Study: Facebook relies on good design to retain users

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An ACM CHI study finds Facebook adheres to good user interface design principles

What is Facebook’s secret to keeping the world’s largest user base content? Sticking to well-proven software design principles, one study has concluded.

University of Washington graduate student, Parmit Chilana, worked as an intern at the social networking giant last year, and, during her time there, interviewed Facebook engineers and design specialists to learn about how they build and deploy new features for the service. Chilana discussed her report, which she co-authored with other researchers at the University of Washington and Facebook itself, at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, being held this week in Austin, Texas.

Facebook has an audience that would make user bases of even the largest software products seem small in comparison, Chilana explained. As of latest count, the social networking service has over 845 million users. And it is an audience as diverse as it large: Facebook supports over 70 different languages. About 80 percent of its users live outside of the U.S. and Canada.

"Even if only 1 percent of the users were dissatisfied, that would still represent close to 10 million users," Chilana said. "Most software companies don’t even have a user base of 10 million users. So you can imagine the impact of [Facebook’s] design choices can be enormous."

While its users may grumble about periodic privacy infractions or buggy new features, Facebook has largely been able to continue to increase its user base and keep them involved. About 50 percent of its users log on every day, and interact with more than 900 million objects that Facebook stores on their behalf.

Chilana sought to identify what perceptions those in charge of Facebook’s user interface held about what makes for a successful user interface. She interviewed 17 Facebook employees — software engineers, product designers and product managers. She queried them about the decisions they had to make when launching a new product or feature and asked how decision choices fit in with the company’s business priorities.

Chilana’s work “is one of the very first studies of Facebook’s [design] process,” said Wayne Lutters, a computer science associate professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, who moderated Chilana’s talk. Only recently has the company “slowly started opening its doors to outsiders,” wishing to learn more about its development process, he said.

As a baseline, Chilana used the generally agreed upon principles of good software user interface design, as espoused by John Gould and Clayton Lewis in a 1985 paper “Designing for usability: key principles and what designers think.” Gould and Lewis stressed iterative design, a focus on user testing and user-focused design in general.

While many product designers tend not to be aware of such principles, Facebook relies heavily on such ideas, Chilana found. “Over half the interview participants explicitly identified user experience as a key factor in driving design on Facebook,” Chilana said.

Facebook also values iteration. One engineer told Chilana that the company “will just try to get something out there, make sure it is reasonable and then iterate on the design based on how people are using it,” she said. “Design is hard,” another designer told her. “Just doing our best with very smart people, we screw up plenty.”

This approach is not always easy given the size and variety of Facebook’s user base. One engineer told Chilana that “once you get away from the core features, it is not necessarily obvious that there is a magic way that a feature could work in a way that everyone can find value in it,” she said. Engineers often have to design for the least common denominator, she said. Many proposed advance features don’t get implemented because the adoption rate would be too small to make the work worthwhile.

Engineers cannot simply rely on intuition. Early on in the company’s history, Facebook engineers added many features on the premise that if they thought the feature would be cool or useful, so too would the users. The company is slowly moving away from this mindset, Chilana said. New features, such as a photo upload button, must be equally intuitive to a 90-year-old Mongolian grandmother as to a 14-year-old Brazilian soccer player, one engineer told Chilana.

Even with user satisfaction in mind, Facebook designers are not afraid of implementing a cutting-edge feature that fulfills the company’s long-term vision of what a futuristic social-networking site should be like, even if it causes short-term dissatisfaction with users. When Facebook introduced the Timeline format last year, for instance, some users complained that it was clunky and difficult to use.

One engineer praised the company for not being afraid of making changes even if it causes some dissatisfaction. In some cases, such as the controversial Timeline, Facebook will give users the option to update to a new feature before rolling it out across the entire site. This works to minimize the disruption caused by the new feature, as well as giving the company engineers more time to tweak the design.

Despite its size, Facebook faces the “same frustrations” that other organizations do when trying to design good interfaces for their users, Lutters said. “It’s a very familiar tale, even if the stakes are much higher.”

"It’s a positive affirmation that they are doing the things everyone is else is doing to stay current, relevant and focused," Lutters said. "If there is a secret sauce, she wasn’t able to uncover it."

Why Good Design Is Finally A Bottom Line Investment

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GOOD DESIGN IS GOOD BUSINESS

A MIX OF FACTORS, RANGING FROM COMMODITIZATION TO EVAPORATING BARRIERS TO COMPETITION, ARE CONSPIRING TO PUSH DESIGN TO THE FORE OF BUSINESS THINKING.

