I haven’t really been ‘with Apple’ for that long. I’d gotten my first Mac not too long before joining the Academy in late 2005. Before that, in high school I bought a 2003 iPod with the money I’d earned working as a dish washer in a Chinese restaurant. In my little rural school, only a handful of kids even knew what an MP3 file was, let alone an iPod.

I’d grown up with an innate dislike for Macs. Since I’d always had a PC, once I had overcome my fear for its intimidating hidden workings I started taking it apart. From hardware to software, I wanted to know what made computers tick. The Mac seemed like such an antithesis, such an impediment to creativity, learning, and curiosity. Why would people prefer closed, shiny plastic boxes?

It’s only when I got my iPod that I figured it out. The experience was enthralling. When the Mac finally switched to Intel chips is when I felt comfortable switching, and I never looked back. I took the amazing experience that welcomed me – and swallowed me whole – apart, bent on finding what made me love my Mac so much. That year I found my passion for visual user interface and user experience design. Fast-forward to today: I am changing the experiences millions of people have with software for the better as a job. I love it. I have never been happier.

Steve touched us all, and I am no exception. Before going to the Academy of Arts and before getting my first Mac, I started learning about the history of Apple as a company. I devoured books, documentaries and even the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley, in which the early years of Apple and Microsoft are told from the perspective of Jobs, Wozniak, Gates and Ballmer. The movie, and Steve’s 2005 Stanford Commencement address, are what motivated me to let myself go, and let myself be submerged in my inner drive to obsess. I put a picture of him and Woz in my sketchbook.

When I worked at Apple, having my work reviewed by him and getting feedback and input from him was my lifelong dream made a reality, and the greatest honor I ever had. It has helped me tremendously grow as a person, and a professional.

When I sat on my couch this morning after a terrible, sleepless night full of confusing dreams and racing thoughts, it finally struck me that that man is gone. Even writing those words now, I feel a terrible sinking feeling.

Steve was my greatest inspiration. We all have to fight, live, work and most importantly love more and more strongly than ever to fill the void he left behind. I’m in a lucky place where I have never lost a close member of my family to cancer, but I am sure I will some day. Until then, I will do all I can to fight it: I am donating all proceeds of my video tutorial website, Icon Resource, to the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network between now and Monday, October 10, midnight PST.

As my friend (and amazing human) Aza, whose father was robbed of him by the same disease put it so well:

“First my father, then Steve Jobs. Pancreatic cancer has had a disproportionate and dire impact on early Apple people. Imagine if it hadn’t.

And I will end this post on a note I wrote myself:

“If you want to honor Steve, don’t mourn. Do your best work every day. Live your life to the fullest. Never settle. His spirit lives on.”

And I can relate: when I am abroad, with my three email accounts, whenever I open Mail on my iPhone, I have to dismiss three ‘data roaming is off’ dialogs, and three ‘cannot get mail’ dialogs ( — that’s one per mail account). On an iPad, it can be even more jarring, with a tiny alert disabling the whole 9.7″ screen until you act on it.

This is a real issue. I have no doubt Apple is aware of this, like they were aware of copy and paste and multi-tasking.

This is not a post about what Apple will or should do to improve notifications on iOS. It’s a post talking about what solutions other platforms currently use to notify the user, and why Apple is (possibly, probably) taking such a while to create an optimal solution to the notification problem.

The biggest current smartphone OS, Android, has a well-known approach to notifications. They gather in the status bar, a never-hiding, tap / swipe-able interface element at the top* of the screen that slides down to cover the entire UI when invoked. When notifications come in, icons gather in the bar. Note that these icons gather at the left, while system status icons illustrating current battery life, signal strength, 3G status, Wi-Fi status, time, location services status and more gather at the right. As you can probably tell by that line-up of status items, it doesn’t take a lot of notifications on Android to fill up the entire top bar.

Most casual users I know solve this by either sliding the status bar down and using the ‘Clear All’ function to get rid of the unmanageable and opaque mess of icons or manage all the notifications as they come in, so they don’t miss anything important when it does pop up between the others.

Notifications have interesting design consideration you have to take into account: priority. For instance, Android attaches equal UI importance to a notification telling the user that the phone is connected through USB, that there’s new mail, and that there’s one missed call. They all get the same sized icon in the top bar. Only very rarely does Android throw a modal dialog on screen demanding action, like iOS does for most of its notifications.

You could say Android’s solution to all that incoming information is to throw them into a big junk drawer. Organized people will no doubt create a system around the drawer and find all their stuff in it, but why put that burden on the user? I don’t want to manage the information flow — it’s a smartphone, right?

What about webOS? I’ve seen a lot of arguments in online discussions that webOS is about as good a solution for notifications as Android. I disagree. webOS handles notifications in a far more clever way.

