Google Drive And The Cloud Wars. Editor’s note: Aaron Levie is co-founder and CEO at Box.
Follow him on Twitter @levie. For the past six years, any startup touching the cloud storage space has lived in anticipation and fear of Google’s entry into the market. G(od) Drive’s arrival was meant to instantly commoditize existing offerings, kill all future opportunity for new players, and leave a charred ecosystem in its wake as it battled Microsoft and Apple for control of our online lives and content. This was seen as all but a forgone conclusion among investors, press, analysts, and even competing startups since 2006 and beyond.
And even beyond that. But the Google Drive never came. “Sundar had concluded that it was an artifact of the style of computing that Google was about to usher out the door… I don’t think we need files anymore,” Steven Levy writes in his book, In the Plex, referring to Sundar Pichai, head of Google Chrome. But it turns out that lawyers still needed to share detailed, structured documents. A Responsive Design Approach for Navigation, Part 1. Designing for touch. OS X Mountain Lion: The iOS-ification Continues This Summer. Earlier this morning Apple caught the Internet by surprise with a series of major announcements regarding the future of OS X.
To put it simply, Apple officially unveiled OS X Mountain Lion, or version 10.8, the next major iteration of OS X that will become available later this year — the initial targeted release date is a vague “this summer” — through the Mac App Store. A preview of Mountain Lion was given to a few selected tech blogs, including The Verge, Macworld, Daring Fireball, and The Loop, which we are linking back to summarize the new features of Mountain Lion and reflect upon the changes previewed by Apple.
The basic theme of Mountain Lion is iOS-ification. Apple took the best features of iOS, and in particular iOS 5, and brought them “back to the Mac”, giving them a desktop-class facelift to make applications and services suitable for the Mac environment. Changes in Mountain Lion From Apple’s press release: iMessage for Mac, officially named Messages, is a replacement for iChat. Why Mobile Matters. When I initially proposed the idea of Mobile First over three years ago, there were a lot of skeptics.
The situation today has a lot more people convinced that taking mobile seriously matters. But just in case some people remain unconvinced, here's a really vivid way of explaining the situation. Number of Mobile Devices Every day 371,124 children are born across the World. Soundcloud’s savvy way of mixing HTML5 and native apps for growth on mobile. HTML5 may fall into the experimental category for many app developers (especially in games) because of problems with performance and monetization.
But for a handful of highly-social apps, a dual strategy with HTML5 for brand new users and native apps for devoted ones is the way to go. Germany’s Soundcloud is one of these. Why HTML5 is not the choice for enterprise mobility. Why The Kindle Fire Goes Beyond Usability by ZURB. Amazon is really pushing the Kindle and when you go to their homepage, the Kindles are front and center with the Kindle Fire being the most prominently showcased.
But have you actually looked at a Kindle Fire? It's not exactly easy to use. So when it comes to usability, the Kindle Fire just plain sucks. Jakob Nielsen recently trashed the Kindle Fire's usability, calling it disappointing from a user standpoint. Here are a few of its faults: The browser is awkward and not at all easy to navigate. Yet the Kindle Fire is on fire, selling like hotcakes.
This is something that's been brought up by Simon Sinek in his book "The Power of Why. " By asking and answer why first, Amazon has managed to convert people into thinking that they need a tablet that isn't just a book reader or movie viewer, but that's a portal into the world. Deep dive into responsive mobile design, part 1. November 8th, 2011 It’s time to take a closer look at the design and implementation principles of responsive mobile design, and this will be the first part in a series that will answer three underlying questions: what are we designing, why are we designing it in a certain way and how are we implementing the target design.
This series is based primarily on our experience in unifying the two separate code bases that we had for the Android market client – one optimized for small phone screens, and another optimized for large tablet screens. The main goal is to show the basic principles of designing and developing for a wide variety of screen sizes, ratios, resolutions and form factors. Keep in mind that the Market client UX and UI design used to highlight the specific points is always work in progress, as we continue refining and polishing the application across the entire gamut of supported devices. This is a screenshot of the application details page.
What happens on a larger form factor?