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Mobile platforms. Just saying the phrase makes some people cringe due to the number of ecosystems out there. But with each ecosystem/platform comes a new UI. WPCentral has an interesting article how how close each platform’s icon size/shape really is.

It’s something you don’t really see until you line them all up. Also notice the absence of BlackBerry OS and Android. Both platforms have no standard/bounding shape for developers to use. While some people might hate the restrictions on icon shape and size I think it’s good to have when you want to really give the consumer the best UI possible.

I upgraded my MacBook Pro to the Golden Master release of Lion this morning and was treated to the delight of inverted scrolling. At first it was kind of cool but very quickly it got annoying. Good thing I had an external mouse lying around to fix the issue.

To get scrolling back to the trusty way it has been since…forever just plug in a USB mouse or connect a Bluetooth mouse. Then in System Preferences go to Mouse and uncheck the checkbox at the top.

The setting will apply to the external mouse but it will also carry over to the trackpad.

If you know me at all you know that I am not a book reader. I would much rather sit down with a nice thick programming language manual then a novel. That being said when I actually spend the time to read a book I expect it to be good. Upon getting the recommendation for Rework I was a bit turned off at first. Really, a business book? But those notions all fell away when I saw who it was written by, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. Jason & David are the main guys at 37Signals which you should know as the company the created and open sourced Ruby on Rails.

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A few days ago I wrote about the new top bar on the Google sites which was white and turned to black. At the time this made no sense to me as the pages just looked goofy and the black bar was carried across all of their services except for Gmail. Well now that has changed. Google has begun to roll out UI changes to Gmail and Google Calendar to conform to the new UI. Overall the changes are a bit startling at first compared to what we have all come to expect from Google but I think in time this could be a good move. Now if they could just get the Android UI/UX to match up with Web UI/UX then they could have a golden platform.

Also I now have a Google+ account so after some use and helping populate the user base I hope to have a write up on it soon.

Gmail Blog Showing New UI

Google Calendar Help – New UI

Flash. Just saying the word makes me cringe. It’s never ran well on my desktop or laptop let alone any tablet I have seen but the Internet just loves it. With an onslaught of new features in HTML5, and a lot of websites moving towards these features, we can only hope that Flash will have a funeral sooner rather than later.

The one reason most sites are still Flash based is because the web designers and developers really don’t want to go back and recode everything. Well now Google is stepping in to help the process out with Google Swiffy. The idea is simple; Flash goes in, HTML5 comes out. Just like everything else coming from Google it’s in the Google Labs/Beta stage but I really hope this will catch on.