When Thomas Watson Jr. told Wharton students in 1973 that good design is good business, the idea seemed quixotic, silly even. To many people, design still meant the superficial polish of nicer homes and cleaner graphics. But Watson had earned the right to his beliefs. The recently retired IBM CEO was a business oracle, having grown the company tenfold during his tenure by transforming its signature product line from cash registers to computer mainframes. Along the way, the perception of IBM had changed irrevocably. Once rooted in the grime of cogs and springs, Big Blue had become the face of a new computer age.

Watson had always been a pioneering advocate for design, going back to 1954 when he recruited Eliot Noyes to reinvent the street-level showroom at IBM’s Manhattan headquarters. And as IBM transformed, it became synonymous with the rise of modernism. Watson and Noyes commissioned Paul Rand to create its logo; Mies van der Rohe and Eero Saarinen to build its offices and factories; and Charles and Ray Eames to craft its legendary 1964 World’s Fair exhibit. But from our current distance we can see the cracks in Watson’s logic: Logos and buildings, nice as they were, weren’t central to how IBM actually made money—not compared with the engineers who were figuring out how to build ever more powerful mainframes. Back then, design was marketing by another name. The design and business symbiosis that Watson was advocating at the time was more prophecy than reality.

THE DESIGN AND BUSINESS SYMBIOSIS WAS MORE PROPHECY THAN REALITY.

Only now, 19 years after his death in 1993, is Watson being proved right. Innovation today is inextricably linked with design—and design has become a decisive advantage in countless industries, not to mention a crucial tool to ward off commoditization. Companies singing the design gospel range from Comcast to Pinterest to Starbucks. You will see dozens of them inthe pages that follow. But why now? What makes this moment different?

Fernanda Viegas The search giant acquired her startup, Flowing Media, and created its Big Picture group for her (and partner Martin Wattenberg) to research the future of data visualization. They’re creating such eye-popping projects as Google+ Ripples, which shows how links spread in a social network. | Photo by Adam Fedderly

Apple’s rise offers a few important lessons about today’s connection between design and business. The easiest is that design allows you to stoke consumer lust—and demand higher prices as a result. Whirlpool’s VP of design, Pat Schiavone, recently told me, “We’re changing from being a manufacturing-based company to being a product company. It’s not just about cost cutting.” Schiavone was hired three years ago from Ford, where he most famously rebooted the Mustang’s design. “Why change? Because good design is very profitable.”

That shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who owns a $600 iPhone, but Apple’s model suggests some harder-to-digest lessons. One is the value of thinking of product systems rather than solely products. An instructive example comes from Frog, the design consultancy that fashioned the case for the legendary Apple IIc. Today, one of its marquee clients is GE. You might wonder what design can possibly have to do with the success of a jet engine or an MRI machine. But hospitals and power plants are now linking their machines into ecosystems. And well-designed iPad apps are the simplest way to manage them. “If we don’t do it, someone else will,” says Greg Petroff, general manager of user experience and design at GE. For the company, the threat is that if someone else designs those linkages, “GE could be relegated to not having the top relationship with the customer,” Petroff says. “Our hypothesis is that we can build a better solution.”

DESIGNERS ARE THE ONES BEST SITUATED TO FIGURE OUT HOW A KIT OF PARTS CAN BECOME SOMETHING MORE.

Designers are the ones best situated to figure out how a kit of parts can become something more—they’re the ones who can figure out the human interface for a vast chain. If they do their job right, the result—a working ecosystem—is a far better platform for innovation than an isolated product. Just think about Apple and how its products have expanded from iMacs to iPods, iTunes, iPhones, and iPads, all linked via its iCloud. Or Nike, whose body-computing foray began with Nike+ and has evolved into the Fuelband, which aims to rebrand the calorie, for an age filled with networked devices.

Sharon Hwang and Mike Matas, Facebook: No designers are more in demand thanApple alums, and no company has hired them more aggres­sively than Face­book. Hwang (once a senior art director) and Matas (he designed the map and photo inter­faces for the iPhone and iPad) are at Facebook to help it invent a mobile exper­ience that’s delight­ful and keep the website from becoming utilitarian. | Photo by Adam Fedderly

COMMODITIZATION PUSHES DESIGNERS TO THE FORE

Innovation usually cycles between periods of raw, technical inventiveness and the finer task of packaging it for mass adoption. In personal tech, for example, we’re in an integration phase that comes on the heels of fundamental advances such as the Internet and mobile computing. With back-end magic becoming a cheap utility, user interfaces are now a startup’s best chance to break out.

