I’ve had my Pebble watch for around a week or two now, and I am very excited by it. I’m excited by not only what it can do now at it’s price but by what it represents the future can do with compact connected devices.

I see the Pebble as the introduction to idea of small & compact networked screens that complement our existing devices. The Pebble’s main advantage is that it has access to a phone providing it with with an always on network connection and a very fast processor.

I see the phone as the Pebble’s gateway to the connected world, not just a forwarder of notifications.

A smart watch will be addressable directly

Right now we are hacking notifications to our phones (via services like Pushover) but a watch like the Pebble will need to exist on its own and events should be publishable directly to it. There are things that are relevant to me that change between the context of my phone and my watch.

A smart watch shouldn’t receive all phone notifications

The idea that you will see all your email on the watch is going to kill the smart watch. No one wants email tied directly to their wrist, we should be taking the idea of Gmail’s Important or Apple’s VIP email and applying it to email notifications on the device.

Vibration should respect event severity

A phone vibrating is annoying, I’ve switched it off in Silent mode just so I can have a way to kill my phone’s annoyances.

A smart watch should receive more context about the notification to understand whether or not a vibration is required. Phone call - yes Email - maybe SMS from VIP - yes SMS from a group - No.

It should be thought of as a passive device

We can become addicted to a Dick Tracy phone that has all the bells and whistles such as talking to it or using it as a calculator — or we can build something that complements our networked world.

The watch can be something that receives contextual information based on our phone’s location such as routing information, important alerts and it can be something that prepares us for the future with upcoming & important information.

If I’m walking to a meeting, it could provide me route guidance if I veer off course on the streets.

If I have events coming up it can prepare me and guide me so I’m there are ready on time.

It’s not like what we tried before

Microsoft/MSN tried to build a watch that provided the weather, sports & news. It didn’t sell because society at the time wasn’t into the idea of connected devices — we had not been shown the power of the iPhone with notifications.

The old watches were set in the things they could do, they could be relevant to people other than a select group of people who wanted News + Weather + Sport. People now want information tailored to what they care about, not a generic template for everyone.

Really nice simplistic demonstration video from Mercedes-Benz, I really like videos that scrap all surroundings to the basics to focus on the product.

I appreciate that they struck the right balance as well, the background scenery is still animated and stuff is still going on (like cars going under bridges).

This is the concept for the BMW 4 series coupe.

What really excites me is that the design of this car connects the front and the back, it looks good from any angle.

I was reminded to revisit the .Mail concept by Tobias van Schneider and it got me thinking about the third category of emails where they don’t quite fit into actionable tasks and they aren’t really things you want to revisit later.

References to external things

Flight e-tickets, courier tracking numbers; these are the sorts of things I don’t particularly want an action for but rather have them become useful at their declared date.

An email is now more than just a collection of text, it’s used as a referenced to external objects (hyperlinks) but why should we jump from an email client into a website to extract information that could have been embedded in the email. What if that email was live, those external objects behind the email were being updated inside our email client and we didn’t have to click through?

And why should something that may not be needed now but needed later be buried underneath newer emails?

E-tickets

In the case of an e-ticket I want it to setup a reminder for me to leave for the airport and I want it to become useful when I’m in the airport. This sounds like Passbook but unlike Passbook it doesn’t require any action or handling of special .pkpass files; the client recognises an e-ticket and organises it appropriately without you having to manually invoke a workflow.

Passbook currently extracts that e-ticket and stores it in a segregated data store (iCloud), meaning you’re out of luck if you’re roaming and have access to a internet cafe but no WiFi for your iOS device. The e-ticket (metadata in the email) should be stored with your email so when you visit Gmail/iCloud/Outlook online in a cafe you should be able to see a richer email with details about your flight, changes etc

Courier tracking

But I’m more interested in the courier tracking numbers, these only become useful after a few days but after a few days you have to hunt through your emails to find that tracking link. A mail client should be capable of subscribing to this courier tracking number and polling for updates, when the package is in your city you should be subtlety notified but when the package is out for delivery your mail client should delivery a notification to you.