To illustrate that, let’s grab a smartphone. Anything the size between a tiny Palm Pre or a huge HTC EVO 4G will do. Hold it in your left or right hand, and tap the bottom of the screen with your thumb. No effort, right? Now tap the top of the screen. See how much more effort that takes? I’ve got pretty big hands, and tapping the status bar of my iPhone 4 forces me to stretch my thumb. Fortunately, I never have to tap the status bar unless I want to scroll to the top of a long content view.

For exactly this reason, and the aforementioned ‘clutter bar’ of Android, webOS cleverly puts notifications at the bottom. In mobile UI design, it’s often recommended to put the most accessed controls at the bottom. In fact, it’s in the iOS HIG. As a notification comes in, webOS shrinks the screen a little bit, shows you some of its content with an icon and then puts a little icon at the bottom of the screen. You tap it, and it shows the notification content, allowing you to act on it, ignore it, or swipe it out of view. This doesn’t just prevent you from stretching fingers, it doesn’t clutter the webOS status bar with icons that tell you little to none about the device’s status. With some stretching, you can still swipe down on the status bar to reveal a quick menu that lets you enable / disable Wi-Fi and other system actions.

I’d say webOS has one of the most elegant systems for notifications on the market today, even compared to desktop OSes. Even when the notification ‘tray’ fills up with a lot of Facebook, Gowalla, Twitter, SMS, low battery and USB mode alerts, it’s a manageable mess.

Let’s look at the video I referred to at the beginning of my post again. When notifications come in, they literally cover the screen. Is there a control below the notification? Tough luck. Act on it now, or lose that part of your screen. It’s not shown, but if it scales like I think it does, it will simply fill your entire screen with three to four notifications. Going back to my example of Mail on iOS, that would mean I have to do more than tapping “Okay” six times to get back to interacting with my phone. How is this “iOS Notifications done right”?

I’ll keep looking forward to what the talented design teams at Apple are doing to tackle the hard-as-nails problem of notifications.

My views are my own and not those of Apple Inc. I do not have access to information on upcoming designs or interface conventions of iOS or other aspects of Apple products. All content of this blog post is uninformed speculation and opinion, attributable to my own person only.

Gaming on the Mac is certainly not as common or well-supported as it is on Windows, but the HD5770 handles whatever you throw at it quite well. I still have to adjust to it, though: the HD5770 is not a brand-new top-tier graphics card, like the card I use in my Mac Pro for gaming under Windows (the HD5970), and can sometimes have issues with the latest games at 30″ monitor resolution (2560×1600 pixels -are- a lot to push around).

As for the PC enthusiasts that often sneer at the Mac GPUs ( – “What, doesn’t STEVE want you using *illegal* cards in your Mac? Sniff! Why buy the expensive Apple card?!” ), I have to explain that Mac OS X compatible GPUs require EFI / EBC firmware on their ROM chips to be initialized for use under OS X. This is not something you can just ‘hack together’: the cards’ ROM chip needs the extra space to have a (Windows) BIOS-compatible and (Mac) EFI-compatible firmware on there, and even then Apple has to make drivers that lets you use the card to perform well. Apple would, of course, love it if everyone could just drop a good GPU in there, as it’d just make the Mac Pro more attractive to consumers. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. On the bright side: you can do that just fine with hard drives, eSATA controllers, USB cards, firewire cards, most audio cards, and so on.

Despite that, it performs great. Fortunately for Mac owners that enjoy gaming, most titles that run on Macs can be shown in full detail on 30″ / 27″ displays using the HD5770. And best of all: it remains almost perfectly silent. You won’t be hearing it rev up the fans like the old 8800GT, completely nullifying Apple’s care to acoustics in the rest of the computer (my Mac Pro nary makes a sound).

It’s easy to connect; the card has my requisite dual-link DVI (for all ‘typical’ LCDs and the 30″ Cinema Display I use) and two mini Displayport outputs, for the LED Cinema Display and other DP monitors. It uses a single 6-pin cable from the Mac Pro motherboard to supply extra power, which is the same as my old Nvidia 8800GT, although the HD5770 is far more efficient: it draws far less power when idle, for instance.

The only two issues I have with the card are the price, as it’s about 75 dollars above the ‘street price’ of a PC HD5770, which is unacceptable for a larger ROM chip and some firmware and the requisite Mac Pro motherboard cable. I understand ATI may have to produce these cards in smaller runs, but it’s a big chunk of cash on top of what is normally 135 dollar card. The packaging sort of makes up for it:

(yes, that’s a little Sony Vaio UX UMPC. With OS X on it. Blog post coming? Hell yes!)

The other issue is grapical glitches in Minecraft. Somehow, despite having excellent performance, Java OpenGL graphics are a terrible mess. I suppose this isn’t as much an issue with the card as it is a matter of the Java runtime, but the artifacts are awful.

