Music Right Now: Born Gold - Bodysongs / Lawn Knives
The Music Right Now series captures a song or album that I can’t stop listening to.
Today’s selection? Born Gold, with their collection of singles known as Bodysongs. The first track on the album, Lawn Knives, has been stuck in my head for a week straight and is showing no signs of fading. I suppose I’m a sucker for glitchy production, cut-time-deliberate drums, and buzzy synth/vocal combinations. Though only one song extends much beyond the three-minute mark, these 28 minutes of driving synth-pop take no prisoners and leave no dance floor empty. Check out the engaging video below, and then listen to Boring Horror, Decimate Everything, and Eat Sun, Son. (For those not quite caught up with Spotify, the entire album is available for free stream or download through Born Gold’s website.)
Snowy Bedford, PA / on Instagram http://instagr.am/p/caOVX/
Visual Design Principles for Usability
Visual design and user experience overlap from different sides of the Venn diagram by working together to improve intuitive usability. UserFocus published a roundup of four primary principles of visual design (familiar to the Gestalt crowd) that can transparently improve an interface.
- Contrast - differentiate important elements to draw eyes
- Repetition - internal and external consistency, with the task as the common denominator
- Alignment - design to a grid (horizontal/vertical)
- Proximity - put like with like to help visual search and influence their mental model
While you can’t fundamentally improve a badly organized architecture by touching up certain elements, keeping these principles in mind can take the perceived as well as actual usability of your experience up a few notches.
Usability 101
Mudslide / on Instagram http://instagr.am/p/YY8XS/
Hard Drive Buying Recommendations
I’ve been asked about hard drives enough to warrant a blog post. Let’s talk about backing up, physical size, capacity, speed, interfaces, brands, Thailand, partitioning and formatting. Don’t worry, I’ve included a “TL;DR” (Too Long; Didn’t Read) summary at the end of each section so you can scan for the gist.
Houston cloud cover / on Instagram http://instagr.am/p/U_S_j/
Disappointing Kindle Fire Reviews
While the Amazon Kindle Fire had me excited about an iPad competitor for the first time (possibly barring the HP TouchPad), early opinions have dissuaded any further optimism. Marco Arment, independent developer of Instapaper, and blogger extraordinaire, weighs in with some unfortunate real-world impressions:
I expected the Kindle Fire to be a compelling iPad alternative, but I can’t call it delightful, fun, or pleasant to use. Quite the opposite, actually: using the Fire is frustrating and unpleasant, and it feels like work.
And later, in conclusion:
The Fire is an Android version, sort of, of the iPod Touch. It’s the first device available that’s inexpensive and offers Android in a somewhat reasonable package without a cellular contract.
But that’s just about all I can say for it. It’s a bad game player, a bad app platform, a bad web browser, a bad video player, and, most disappointingly, a bad Kindle.
While the attempts to match the iPad’s combination of user experience, feature set and price continue, the Kindle Fire doesn’t appear to be a strong competitor with the first two. That doesn’t matter as much in terms of sales volume, though, since Amazon blew the doors off the latter attribute of price. Make no mistake, these tablets will fly off Amazon’s front page straight into budget-conscious homes this holiday season, and you might actually witness someone in real life using a tablet without an Apple on the back for the first time.
I’ll continue to hold out and hope that software optimization and the next hardware revision set the Kindle Fire back on the right course that we expected from the announcement, but my excitement about a legitimate tablet competition will have to be (even further) delayed.
Tech Zeitgeist 2011
We have a doubleshot from The Verge today as they recap the past year with some of the biggest stories and books of 2011. If that wasn’t enough for you to catch up on, there remains an admirable collection of the year’s finest tech writing.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The Verge remains one of the finest sources of tech news and editorials online, with a large and growing user community, and itself makes my list of exciting products of 2011. Make sure to check them out on the web, as well as in video (On The Verge) and audio (VergeCast) form.