Gadgetory

we're here with khoi vinh the CEO and founder of Mixel a social collaging app for ipad but he also helped curate part of apps in this beautiful gallery here he's also worked as a designer on the New York Times com blogs at subtraction com very influential so what exactly are we doing here and what threads do you see between the seven apps that you pick to display here we really try to gather some of the most interesting user interface designs going on on iphone and on ipad and I think the common thread is that everybody's still figuring it out it's really young platform if you go back to the beginning of the iphone it's five years but the ipad is certainly only about two years old or so so people are really trying to figure out what makes sense for all the really different kinds of creative uses that they're putting these multi touch devices to and when you look at the size of the ipad screen do you feel like ab developers are taking advantage of it so I feel like the apple the Apple model is kind of like well the set the menu bar is going to be exact same size no matter how big the screen is not I don't really feel like that works do you see a lot of guys taking advanced on the screen size or just maybe inflating the iphone you I that's really interesting question a Mixel is on ipad only and in some ways I guess the question isn't really are we taking advantage of it is do we know what to do with all of the space because it's compared to iphone it's a lot of space and the way that you create a user interface for the ipad is very very different from both the phone and from the web I think on the web there's a compulsion to sort of cram as much as you can in there but ipad assistants middle ground where you really want to put as little as you can in there and yet you have a lot more space than you do on the phone so it's just very very strange thing I think in a lot of ways the ipad is still evolving it says in this awkward teenager phase we don't really know yet how it's going to turn out and you really see that a lot a lot of apps how you compare that to looking at the site for like the New York Times where there's so much text it's like those sites began before tablets even existed how do you visualize those types of sites kind of changing to be more like paper for example which really doesn't you know you're using your fingers to interact with it there's not much navigation well I think that's a really big open question I mean if you see it look at a lot of the ways publishers are tackling the phones and the tablets there they're very much still in the experimental phase as I said everybody's figuring it out phone is a little bit more straightforward because we really understand the use case of the phone in that people are on the go they need a quick hit of whatever content they're consuming and then it needs to be like highly optimized for speed and download and so forth tablet the use cases are really evolving so people aren't really quite sure how they're using tablets a lot of folks will leave their tablets at home and not pick them up until seven or eight o'clock at night right when they're on the couch yeah and so that seems to be the predominant pattern for most people but that's really changing as tablets enter the workforce and I think you'll see in the next year or two people being issued tablets more and more and then they'll have these tablets with them all day long and how that impacts the way they they want to access information and how the apps respond to that I think remains to be seen it's interesting and another thing is all the apps fear on iOS go back to that a little bit um why is that why do you think perhaps a higher quality of developments have an iOS or is it just the fact that there are only a couple screen sizes and resolutions are developing for I think they might as well take I oh well we picked iOS because we're most comfortable with iOS we know we the people that we know the companies that we know they're producing really beautiful ABS the ones that we look to their doing it on iOS on phone and on tablet and I fully believe that they're going to be some beautiful apps on Android in there there are right now and I think if we've talked about potentially doing another installment of this show or you know at some point the future and it would be great to get Android companies and at that point but I think right now it's so clear to me that that the interface design being done on iOS is really leading the way more for all the platforms when you look at some of the apps around here like path or pick two or Instagram as in here but you know it's like this is kind of this this everywhere mentality you know your bottom navigation bar you have this kind of fuzzy top bar we can able to app or something like that and then you see something like tweet bottom what you have here yeah what do you think is interesting about that like what are they doing right I guess because it's I mean it's modern in different ways but in some of the other apps it's kind of breathing well we really wanted to get mark Jardine from tap BOTS to bring tweetbot to the show because they really are sort of a very interesting almost like argument for how Apple's is you I foundation is really just the beginning and you should take it at face value right because they have a lot of the same visual motifs but then there's so much for power users right and they've also reinvented almost every little widget in UI toolkit and in many cases improved upon them and so I think it's really important especially to get that work here to sort of show that that people are improvising and are you know figuring out what works for their their app their features their content and their users when you look forward at the way these apps are being seen by the public I mean I haven't heard of any other art galleries of apps and how our apps working is kind of like a platform for designers now and it's like you're totally great looking Mac apps and people are just for some reason getting really really excited about us development I mean is it just that people are using these things a lot more like other phones every day I think it's apart form for artists now like how does that work I think that's part of it i think you know i mean it's kind of hard to you chose to focus your time on us yeah absolutely after working on some cool projects oh yeah and it's hard to hard to remember what phones were like before the iphone yeah i mean they were not very capable of showing really really beautiful user interface design and now all of a sudden you've got this beautiful screen that in many cases is got more resolution than we had on our desktops five years ago and you're carrying it around with you all the time on top of that Apple did this terrific thing the terrific favor for designers in fixing the resolution so you don't have to design you know I'm team number of prompting a number of screen sizes and so more that's huge but I think the biggest thing is as you said these apps are more integrated in our lives than desktop apps ever were it's a great opportunity to do really focus design but also to have a great impact on people's lives and and to sort of meld with their their you know their usage patterns and she's the way they think about the world I think that's that's why I think user interface design in the next you know decade is going to come more and more important more more interesting to people as I kind of promised like a competition people are like who can do the best job right you know it's like paper I mean there are a million drawing apps on the App Store they came out of nowhere and built something that like yeah I think the key thing about paper is they made it look like magic as soon as you open it up it was like wow that's what the tablet can do for you that that you couldn't do with the Wacom tablet and you know put a shop or something like that on a desktop so that's really really huge breakthrough so we are in a gallery after all you know there a lot of galleries word you're buying things yeah I think most the apps here are free but when you look at like putting a price on this kind of art it's like not that many apps right i mean tweet tweet bug