Consider Bump, an app that lets users swap data between phones simply by bumping them together. Its cofounder, Dave Lieb, notes that in the first dotcom rush, online enterprises had to build their infrastructures from scratch, so engineers were paramount. In our app economy, everything has changed. Bump had 1 million users before it spent $1,000. It didn’t need infrastructure, thanks to Amazon’s server-hosting service; it didn’t need advertising because of social media; and the App Store solved any distribution problem. Development was a breeze, too, because of Apple’s software developer kit. “These are all things that used to cost millions,” Lieb says.

Although these dynamics seem specific to the tech business, they’re analogous to what happens in any maturing industry. The back-end nuts and bolts eventually fade as a competitive advantage: Your manufacturing prowess, once a reliable bulwark, moves to China; your distribution channels, once the best, are now beaten by the Internet. When that happens, how can you sell anything—from a new thermostat to a new passenger plane—without fundamental design improvements that prove their worth to consumers with every use? And whom do you trust to cultivate that relationship between your product and your customer? An engineer? Or a designer?

SILICON VALLEY IS CURRENTLY ENGAGED IN AN ALL-OUT TALENT WAR OVER DESIGNERS.

"Product guys," rather than engineers, steer many of the startups that draw the greatest buzz. Silicon Valley is currently engaged in an all-out talent war over designers. "The market for engineers is always white-hot. But for designers, it’s hotter," says Jeff Jordan, a partner at VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, which has backed design-driven startups such as Facebook, Jawbone, and Lytro. The story of Kelsey Falter, a 22-year-old graphic designer, brings Jordan’s point to life. Five years ago, it would have been hard for Falter to convince an angel about her bona fides as a would-be CEO. But this year, as a senior at Notre Dame, she received initial seed funding of $640,000 to start PopTip, a real-time polling app for Twitter. Her focus is on front-end work, not back-end engineering. Falter says her design education helped her understand the subtle tipping point when a quirk in consumer behavior creates an opening for a better product—or a new one.

The phenomenon of designer-led startups, which also includes companies such as Pinterest and Path, is a telling variation on something legendary Braun designer Dieter Rams once told me. “My work was only possible because I was reporting directly to the chairman of the board,” he admitted. “Design has to be insulated at a high level. Otherwise, you can forget it.” His masterpieces for Braun, created from the 1950s to the 1970s, made him a saint of modern design, but only because he enjoyed unparalleled access to the C-suite. It’s no accident that Rams’s most influential fan, Jonathan Ive, had a mind-meld with Steve Jobs. Without that, Ive could never have accomplished what he has at Apple.

When designers lack influence, superb products become almost impossible. Good designs seldom stay good for very long if they must navigate a gauntlet of corporate approval. That’s because the design process is as much reductive as anything else—figuring what can be simplified and taken out. Corporate approvals are usually about adding things on to appease internal overseers. When something has been approved by everyone, it may be loved by none. Just look at what happened to Microsoft in the 2000s and how only now is it trying to redefine itself by building a more design-driven culture. That culture spawned Windows 8, whose design intent has remained remarkably pure from beginning to end. Solving these design dilemmas has become job one for leading companies. It’s worth noting that some of Nike’s most remarkable innovations have come during the tenure of CEO Mark Parker, who started his career as a designer.

Kelsey Falter, PopTip: The 22-year-old startup CEO epitomizes design’s ascendance in the tech industry. Falter attracted $640,000 in initial seed funding forPopTip, a real-time Twitter polling app, while she was still a senior at Notre Dame. | Photo by Adam Fedderly

IF DESIGN LEADS, THEN RELENTLESS INNOVATION IS THE NORM

The main question remaining for VCs and old-line companies alike is whether design can deliver a sustainable edge. There’s reason to think that it can. Unlike a few more features or marginal increases in computing speed, a better user experience can mean everything. When Path, today’s most elegantly designed social networking app, launched in November 2010, it was quirky, textured, and a little bit too complicated. The second version, released a year later, cut the core interactions down to one simple screen and had plenty of lively touches, such as an animated share menu created with input from Pixar. Path’s hockey-stick growth from 30,000 users to 300,000 in one month began only after the release of version 2.0. And its present valuation, rumored to be about $250 million, has less to do with users than the user experience Path has created—and the number of people in tech hoping to solve the same set of problems. I asked co-founder and CEO Dave Morin, an Apple and Facebook alum, whether attracting capital was hard, given that his investor pitch was based on user experience rather than technological wizardry. “You can pop a tech-driven startup extraordinarily fast,” he acknowledged, “but VCs are starting to see that having designer founders pays off in the long run.”

