Tales of a Designer

Microsoft Entourage 08 for Mac

For the past few years I’ve been searching for a desktop mail app that I enjoy using. I had been used to sending/reading email in the browser with gmail, but I wanted to get away from that and use an actual application. Being on a Mac, my first move was naturally to use Mail.app, before Leopard. I thought the app was just ok, but I wasn’t really impressed.

After moving away from Mail.app, I gave Mailplane a try, but it felt too much like my web browser, and if I’m going to have a separate application for mail, I don’t want it to feel like my browser….or else I’d use my browser.

Then it was back to Mail.app with the new Leopard release. At first I really liked the ease of use and new features brought about. I thought that I had found what I was looking for. Then I realized that a few of my emails that I had sent out never got sent. That was more than frustrating, and I’m not sure if that was an error with the app, or with my mail server, but that was a deal killer.

Thunderbird was up next, and I actually didn’t have any problems with Thunderbird. Emailing wasn’t bad and it got the job done. I didn’t love Thunderbird, it was just ok, but it got done what I needed to get done and I figured I would stick with that since I felt that I was at the end of the rope with mail apps for a Mac.

Then comes the newly released Entourage 08 for Mac. Of course I was very skeptical about this product, not only because Entourage from the 04 Office suite is dreadful to use, but it’s a Microsoft product. But that is no more. For the first time I can say that I found a mail app that I love to use. The new interface is drastically different than the older version, and everything looks and feels very polished.

It is also very convenient that I can sync up my contacts and iCal with Entourage, which keeps all of my apps/devices current with my events and contacts. Since I’m expecting 2008 to be extremely busy for myself and Tridea, email will play quite a large part in communications, and I need an app that I love and feel comfortable using. That is where Entourage fills that void, and it pains me to say that I found a Microsoft product that I love using. But I would highly recommend this app for Mac users looking for a new mail app. Macworld also gave a good review on the app, which I would recommend reading if interested.

UI’s on Mobile Devices

I’m not big on making predictions when the new year starts, but there are a few things that I become hopeful of. One thing that I really hope to see is more competition and innovation in the mobile device arena regarding user interfaces. It seems that with the advent of the iPhone, it’s sparked some liveliness in other mobile manufacturers. One of those manufacturers is Microsoft, who’s currently working on Windows Mobile 7.

What seems interesting about Windows Mobile 7, is that they are adding touch and motion gestures, which can make the user experience quite pleasurable. One thing that some phones companies don’t understand, is that just because a phone UI has touchscreen doesn’t make it a good experience. Touching the screen to open an application has been around on many phones for a long time. Then once you’re in that application, it’s back to the crappy UI that was present before. I’d like to see a little more than that.

What makes the iPhone such a pleasure to use, is the experience of using that touch screen once you are inside of an application, and the interaction with that application. This is what Microsoft seems to be doing with Windows Mobile 7, and I am confident that they will get it right……at least a little bit. I’m also confident that Google will do a good job with Android as well.

Overall, it seems that the mobile arena is headed in the right direction, but more innovation is definitely needed, so hopefully we will see some interesting products this year.

Tridea Redesign

For the past few months, the Tridea team has been planning a redesign to launch for a brand new year. In setting new goals for this new year, we felt it was necessary to put a new face on our website for a fresh start. So we spend quite a bit of time on redesigning, and rewriting all of the copy in the site.

The overall goal for the new site, aside from a new look, was to increase the amount of content in the site, basically elaborating a bit more on what we previously had. An example of this is our about page; we wrote a bit more of our company values, and moved our individual information to our own bio pages, which will give us room to expand on those in the future. Therefore, we increased the width of the site and added two columns, instead of one. This seems to work out very well, and the refreshed content fits the new design very well.

The homepage image that we chose took hours to find. It’s a closeup of the ceiling design of the Madrid airport. We browsed through hundreds of photography sites looking for something to convey the message that we were looking for. It was hard to top the last one because it conveyed the exact message that we were aiming for.

One of my favorite parts of the new site was the use of sIFR. I think they add quite a bit more personality to the pages and the typeface works really well with the identity of the site. If you haven’t used sIFR before, I’d highly recommend it. It’s pretty easy to implement and there is pretty good documentation on it.

This time around we also integrated the blog design to seamlessly fit with the rest of the site. Our first version of the blog had a bit of a different design than the rest of the site, which we didn’t really like. The blog didn’t feel as apart of the site as it should have. So we changed that to have the blog carry the same design as the rest of the site.

So that is the rundown of the redesign, and where my attention has been for the past month. Go check out the new site, and I hope you like our redesign. Please let me know if you find any bugs.