The Boeing 787 Dreamliner is a beautiful vehicle. The interior in particular is amazingly sophisticated and welcoming with an array of high tech features, like LCD window shade and mood lighting. Every aspect of this amazing plane has been thoroughly designed with the user in mind.

Everything, it seems except for the user interfaces for the flight attendants (photo from Engadget’s tour of the Dreamliner):

The graphics, layout and design look like something from 1998. Monospaced fonts, ugly gradients, ugly always visible scrollbars taking up a good deal of space on a touchscreen? Did none of the designers look at a smartphone or a tablet from the last 6 years?

 

I love this title to a post on Box Office Mojo:

‘Taken 2′ Poised To Punch Box Office in the Face This Weekend

So after many years of developing for Silverlight and WPF, and frustrating over the lack of leading (line height) control in a TextBlock element, I learn that Silverlight 4 does in fact have a LineHeight property. Grrr. For some reason, Expression Blend shows the line height property as disabled.

I only stumbled on this little fact after reading Silverlight 4 in Action by Pete Brown, an excellent compact book that delves deep into Silverlight without wasting space on frilly stuff. (This is definitely not a book for beginners though.)

It’s like learning that Santa Claus is real only after you’re too old to receive any gifts from him.

With the foundation of my website somewhat complete, I’ve started to clean up the design and code, starting with the blog. The blog is currently running a slightly customized WordPress theme called the-bootstrap, based on Twitter’s Bootstrap. The nice thing about Bootstrap is that it’s designed from the ground up to be responsive. The next step will be to make the rest of my site responsive. I’m not sure how easy it will be to retroactively apply Bootstrap to an existing code base, so this should be interesting.

I’m using two font families on this site and on the blog: Museo Sans and Museo Slab.

My daughter turned two last month. These last two years have been the most exciting, challenging, crazy, frustrating, exhausting, terrifying and rewarding moments of my life. My daughter has me wrapped around her tiny little finger. She runs my life, from the moment I walk in the door (and before I can even put my backpack down) and until she falls asleep (sometimes well, past midnight. She has her mommy’s stay-up-all-night genes). And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

In the meantime, I’ve had less time to grow my skills as a UX designer, front end designer and concept artist. I’ve managed to squeeze in an hour here and an hour there when my daughter is napping or on the rare occasion she actually sleeps a little early (say 11:30pm , but it’s hard to maintain momentum and not have to take a step back and remember where I left off.

Case in point: I finally relaunched my website after almost two years of on and off work. The design was ready almost two years ago, but finding the time to write the code (CSS/HTML/JavaScript) and put together a backend (currently PHP/MySQL) has proven very difficult. Especially when trying to help sooth a crying baby. Babies can be so unpredictable.

It didn’t help that I was distracted by SSO (Super Shiny Object) syndrome. I started out developing the site using ASP.NET, but as a UX designer trying to teach myself C# and backend coding was time consuming and difficult. I tried CMSes like Umbraco (ASP.NET), BlogEngine (ASP.NET) and WordPress (PHP) and briefly tried teaching myself MVC with CakePHP (an MVC framework for PHP) and Ruby on Rails, but in the end, the solution was to hand code a simple website using PHP and MySQL.

So, over two years after I had started to overhaul my website, I finally have what I originally sought to do: build a simple backend framework that I can use to teach myself the technologies I want to learn. The next step is to put together a plan on what to tackle and in what order. I have a long list too: SASS, CSS3, HTML5, RequireJS, and researching a few JavaScript tools like Dojo, Backbone and Moustache.

And the journey continues.

 

So the new iPhone is here. The iPhone 5. It’s the most amazing iPhone yet.

So why am I not excited?

For the last couple of years, Apple’s focus with regards to the iPhone is to make each release incrementally better. But unlike software releases, where an incremental update usually doesn’t incur any surcharges (or a small surcharge), Apple charges full price for each update.

There’s a handful of other reasons the new iPhone isn’t a compelling upgrade over competing phones (at least, for me):

Small screen

The new screen is 4″ diagonal but it’s all in the height. The width is the same as the earlier model, so webpages will still appear tiny

Slippery design

The iPhone 4 thru 5′s case is a marvel of industrial design and beauty over practicality. It’s still a little slippery without a lot of the grip of its competitors. I still expect to see lots of cracked screens.