A reliance on design-driven innovation poses a challenge for the companies that live by it: You can’t easily patent how something looks, or the feel of a user interface. Features, subtleties, and finishes spawn imitators with unprecedented speed. That means that design-led companies must innovate constantly to maintain their edge. And that’s exactly what makes the stories in this issue so interesting.

Jonas Damon, Frog: As corporate America embraces the power of designing an Apple-style end-to-end user experience, Damon’s job is to create it. A creative director at the leading design consultancy, he has worked with Chrysler, Verizon, and Comcast, for whom he helped create a sleeker cable modem. Its packaging makes opening such a nuts-and-bolts product a surprising joy. | Photo by Adam Fedderly

Microsoft, having stagnated as Apple turned the vision of perfectly integrated software and hardware into an ocean of cash, now has its own road map in place, aimed squarely at the evolving future of mobile computing. The central plank of that strategy is a radical redesign of Windows 8, built for the touch-screen revolution and ready to power Microsoft’s first major foray into hardware, the Surface tablet. For Microsoft, the question is, how intuitive will users find Windows 8? Natural enough that it won’t suffer the disastrous fate of Vista? Strong enough to withstand the critiques that inevitably follow from rethinking one of the most heavily used products on the planet?

THE SUCCESS OF PINTEREST AND MICROSOFT BOTH HINGE UPON HOW WELL THEY INTUIT WHAT USERS WANT.

A hot startup such as Pinterest has different design challenges. Ben Silbermann, Evan Sharp, and their team have built one of the most addictive websites on the planet, which lets users curate and show off their tastes like an art collection. Can they evolve that user experience in a way that will make them money—whether retail, advertising, or some other novel form—while keeping their users rabidly engaged? But notice what unites Pinterest and Microsoft: Ultimately, each company’s success hinges upon how well it intuits what users want and how much each pleases them with products. Only design has that power to seduce and delight.

Design isn’t being looked at as a solution to only business problems. Its practitioners are now taking up roles that used to be dominated by not-for-profits and governments, seeking new ways to raise the fortunes of the developing world. Brazilian architect Marcelo Rosenbaum is using his expertise to repair the fractured bonds in favelas. Elsewhere, in our firstInnovation by Design Awards, projects such as the Embrace Infant Warmer, a low-cost incubator, and the BioLite CampStove, a hyper-fuel-efficient cooking device, aim to significantly improve and even save the lives of people in poor countries with little modern infrastructure. You’ll see these projects alongside other impressive finalists such as the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, which dramatically improves the economics of long-haul flights, and the Nest Thermostat, which takes an often clumsy, hard-to-use product and gives it a complete makeover.

What everything in this issue shares is a motivating ethos that Watson also hinted at during his Wharton speech, just before the quote that everyone knows. “We are convinced,” he said, “that good design can materially help make a good product reach its full potential.” Replace product withbusiness. Or even person. In every instance, the wisdom rings true.

URBANSCREEN Light Sydney Opera House.
Watch as multi-award winning German design collective URBANSCREEN transform Sydney Opera House with their Lighting of the Sails. Vivid LIVE at Sydney Opera House is a 10-day celebration of ambitious popular music within the city’s annual Vivid Sydney festival running from 25. Article: Source

21 Balançoires (21 Swings) 
Every spring, an interactive installation takes over a high-traffic area in Montréal’s Quartier des spectacles and sets a collective ritual. The installation offers a fresh look at the idea of cooperation, the notion that we can achieve more together than separately. The result is a giant instrument made of 21 musical swings; each swing in motion triggers different notes, all the swings together compose a piece, but some sounds only emerge from cooperation. The project stimulates ownership of the public space, bringing together people of all ages and backgrounds, and creating a place for playing and hanging out in the middle of the city centre. Article: Source

Walk the Light at the Victoria & Albert Museum.
This experimental interactive lighting design project creates a band of white light that physically follows the visitor, forming a bright line of light tracking their journey. As one person passes, the white light jumps to the next arrival. Either side of the white band, washes of strong colour are pushed and pulled along the tunnel creating an ambient lighting effect that represents the overall ebb and flow of the day’s visitors. Throughout the day these colours shift in the hue and saturation as they respond to the prevailing direction of movement of the crowds. Article: Source

My Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Mac OS X (2012 Edition)

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This is the fourth installment of my must have must have list of tools and utilities as a Mac and iOS developer (2009, 2010, 2011). A lot can change in twelve months when you work in the technology space. The biggest change for Apple developers each year are the platform updates. This year saw the transition from iOS 5 to 6 as well as Lion turning into a more powerful Mountain Lion.

