I appreciate the need for vagueness in your answer to the question of "What exactly are you building?" I'm sure in many ways you and your team don't know exactly how it's going to grow and change, and I for one would rather have the team making this thing be flexible and reactive as opposed to building to a spec that was promised to customers.
I think you would be able to reach more people more powerfully if you spent more time talking about your vision for what Twitter could have been had they not gone the ad route. As a designer working in the web industry, I am just as excited as you are about the potential for this thing, but I think most people need it explained a bit further to really get on board.
Perhaps you could highlight some of the really cool stuff that was built with the Twitter API that they then squashed. Talk about the potential OUTCOMES of this system, not just the origins of it. Hell, maybe even take some proposals from excited designers/developers for what they would do with said API, then use those proposals as a demonstration of the system's potential.
I'm glad you brought this up, Lance. Frankly, I'm surprised that no one else has.
Due to tax complications, the percentage of money we're going to be able to give is going to vary drastically depending on how many overall copies of the app we're able to sell. We were advised by our lawyer to use the term proceeds as opposed to profits or revenue as a small means of protection.
Additionally, I would challenge your expectation that we should give a "fair" amount to the Wikimedia foundation. We're the only one of the many paid Wikipedia apps that chooses to give any money back to Wikimedia (as far as I know, at least) and we certainly don't feel as though we have any obligation to do so. We CHOOSE to give back because we want to support Wikipedia and free, open knowledge.
We're committed to giving back, we just don't want to back ourselves into an unsustainable corner or make promises we can't keep.
Thanks for taking the time to write this out, Gordon.
One of our biggest concerns with the node view was that it would imply more significance than is actually present, as you mention. Like you point out, the radial order of the nodes, their relative proximity, and which nodes are actually shown are completely arbitrary. At the end of the day, you're right: it is far more aesthetic than it is informative.
However, we do think there is something to be said for aesthetics and how the app feels. Our goal was not to expose all sorts of new data and information, but rather to make the browsing of Wikipedia more fun. While I concede the node-view does not convey a whole lot of meaning, my hope is that is stimulates curiosity and delights the user.
Thanks for taking the time to leave some thoughtful feedback.
To pull back the curtain a bit, you are right that the nodes that show up when a parent node is tapped are randomized. As you can imagine, many Wikipedia pages have thousands of links which would be unwieldy for both the hardware and the user. For this reason, we gave up on the idea that users would be able to search for a specific page through the node view. Our hope is that someone who is looking for a specific page will use the search feature, while the node-view will be used for more serendipitous browsing.
As far as the double-tapping is concerned, you may be right about it not being intuitive. It will be interesting to see what people's reactions are. We decided to go with it because, like you mentioned, it is one of lesser used gestures in iOS, and deleting a node is the least important way to interact with it. We felt that expanding and bringing up the article itself were more important, so we tied them to the more standard gestures.
Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding, but it actually seems like you agree with me almost completely... You say:
>it has become less a place where you post your progress and methods and more a place to hype your startup, post your better idea of an app or site or just plain steal a style from another designer. There's very little "process" and a lot of sleek, shiny finished concepts.
Agreed. The purpose of my post was to point out that THIS is what Dribbble has become, and it's not because the community has dropped the ball as much as it's because the design of the site doesn't encourage more thoughtful, critical interactions.
>If Dribbble really cared about a lot of things, the site wouldn't look and work the way that it does.
This is precisely my point. Dribbble has chosen to not focus on nurturing criticism and feedback, therefore Dribbble is not a platform for critique.
Levying "designer arrogance" on Google is laughable. Google has never made decisions based on the principles of design before, so why would one assume the design process is to blame here? I think this is a result of people who don't understand design abusing style and visual trends.
The authors criticisms are legitimate and directly related to the design, but to assume an arrogant designer is at the top pushing these changes is frankly offensive. It's the same old engineers calling the shots at Google. But now, they just seem to be trying to keep up with other well designed products, like a little kid putting on his dad's Italian suit, wondering why he doesn't look great. Pleas, don't blame the tailor.
"50 Images that are now YOURS" is a bit misleading. The point of the Creative Commons License is that the images still belong to Wired, but now others are allowed to use them. This will only contribute to the "Creative Commons means it's free for me to use however/wherever I want" mindset.
I think you would be able to reach more people more powerfully if you spent more time talking about your vision for what Twitter could have been had they not gone the ad route. As a designer working in the web industry, I am just as excited as you are about the potential for this thing, but I think most people need it explained a bit further to really get on board.
Perhaps you could highlight some of the really cool stuff that was built with the Twitter API that they then squashed. Talk about the potential OUTCOMES of this system, not just the origins of it. Hell, maybe even take some proposals from excited designers/developers for what they would do with said API, then use those proposals as a demonstration of the system's potential.
You've got my money.