Dated UI

A dated UI that’s becoming more and more cumbersome to use, compared to Windows Phone or even Android ICS.

Damn you Autocorrect!

Apple hasn’t really improved the iOS keyboard since … I don’t know, the original iPhone came out in 2007? Unless iOS6 vastly improves their dictionary, typing on the iPhone 5 will continue to be as frustrating as on my 2nd generation iPod Touch (which shipped with iOS 3). Hey Apple, you’ve had no problem stealing from your competitors (Android’s multi-tasking, window shade notifications bar, panorama mode in the camera), why not steal their better keyboards too?

In the meantime, Nokia delivers stunning industrial design (and an amazing camera) with their N920, the first phone since the iPhone 4 that I want to buy just on the marketing alone. And the Galaxy S III and Note deliver beautiful large screens (I just wish Samsung would kick their craptastic TouchWiz and use stock Android).

I’ve been waiting for 6 months for the new iPhone, putting up with crappy flip phones and the embarassingly subpar Sidekick 4G (released this year with Galaxy S hardware and Froyo. Wha?), for the faint hope that the iPhone would be a compelling purchase.

I guess I can stop waiting now , and go buy a Galaxy Nexus or Galaxy S III. But oy, all those months of waiting.

Actually the HTC One X seems like a much better buy.

Update

Alright, I admit, I jumped the gun. I should have waited for the actual reviews, and more importantly tried it out myself, before coming to a conclusion. Oh, hubris, will you never cease to surprise me?

Most of the reviewers seem pretty excited about the new phone. So, I’m going to give it a look once it shows up in nearest Apple store. I still have my doubts it’s the right phone for me, for two reasons:

• The navigation in iOS 6 is still pretty new, and the dataset much smaller than Google’s. Based on my experience with Windows Phone (which got me lost plenty of times), I’m not ready to trust Apple’s map app yet.
• I surf the web a lot on my phone, so I need the bigger screen. Not just taller but wider as well, so I can fit larger pages on the screen without constantly double-tapping to zoom, and/or squinting a lot. And I don’t have any problems with holding and using a larger phone like a Galaxy S III or HTC One X with one hand; I don’t have giant hands, but I can still hold those bigger phones quite comfortably.

 

 

I was hoping to take this site live after everything was ready (especially the Portfolio section), but I can’t wait any longer. So here’s my new site, warts, incomplete content and all. I’ll fold in the rest of the content as a I go along.

Perhaps, this will get me motivated to finish the rest of the site. Fingers crossed.

So, this is really happening. I’m on WordPress. Leaving behind 4 years of sometimes frustrating, sometimes rewarding moments of trying to build my website using ASP.NET and BlogEngine.NET. In retrospect, it was a misguided attempt to learn ASP.NET by building my whole website around that technology. And if I had been going in that original direction that I had started so many years ago, splitting my time between design and development instead of focusing on exclusively on the user experience, I would probably still be on ASP.NET.

Or maybe not. In hindsight, my mistake was in not realizing how vast and complicated and painful and time consuming ASP.NET can be. It’s not something you dabble in. It’s a technology you commit to, and having done that, shun any other tech for the time being, because once you cross that initial chasm into the realm of ASP.NET, things get harder really fast. Unless you’re committed to diving deep into ASP.NET, and learning all the ins and outs of delegates, C# partial classes, interfaces, IIS idiosyncracies and all the minutae that make up being an ASP.NET developer … well, don’t do it.

And what finally convinced me to take this step (albeit a step that took many weeks to complete) was a Freakonomics podcast episode called … drumroll please … the upside of quitting.

That’s right, I was deep down the rabbit hole of ASP.NET that I couldn’t see the reality, that rather than struggle and stumble forward with ASP.NET, a very developer-centric and designer unfriendly technology, I should just stop right here. Quit. Move on to something easier, something better designed for my skillsets. Specially given how unlikely it was that I would be able to invest in the time needed to get good at ASP.NET, *especially* after my daughter was born, and a lot of other responsibilities suddenly became clear.