The idea for this list was shamelessly ripped off from Windows developer Scott Hanselman whose list is an enjoyable read every year.

Many of the products you will recognize from previous years’ lists. I’ll outline new additions to the list as I go by marking them in bold.

Hardware

Though I am currently working on the road, I am still maintaining a dual Mac setup under normal circumstances. When I have a home, my daily driver is a 27” i7 iMac with a 256GB SSD, 2TB spinning disc and 16GB of RAM. There is absolutely no reason for me to have 16GB of RAM other than to brag about the fact that I have such a ridiculous amount of memory.

Presently I am using my 15” Retina MacBook Pro with a 512GB SSD and 8GB of RAM. In last year’s list I mentioned my love for the Air line of Apple portables, but as the software I started building got more complex, I felt like I was hitting memory constraints with just having 4GB of RAM. When Apple refreshed the portable line this summer, I decided to jump back on the 15” bandwagon rather than getting a beefier Air because of the larger screen-size and, of course, the Retina display.

I am using Dropbox more than ever to keep everything between the two machines in sync. I’ve now symlinked Documents and Sites to point to those respective directories on Dropbox. I am also using shared Dropbox folders for Second Gear projects that require collaboration with a designer. I’m still using GitHub for storing all of my code.

In terms of accessories and upgrades:

• I use a Das Keyboard. What is funny is that last year I mentioned that I “loathe” loud keyboards. Now I love them. The Das Keyboard doesn’t make be a better developer, writer or person. It just feels satisfying to use.

• On the left side of my iMac I use a Magic Trackpad, to for swiping and gesturing between full-screen apps and Mission Control. I am a big user of multitouch gestures in Mountain Lion, so I am incredibly comfortable using the trackpad.

• On the right side of my iMac I use a Razer Mamba 2012 Elite Ergonomic Wireless Gaming Mouse to do all my pointing and clicking. The Razer mouse is far more comfortable to use and is wired, which was useful for that month I was obsessed with playing Quake 4. It’s interesting that the simplicity of my 2011 setup has now been replaced with a giant keyboard and two input devices. I may be becoming more of a neckbeard, but my facial hair still doesn’t show it.

• Time Machine backups are handled by a 1TB Western Digital MyBook connected via Firewire 800. It’s fairly quiet is one of the few external drives I’ve found that doesn’t have a horrific design.

• I am a completely paperless office thanks to my Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M. I usually scan all my receipts, bills and invoices once a month and then run them through OCR so I have a searchable archive on my Mac.

• I connect to the Internet through my Airport Extreme Base Station. It cost more than a Linksys but it’s super reliable and the management software is much more pleasant to use.

Software

I am really hard on software. This is for a variety of reasons, but I think it is because I build it myself. I have always envisioned that directors and actors can sometimes lose focus during a movie as they judge the decisions others made in their productions. I feel like I do the same thing with software.

I loathe poor and/or non-native user interfaces and cherish simple tools. These are applications I constantly rely on.

The Essential Power User 5

• CloudApp - Whether it’s sharing screenshots, beta releases or small snippets of text Cloud has become an essential tool for me. It’s automatic screenshot uploading feature solved the problem I always had with figuring out how to successfully share screenshots without having to rely on AIM’s flaky servers or uploading them somewhere with Transmit.

• Dropbox - Dropbox is the secret sauce for a variety of reasons. It makes it easy to share files between machines as well as with colleagues. Beyond that, maybe you’ve heard of Elements and the many other great iPhone apps that sync data using Dropbox?

• OmniFocus - I don’t know how I ever stayed organized before OmniFocus on my three screens. It’s my brain.

• Sublime Text 2 - I was a longtime BBEdit user for everything from editing scripts to writing my weekly newspaper column, but this year I made the switch to Sublime Text 2. It’s not the pretty girl at the dance, but it’s powerful text editing features and the ability to customize the interface however I see fit ultimately made me make the switch. It also handles Ruby development a bit nicer than I found from BBEdit. We’ll always have Paris, Bare Bones.

