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Posted by mattc at Oct 20, 08 10:52 PM ... Comments (0)

I've been playing with TUAW's and Receding Hairline's fake tilt-shift. The illusion of a shallow depth of field makes your photo's look like they were taken above a model village.

A not-to-great example from the French coast ...

It's reminded me of how much I like playing with Photoshop tutorials (I hardly ever open it these days, unless I need to chop or resize a JPG!) and how you can lose and entire evening tinkering with the sliders, filters, channels, gradients to get it just right ... It feels very creative even thought you are essentially just adjusting numbers that are fed in to Adobe's canned CS3 image algorithms.

Some of the work Cisnky and Matt have been doing recently (cinematic tweening and ui widgets, respectively) have reminded me of the importance of tinkering, getting the interface in your hands and poking at it until it feels right.

I've seen (and worked on) so many projects where version 0.1 of the interface was built and everyone moved on to the next project before anyone had time to tinker, it's so easy to keep cramming product requirements to the very last minute that there's no time to let things settle. Good UI developers can intuatively fine-tune their app's if they have the time.

So I'm making an effort to justify the dumping of requirements (or do some extra hiring) and finish projects early to give the developers time to tinker with their interface code.


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