Push?

Maybe it shouldn’t be polling that the mail client has to do, maybe email providers should be pushed updated meta-data for a specific message? To establish the push link

• The mail provider sees an email with external objects
• Communicates with the external objects provider, declaring this how you can reach me
• The external objects provider can then push updates/events to the related mail message

By using the email provider we don’t have the issue of OS X doing its own thing with the provider, my iOS device doing its own thing etc. They are just receiving the information from the middleman email provider.

From there a company like Emirates could push a generic event that contains a date & time (okay awesome let’s create a calendar event) or they could push an important notification (okay we may need to update the calendar event and flag the mail to the top regarding a flight change).

A company like UPS could push a notification (a casual bump for that message that the package is in my city) and another important notification (flag the email and send out a push notification).

There does come the problem of spammers having an essentially having a richer way to spam you, so we might have to look into human verification where we have an established list of services that are trusted for pushing to email providers. Again the email provider can chose to blacklist bad push providers.

What are we achieving here?

• We aren’t diving through emails to find things when we need them. Those emails are presenting themselves when circumstances change and becoming useful when we need them.
• We aren’t locking the richness of an email to something like passbook on an iPad or iPhone, we are letting an external or web mail client be just as useful. And we are letting people move between Android, WP8, iOS without locking away important rich content
• We are turning email into an important organisation tool

Beautifully simple furniture design.

This post isn’t meant to be a guide or a essay, it’s really just an admission of guilt about my incorrect love for a worrisome UI paradigm. I’m writing this because I believe design and connections (with people OR systems) are the most important things in life

I was recently very excited to install an app called Weather Dial, an app for the iPhone that provides an overview of the weather in a design based off the design principles of Dieter Rams. It’s meant to look like a Braun product but it’s trapped inside a phone and I’m really over it.

I was originally attracted to it because of my interest in Rams’ work but I’m really feeling let down by the application because of the box it locks itself into and limitations it reaches because of this.

This app has a huge dial that indicates the type of weather currently, it even animates like a mechanical wheel. But, I can’t play with itself despite my mobile having this touchscreen so I’m left with a view into a world containing a product I can’t really touch (it even feels like a magical world because it’s told iOS to get rid of my status bar so who knows what the time is in this new magical world). I love design because it’s usually connected with its environment, a beautiful Braun watch face is linked to a nice band and it feels great but I’m left with a app that ends with the size of the screen — but I can’t turn over my phone and feel the back of this weather machine.

I feel like this design is probably more about being cool or showing off appreciation for elegance, when design (for me) is about helping people get stuff done in life. Machines are meant to be out of the way.

I truly appreciate the core reason of skeuomorphic design, trying to build interfaces that people can relate to and be able to use without any hesitation. But it locks your application into a very tight box that you can’t get out of, it leaves no room for growth because the physical product has already been decided in its functionality and going beyond that would be a departure from the product itself.

So.

We should limit skeuomorphic design to the concept of building things that people can relate to, but don’t base a look or feel off it. Why is a notepad and paper so successful? It’s because it marries a easy to use input device with a responsive way of storing information. So let’s build off this in an application, build an easy to way to input data easily with a powerful way to store information. Dump those truly terrible cursive fonts (hey, Notes in iOS thank you for introducing Helvetica as a input font).

I’m interested in design teaching people how to use modern day devices without having to rely on a manual or previous experiences because not everyone has those previous experiences.

We need to keep pushing computers forward. We’ve done this in the hardware world by dumping floppy disks, DVDs but keeping software in touch with the past is going to leave a dull future.

This is still my favourite application design.

Mercedes CLS63 AMG Shooting Brake

You’d be crazy to buy a Porsche Panamera over this, it seems Mercedes actually thought about a good design for a estate wagon. Whereas the Panamera (like every other Porsche) seems to be an lazy extension of the 911 design.

BMW M135i

I don’t think anyone can deny that hatches are the most exciting form factors right now.

There’s something awesome about this old school Lotus Esprit decal from the late 70s.

From the same universe that Volkwagen cars and Apple products live in.