tap box is doing well selling line products but it's like do you think this is a sustainable industry and be building these move apps especially free ones where you can buy little pieces of it right like how do you see that as a business that you're now in are you asking me every app is worth a billion dollars haha i don't know i mean i can say that if you want yeah i think as as the co-founder for start-up is the CEO we spent all of our days thinking about what is the worth of this thing that we're building and i think what's nice about this show is you just get a chance to really admire the work and so I'm gonna punt on that that question I don't know how we really value these you guys for that being all i know i said think they're there the work is interesting enough it's beautiful and all the work is interesting about the work is interesting enough it's beautiful enough and it's pushing it up boundaries that I think it really bears closer inspection and that's what the shows about mm-hmm do you think that they're gonna be a lot more things like this like I mean even WWDC sold out in two hours yeah are you gonna be there mica powder will be I i was actually added a breakfast on it so I was too late to scorch it too late already taken yeah have you heard of any other like events like what you guys have done here we have it that's why we're so excited about this I would hope to see a lot more of this because you know a whole generation when people are focusing their energy on apps and they're doing amazing work and I think it it really deserves this kind of showcase it really deserves people looking at it more closely and and having a dialogue about it and I mean you're obviously a busy guy what part of you wanted to spend a month putting something like this together reaching out to companies and bringing bringing this type of work together you know when you're going to start up your heads down so often and as a designer's foot in the stirrup you're often sort of drowned out by the business dialogue and the technology dialogue and just to get a place where people can look at at the you know the artfulness of the user interfaces that are being you know made all the time I thought that was really valuable and I really wanted the opportunity to let a lot of these app designers shine so it seemed totally worthwhile firstly the gallery space just made it really easy because it's ideal for showing digital art mmm yet there are no iPads to play with the apps here there is one downstairs you can play with Mixel downstairs yes song yes so speaking of mix of what do we have to look forward to for your company sharrap so we're going to focus on the phone next right now mix-a-lot's ipad-only and we're taking a look at all of the interactions that we have on the iPad and seeing how they make sense in in your hand and on the go yeah that's interesting because I mean people see the ipad is like a creation or consumption device whereas phone is more so communication aid consumption yes my recreation yeah but I think you I think multi-touch in general is much more conducive to creation than people really give it credit for when it first debuted especially on the ipad i think i think the amount of screen real estate you have the ipad is just very very conducive to doing like really great creative stuff let me just take a look at the stuff that people are doing on paper yeah so you know from nixle like our journey is to figure out how to get people to lower their inhibitions about expressing themselves with pictures and you know art that kind of thing and so we're going to be we've learned a lot on the iPad we've learned a lot about what it takes for people to to dabble in this kind of stuff and we're going to apply some of those lessons to the phone necks and reach an audience of people who are on the go and try to create a way of cream this kind of content that is complementary to the way people you know think about their phone how are you finding the different ways like very surprised by any of the ways people engage with Mixel like look at the users and what they're doing yeah so is everything social these days but what's surprising you know what is is unexpected because everybody's got you know social references so there are a few things I think are really surprising first the tools that we built into Mixel that allow you to edit and make a collage or really quite primitive we we didn't put a ton of engineering time into letting you crop things that you flip and duplicate right you just got a lasso yeah basically yeah but people have done some really amazing impressive jaw-dropping work inside very very sophisticated and and very very complex shmixels the other thing that it's been really gratifying as well as surprising is the communities come together really really quickly and really feat they've sort of jointly decided okay we're going to figure out how to use this tool and support each other and get to know each other and they really you know they very often refer to themselves as a kind of family now and they know a few of them are hitting these milestones like 100 pixels or five hundred or a thousand nixle and that in itself is amazing but what's even more amazing is the community is waiting for each person to hit that milestone and as they get to like 495 mixels they start making mixels cheering them on and and really trying to to root for each other to get there it's just been incredibly gratifying to see that kind of stuff and a lot of this stuff is cool and I'll get people tend to like put a lot of effort into one or two creative absolutely do you think there's time in our lives for all these apps or do you think over time let's say in 10 years things are going to be distilled down to the point where you know or is it really just like you know what everybody likes different books are really likes different video games that kind of things I mean theory I think in Sami people all just throw around the other but like is there time for all these apps well I think you hit on it I mean there's not enough time for all of the books they'll be published this year or all the movies that will be released this year but having that variety and especially with digital media with the web creating these apps where people who have passions that otherwise would be unmet can go and meet other people and engage in and get and get sort of encouraged to indulge those passions I think that's incredibly valuable and and you know we see people make time for it i mean the the session links inside nixle are really super healthy people come home they have been wronged me oh yeah for yeah this is sit down they have dinner sit down maybe it from the TV and open up Mixel and they're in there for you know half hour hour or longer they're incredibly engaged that's part of the beauty of the iPad as well it's very very immersive platform in creating experiences when you look at just in the past few months or so since draw something started taking off do you think style I are sticking around or are we going to stick with fingers I will tell the guys at 53 who make paper I think that that it's fingers all the way I'm hope four fingers but you know style I'd there might be a market for them and if anybody can do what those guys can do it what about in terms of computers I mean you you right you right you mark things up and sketch things out in applications I mean is it is everything going to be touched at some point or I think you're always going to be a place where typing I tell you I I got a bluetooth keyboard for my iPad and I can travel just with the ipad now which is it's lighter it has a lot of additive life it's a logitech one maybe I think made by another company I can't remember which one it is zagg and yeah it's a zag exactly yeah and and that's terrific it doesn't replace everything that I can do on my laptop but I think in five or ten years it very very possibly could or if not sooner so I and I think there's you know a pretty good bet that some touch properties will come to what we think of as desktops and laptops today but you know I would be a fool to predict win I will thanks so much for your time thanks a lot really appreciate your wisdom and expertise yeah thank you