Snapguide – iOS Interface Design

So, a few weeks ago I came across Snapguide. It’s a great howto and guide app for iOS. The thing that really struck me about this app is how well thought out the interface is. iOS is a great platform for building apps to consume content, however content creation is somewhat limited. The only apps that really do a good job of content creation are simple, one step creation apps (like: Instragram, Facebook etc). Where you only create one piece of content, and you provide minimal information. Snapguide, on the other hand, has an inbuilt editor that allows you to create detailed photographic guides, all from the “comfort” of your iphone. The app basically asks its user to take photos of each step of a process and annotate them. It then joins these steps together to make a beautiful guide. The true interface magic is in the creation process. It actually makes it simple enough to take each photo, annotate it and add it to your guide. Also allowing you to re-order the photos and edit the guide (before AND after publishing). In testing the app, I created this guide (which went to their homepage features for a few days – and got a fair few likes as well): Make Paleo Tabouli. On a side note: i would highly recommend trying this recipe if you like tabouli.....

Section vs Div – HTML5 and Semantics

So, this week I’ve been teaching web design at Shillington College in Sydney. Today we had an interesting discussion about <section> vs <div> for marking up regions on a page in HTML5 – in our case: particularly the main content region (which previously we style as <div id=”content”>. The debate stemmed from the (somewhat obsessive) idea that <div>’s are evil. The evil part of the <div> tag has more to do with the sloppy, messy usage that has become rife with the advent of WYSIWYG software that invariably writes terrible HTML. What people seem to not understand – or be reluctant to accept is that <div> is still a perfectly acceptable element in HTML5. Furthermore, I would suggest that there is no more semantic meaning in the use of <section> than <div>. As far as I see it, neither of them carries any intrinsic meaning. The other new HTML5 elements all have embedded meaning.. but section is really no more meaningful than <div> or <span> or any of our other un-semantic tags. The issue here stems from the seemingly conflicting messaging in the spec. on one hand we are being told to avoid the <div> tag, while on the other hand we are told to use it instead of section to markup a region: Note: The section element is not a generic container element. When an element is needed for styling purposes or as a convenience for scripting, authors are encouraged to use the div element instead. A general rule is that the section element is appropriate only if the element’s contents would be listed explicitly in the document’s outline So, while I understand the...