• xScope - I use xScope to detect colors on various UI elements, check alignment of controls and to measure the distance between objects. If you are meticulous about your UI, it’s an essential utility.

Developer Tools

• Xcode - If you write Mac or iOS applications, you spend most of your life in Xcode and Instruments. I am no different.

• Appfigures - Manually fetching iTunes sales reports is tedious. Appfigures is a low cost Web services that will import your reports and send you a daily sales email. You can also do a lot of other analysis on you sales to find trends, but I generally use it for the daily email.

• Base - Elements has a SQLite database behind it. I’m constantly inspecting the database contents using this application. It’s lightweight and easy to use.

• Changes - I was never a fan of FileMerge, but have found Changes to be vital to my workflow when running diffs on my Git commits. Changes got a new owner recently, and I am looking forward to hopefully seeing more regular updates to it.

• Cloak: If you connect to any shady or insecure networks, Cloak is a super easy VPN service to secure your traffic. On my Mac, I like it because it will automatically connect when I join an insecure network. Even better, it’s just a tap away from toggling on my iPhone and iPad.

• Charles - Sometimes I want to snoop the traffic that is going through an iPhone app. Setting up Charles makes it pretty easy to do just that.

• Coda 2 - I manage the Second Gear site using Panic’s excellent Web development IDE.

• CodeRunner: There are times I am writing a small snippet of code to share with someone or just to test an idea on my own. I don’t necessarily need the full power of Xcode, so CodeRunner comes in quite handy. It’s even more useful in its support of other languages like Ruby and JavaScript.

• Committed - Shameless plug for my GitHub to Notification Center app. I built it because I needed it. I use it everyday.

• Cornerstone - For those few times a year I need to work with Subversion, Cornerstone is the best desktop client I’ve found for it.

• Dev Color Picker: Must have. Choose whatever color you want and then it will output a UIColor or NSColor for you.

• Feeder - I use Feeder to update the IRQ Conflict podcast as well as several different Sparkle AppCast feeds. It’s one of the best user experiences I’ve found on the Mac.

• FogBugz - I have been using FogBugz to manage Second Gear’s support inbox and bug database for almost five years. People complain that it is an unattractive app. I disagree. It’s not flashy and instead just disappears so that I can actually focus on using it for its intended purpose: managing my software projects.

• Git: I am now exclusively on Git for Second Gear projects. Thanks, GitHub.

• Go2Shell: A small utility app that I keep in my Finder toolbar to open a Terminal window in whatever folder I am currently looking at.

• HockeyApp - I am using Hockey for distributing betas and handling crash reports. Whenever I archive a build, I HockeyApp’s OS X app to upload the binary and dSYM as part of the build process.

• Hex Color Picker: My designer sometimes sends me hex values for colors I need in my user interfaces. This coupled with my next pick makes it easy for me to grab an NSColor or UIColor value.

• Hues - Combined with Hex and Dev Color Pickers, Hues is one of my most used apps. All it is is the OS X Color Picker in a full application that is accessible via the Dock and command-tab switcher. Awesome.

• IconSlate - When I was putting together Committed’s icon IconSlate was the best way to drag-and-drop the different sizes and get an icns file. It’s also what I use whenever I need a new favicon in the ICO format.

• ImageOptim - When you add up the kilobytes of non-retina and retina assets for both the iPhone and iPad, app binaries are getting bigger. ImageOptim has a better compression algorithm than the one built into Xcode, so I will sometimes run images through it to get smaller sizes.

• iPhone Backup Extractor - When doing iPhone support, it is sometimes beneficial to get a copy of the user’s data and preferences. Using this application, it’s fairly easy for the user to handle on their end.

• Library Inspector - There have been a few times I’ve wanted to see what was in a static library.

• MindNode Pro - I’m a recent convert to mind mapping and use it to sketch out software releases, blog posts and presentations rather than OmniOutliner these days. This is the best app I’ve found on the Mac.

• Patterns: I don’t think I will ever fully grasp Regular Expression syntax. Patterns makes it easier for me to fumble around trying to build and test a regex compared to doing sample finds in Sublime Text.

• Querious - If you need to connect to local or remote MySQL databases, this is a great application to do so.

• RESTed: When building or testing an API, RESTed comes in handy to see raw JSON output and quickly test input parameters. I also tend to keep a couple RESTed documents in my source repos so I can quickly test the API.

• Screentaker - Screentaker is the fastest way I have found to go from an iOS device screenshot to something wrapped in a device shell.

