State of Design Tools. It turns out that while Photoshop is still widely used, Illustrator is not far behind.

Adobe Illustrator is surprisingly popular. It used to be rare, at least in my experience, to find digital designers who used Illustrator, but in one of the bigger surprise findings from our visits, we encountered a sizeable contingent of folks for whom Illustrator is their tool of choice. This seems to be a function of the popularity of responsive design, for which Illustrator’s support for multiple artboards is well suited, and Retina screens, for which Illustrator’s vector-based tools are a natural fit.

This 2015 update is certainly a step in the right direction and should keep many designers satisfied for some time. As far as I’m concerned, Illustrator will remain my go-to design software until something better comes along. There’s always next year, right?

I stumbled upon this video about the possible future of touch screens by Chris Harrison from CMU and found it amazing. You can see him demonstrating their TouchTools and TapSense apps for tablets.

The device they put together is able to achieve something really cool: anticipating what a user wants to do next. By positioning their hand as if they were actually holding a physical object over the glass users get access to that same object except on screen. In fact, the smart screen recognises the grip unique to a product and its intended use.

While some of the examples shown may provide little real-world use, such as a camera or a mouse, this little experiment makes you think about all the possibilities associated with this type of technology.

What I find even more impressive though, is the precise recognition of different types of touch input such as fingertip or knuckle by the device. This opens up a lot of possibilities in terms of interface interactions, as a single button could output various results depending the nature of the touch and essentially triple the amount of possible actions on a given screen.
I can’t think of a current app that would directly benefit from this, except for something like Knock maybe. And even then it’s a long shot.
Nevertheless, it’s going to be really interesting to explore new ways to interact with screens in the future.