Overall verdict:

8/10. If you’re in the market for a graphics upgrade, I’d check out how well the now-finally-shipping HD5870 compares in terms of pure bang for your buck. If you’re using all the extra power pins on your Mac Pro motherboard already (check!), and need an affordable replacement for Nvidia’s horrible, unreliable cards and crash-prone drivers (especially in Photoshop – check!), this is a no-brainer. And you can use the box for… well, I don’t know. Storing cats.

Download it here. I cannot be held responsible for inaccuracies, flaws and errors in this this PSD I might have overlooked, but if you notice anything please let me know in the comments.

iPhone, iPhone 4 and iPad PSD icon template – 303 KB

Again, if you appreciate it, tweet this to help your fellow designers and developers make nicer icons for iPhone 4 (and beyond).

In 2009, he left Apple. Lately, he uploads the fruits of his also impressive photography skills to his website and blog, mikematas.com.

I’ve asked him a few questions in this interview to learn more of one of the designers of the most innovative and beautiful interfaces of the last decade. Unfortunately, he wasn’t willing to disclose what he’s working on these days, but I’m sure we’ll see a lot of quality design from his hand in the future.

• I consider it the least important part of someone’s life, but it’s interesting to ask nevertheless: what kind of education did you have?

Formal schooling ended for me half way through my senior year of high school when I decided to drop out so I could focus on starting up Delicious Monster. Although that’s obviously not to say my education stopped there. I’m educated every day by the places and things I surround myself with, and the people I collaborated with.

Delicious Library’s wooden shelves were Mike’s idea.

• Naturally. When or how did you gain an interest in design?

As long as I can remember Iâ€v always had that sort of “designer personality” where I enjoy looking at things and trying to figure out how they can be improved. I used to sketch down little ideas here and there, but I think what really set me loose was when I upgraded my design tool from a pencil to Photoshop.

Photoshop did two things for me. First, it allowed me to turn ideas I had into actual designs that other people could understand and get excited about too. Second, the new possibilities that unfolded as I learned the tool inspired me to come up with design ideas I would have never thought of had I not been using Photoshop. The same thing happened when I learned how to use Cinema 4D to do 3D modeling, and more recently when I learned how to use Quartz Composer to do interactive designs.

That cycle of new ideas requiring new tools and those new tools inspiring new ideas has always lead my interest in design.

Time Machine’s user interface was designed by Mike while working at Apple.

• Speaking of inspiration: when it comes to graphic- and UI design, which people, companies or works do you find outstanding, or inspire you?

Something I discovered just the other day is this little bookmarklet called Readability. When you click it, it sucks the article out of the webpage your currently on and displays it in a super clean, easy to read layout. I found that pretty inspiring.

I also find lots of inspiration in design blogs such as Ffffound! and Fubiz.

• What’s your setup and ‘tools of the tradeâ€? (preferred software, hardware, etc.)

My secret weapon is Quartz Composer. These days I use that more than anything else, but I’m still in Photoshop and Cinema 4D when necessary. I use a 15” MacBook Pro, plugged into a 24” Cinema Display when I need a little more space and feel the need to be more ergonomic.

• What would you consider the most important quality in design?

My favorite designs are the ones that donâ€t just solve a problem, but also engage you on an emotional level—where you take away more from it than just the end result of its function. When there’s that balance between functionality and emotion, the two amplify each other and the result is really powerful. I’m always trying to get there when Iâ€m designing.

Mike and his brother, Jonathan, at the Esmeralda Basin.

• So far, we’ve only talked about you as a single designer, but you probably have a lot of experience with working with a group of designers now. Do you prefer designing alone, or collaboratively?

When people think of a group of designers working together they probably imagine big creative brainstorming meetings where ideas are bounced around and designs are built up on white boards. In my experience that is not usually the case. Iâ€v worked with a lot of other designers but Iâ€ve only really collaborated with a couple of people in my life where I felt like we amplified each other creativity and were able to come up with a design that was better than one each of us could have created on our own. Its great when it happens but it takes the right combination of people and the right combination of people is not always what you have to work with.

Having a group of designers can be about more than indirect collaboration though. The more I work on a design the more I zoom into it until there comes that point where all I can see are the details, not the full picture. Getting feedback from another designer with a fresh eye or putting down my own design for a couple days and looking at someone else’s work really helps me keep some perspective.

These ‘piles†of photos in the iPad UI is something Mike’s particularly happy with.

• Good points. To wrap up, what kind of changes of the design landscape have impacted you the most since you started working as a designer?

Probably the most significant has been the explanation of application development from the desktop, to web apps, and now iPhone apps. The landscape is just a lot wider and deeper now than it was when I first started. I think it’s pretty exciting!

iPhone’s Maps is another interface Mike designed.

I’d like to thank Mike for lending me his time to answer these questions and lending his great photographs for this blog post. If you’d like to read more about his travels and design work, check out his blog. He’s also on Twitter.