• SourceTree: Working with Git is a little more tolerable thanks to SourceTree. I have tried quite a few GUIs for Git and this is the one that sticks with me most.

• Trello - While I use FogBugz for customer support and bug tracking, I am using Trello for the high level management of Elements and Committed. It’s where I can get a quick overview of what my release plans are and adjust them if necessary.

• Web Sharing - In Mountain Lion, Apple made it a bit more difficult to work with the Apache web server that ships with it. Web Sharing is a preference pane that re-enables the ability to toggle the server without dropping down to the Terminal.

User Tools

• 1Password - One of the first tools I install. It’s Dropbox over-the-air syncing makes using it on my iPhone and iPad even easier. It also has made me use better passwords because I no longer have to remember them. 1Password does that for me.

• Acorn - Acorn is my favorite image editor for the Mac. It’s fast, intuitive and looks pretty neat too.

• Backblaze - While I primarily rely on Time Machine for my backups, I also subscribe to Backblaze to offload the contents of my hard drive to the Internet.

• Billings - Now that I am back full-time at Second Gear I am doing contracting in addition to my own product development. Billings allows me to keep track of time in my active projects, manage clients and distribute invoices.

• FastScripts - The default scripting menu in OS X is good enough for basic scripters, but I’ve found FastScript’s enhancements most beneficial: mainly the ability to assign keyboard shortcuts to scripts in certain instances.

• Labelist - I have horrible penmanship. I have had letters returned by the USPS for illegible addresses. I bought a label maker and use Labelist to generate all of my address labels now.

• Launchbar - I use Launchbar primarily as an app launcher, but I also am a big fan of version 5’s clipboard history feature.

• NetNewsWire - I am convinced that NetNewsWire is dead. This makes me very sad because I still consider it the best RSS experience on the Mac. It’s a niche market for sure, but I’d love to see someone take over the app, or build a new, modern NNW from the ground up. Reeder ain’t it.

• RCDefaultApp - RCDefaultApp is one of those applications that has been on my Mac for so long, I take it for granted. For those times when you want to force a file extension to open in a specific application, it’s great.

• PDFpenPro - Preview is a fine PDF viewer, but if you need to sign contracts, make edits to PDFs or create new forms, PDFpenPro is top notch. Bonus: it’s a lot cheaper than Adobe Acrobat.

• Photoshop CS6: When Adobe switched to its Creative Cloud pricing, I decided to jump back on the Adobe bandwagon. I don’t really have a system for when I use Acorn and when I use Photoshop. It usually just ends up depending on what I decide to type into Launchbar on a given day.

• Rdio: Last year I made my transition away from a local iTunes music library in favor of iTunes Match and Spotify. This year, I am 100% on Rdio. I no longer have any music stored locally on my Mac or any of my iOS devices. Instead, I am syncing albums from my Rdio collection to my iPhone for offline listening. It’s been working great and I can’t imagine going back to the traditional ‘purchase’ model for music.

• Soulver: Marco turned me onto the iPhone version of Soulver and now I am a convert on the Mac too. It really is a much better interface for doing quick (or complex) numeric calculations.

• TextExpander - If you do any sort of customer support, TextExpander is a must have. I have snippets created for each of my products’s most frequently asked questions as well as common troubleshooting steps. What sets TextExpander apart, however, is the AppleScript support, which I use for a variety of different text-related tasks as well as expanding unique product tags to my email signature.

• Tweetbot - I haven’t traditionally used a Twitter client on my Mac, but I periodically will launch Tweetbot if I need a distraction from what I’m working on.

• The Unarchiver - A file extraction utility is somewhat of an unsung hero, but when you need it, it’s good to have a utility that is robust and can fit almost any bill. The Unarchiver does that and does it well.

• Wedge - Whenever someone decides to bitch quit Twitter, they usually go to App.net, another privately owned social network (but you pay for it!). Wedge is the best ADN client I’ve found for the desktop thus far.

Audio Production

Outside of doing software development, I talk about software development and technology in general with my Windows development buddy, Mikel Berger on IRQ Conflict. These are the tools used to produce the show and some other audio gimmickry I pursue:

• Blue Blubird - I chose to buy an XLR mic because I could easily upgrade to a mixer someday without having to also buy another mic. Choosing a microphone is a personal thing, but this one had the right amount of audio quality and style for me.

• Icicle - I’m still not ready to commit to putting a mixing board on my desk, so I am using this XLR to USB adapter also from Blue to connect to my Mac. I’ve noticed no real downsides to it other than it sometimes loses connection with the USB hub I have it plugged into. Just make sure it shows up as an input source before recording and your’e good to go.

• Adobe Audition CS6 - Last year I was still using the Windows version of Audition in VMWare. The Mac version finally shipped and it is great. It’s got those typical weird Adobe interface issues, but I wouldn’t recommend another multitrack editor over this one. It’s a great workflow.

• Skype - Mikel and I use Skype to record IRQ Conflict.

• Call Recorder - Call Recorder is the least hassle for recording the audio of a Skype conversation.

• AudialHub - AudialHub is a dead app. It hasn’t been under active development for years. Sadly, it’s still the best for converting between a variety of different audio formats.

Spectacular Water-Activated Light Graffiti

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Normally, when we think of electronics and water, we think disaster. They don’t generally work well together, but French digital artist Antonin Fourneau has found a way for the two to brilliantly cooperate. The artist’s interactive project titled Water Light Graffiti features a giant board embedded with thousands of LED lights that illuminate in response to contact with water. Essentially, the board is a life-size digital canvas and water serves as the paint. The truly undefined element is the paintbrush, which can be anything from a spray can or a sponge to your own soaked hands.

In collaboration with Digitalarti, a French team dedicated to promoting digital arts, and as its Artlab’s first resident, Fourneau has developed this visually stimulating project that blurs the lines between graffiti, painting, and technology. It allows anyone to become an artist and invites people to participate in producing public art. Water Light Graffiti was finally installed on the streets of Poitiers, France recently, where graffiti artists and pedestrians alike were welcomed to “paint.”

Check out the video, below, to see some of the luminous works being created. Also, be sure to read our interview with the artist who was kind enough to give us some insight into his amazing project.

How did the idea come about to use LEDs and water?
I used water in several of my projects already. During an experimental workshop with visitors in 2011 @ Centre Pompidou, I used moisture and a sponge to make a human game controller. (See a video here.) For an exhibition in 2009, I’ve used LED to make a jaw prosthesis reactive with saliva.

I had in mind to make a project with a lot of LEDs and a simple principle. I always had the work of people like Ingo Maurer and Moriitz Waldemeyer in mind. One of my favorite hobbies is to try to make interactive installations with a simple and effective concept. The trick of using water as a light switch matched these expectations perfectly.

The idea grew during a workshop in March 2012 at the CAFA Design School in Beijing. I proposed a subject around “natural interactive devices.” I’ve managed several prototypes with students and around the water. One evening I was in my hotel room preparing for the next day’s classes with some electronic components and a spray bottle of water was on the table.

How long did it take to create from beginning to end?
I had a period of two months to find the right design and machining process. And then one month to make this a first prototype in large scale. I still have work during my residence at the ArtLab (in Digitalarti)  to improve the effect and the possibility of having the wall in the city for a long period.

How many people were involved?
The delivery time for the exhibition at Poitiers was very short: 5 days, the time spent to find the right design LED and order a big batch of 22,000 LED. Fortunately the Digitalarti ‘s Artlab team (a core of six people named in the video description) and volunteers have helped deliver the project on time.Here are the pictures, feel free to use them

What do you hope to do next with the technology?
I want to develop a material that can be easily installed on architecture. I also develop, during my research, quite a few others prototypes flexible and even transparent. I think I have some good ideas for application in the field of play, which is my favorite field.

Antonin Fourneau website

 

Bruce Munro's Spectacular Light Installation at Longwood Gardens

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British artist Bruce Munro is back with another spectacular light installation, this time taking his lighting expertise toLongwood Gardens in Pennsylvania. The exhibition simply called Light features a number of illuminated sculptural structures across the 23-acre expanse. The various pieces radiate against the night sky, adding a colorful liveliness to the natural backdrop of the gardens.

Intermingled amongst the flowers and greenery are some of Munro’s most inventive pieces including Arrow Spring, a sprout of copper fiber optic stems popping out amongst a trail of salvia plants. The installment presents a path of glimmering wisps of light similar to a series of glowing flowers or perhaps a shimmering sprinkler system that has been set off. Other intriguingly attractive sculptural landmarks include Munro’s multihued water towers made of clear containers illuminated by systemized LED lights.

The exhibition is currently on display and set to run through September 29, 2012. You can check out a time-lapsed video, below, of the installation’s construction and result.

Photo credits: Mark Pickthall, Corriette Schoenaerts, Linden Gledhill
Bruce Munro website