Charles Peters

Friction

Wed, 27 Apr 2016 00:00:00 -0700

About a year ago, my dad was on a tirade about something (it runs in the family a little bit), he was trying to do something fairly common from his phone. If memory serves, he was trying to send a spreadsheet he got as attachment to another person. He bemoaned how unintuitive and complex this process was, the language around the interactions in the UI being unclear and the lack of assurances that spreadsheet had been sent.

He’s almost 68. It’s not uncommon for him to be frustrated with technology and the new demands it presents to him.

The next thing he said has stuck with me ever since. He said (a little exacerbated, but clear nonetheless), “There’s just too much…” He paused and motioned his arms as if to entice the word he was searching for to appear. “…too much…friction in this whole thing. I guess that’s what you’d call it, friction. Why can’t this damn thing be any easier?”

I like the way he put that.

Apple Watch: 2 Months In

Mon, 07 Dec 2015 00:00:00 -0800

I’ve never thought so much about a gadget I’ve bought or wanted so much as I have with the Apple Watch. When the iPhone first came out I thought it might be cool, but it wasn’t until the 3GS was released that I really started salivating for one. Same is true for the iPad; I scoffed at the first couple iterations of it and when one was released to market with Retina Display, it’s all I wanted.

But the Apple Watch was a little different. I didn’t really want it at first. The watch, like the Apple TV, doesn’t have any web views, so not a whole lot do with anything I could reasonably create for it. But it’s a new interface method all the same, so I was a little curious but not $400-curious.

I finally cracked and got the Apple Watch, mostly because everyone else I work with had one and I didn’t want to be the odd man out. The tide has pushed me to do worse things.

Now two months later I’m still not really sure what you’d want to do with this thing. It’s not an ideal replacement for a FitBit. It’s not a device really meant for composing anything. And its main strength is to alert me to things I otherwise would’ve reached to my phone for.

Where it Shines

At best the Apple Watch is really great at telling me things on the fly. For instance: if I’m close to things I need to find in Seattle, like Kings Street Station or when buses are due, if my wife is texting me, getting DMs from Slack and Twitter (via Tweetbot) or if I need to be in a meeting (from Fantastical).

Other than that, I haven’t found a whole lot of use for the watch. (Except Calcbot, it’s the best calculator app on the market on any device it runs on.)

Consumption

There are lots of remote apps for NPR One, Overcast and Instapaper that connect to their iPhone counterparts to control the players in those apps. It doesn’t exactly blow my hair back. Plus there’s nothing in me that makes me feel like I want to read emails or read Facebook Messages or my credit card statement from my wrist.

News apps like the New York Times sending headline updates to my wrist are quick and interesting and make me more interested in the topics at hand (see what I did there). I would love to see a certain awesome news reader follow suit.

Horizons

To-do lists and productivity apps seem like a real avenue in their infancy on the Apple Watch. When most apps are trying to have a tethered experience to the iPhone (or worse a retrofitted iPhone experience) these apps feel more complementary. For some reason having a reminder hit you on your wrist is more intimate and less obnoxious than having it on my phone interrupting an existing task I’m performing. Crossing things off in Clear always feels productive and that I’ve accomplished something.

(I haven’t checked out Omnifocus yet, but I definitely think I should in the coming year. I’ve only heard good things.)

IFTTT & Do Button are really convenient together and having those predefined tasks set-up and being a button press away trump things like Launch Pad Pro (which I am very fond of).

On a separate note, gaming hasn’t ever really been a lot of interest; even still I’ve spent a fair amount of time with quick-fix games like Boxpop and Letterpad. I’m excited to see more.

Every time iMore publishes a best Apple Watch apps listicle, I’m quick to devour to it, and always on the look out for different applications to try, so send any recommendations my way.

Fucking Pomegranates

Sun, 29 Nov 2015 00:00:00 -0800

Have you ever opened up a pomegranate? It’s a gigantic pain in the ass if you haven’t. To make the least amount of mess you have to score the open tip of it over a glass bowl[1] full of the hottest water your skin can stand. You need to score so there’s a light cut around the thing so it’s divided into quarters.

![Innards of a red pomegranate](http://www.cravebits.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Fruit-with-strong-outer-layer-and-red-rind-inside.jpg)

You rip that bastard open with the least amount of force you can so it doesn’t go anywhere other than the bowl. Inside of it seeds nested in clusters inside the flesh of the pomegranate. You have to rip the flesh off of seeds without puncturing them. And you need to do this with your hands in the hot water. The flesh protecting the seeds will float to the top as the seeds sink to the bottom of the bowl.

Now to add insult to injury you can’t do this without finesse. You’ll puncture the seeds and stain your hands. When you’ve actually managed to remove all the seeds from the flesh of the pomegranate. You can’t do anything with them until you’ve dumped the shreds of skin and flesh of this and dumped the remaining seeds in a colander so they can be rinsed.

Even after all that to get the juice out of the fucking seeds (which look like blood red popcorn kernels) you need to press and smash them and let the juice run into a container to hold it because you can’t eat the seeds. (Actually most of a pomegranate other than the juice can kill you, it makes kiwi skins almost cuddly.) And as luck would have it, you don’t really get that much juice out of this ordeal; it’s less than 3 ounces in most cases.

So there you have it. Lots of awkward tedium for so little gain. Isn’t Mother Nature a real bitch?

[1] I’m not sure why it’s better if the bowl is glass but out of the handful of times I’ve done this literally fruitless endeavor it doesn’t work super well in plastic bowl.

The Value of Design

Thu, 14 Aug 2014 00:00:00 -0700

For the last couple of weeks there’s been a lot of conversation about a bait-and-switch company and about doing free work. And they all make amazing points in some clever ways. I need to be more of an evangelist of design and it’s value.

But these are only great conversations to have for anyone trying to make a living designing things (websites, posters, promotional things, logos and identity and everything I’m not mentioning). We’re forgetting that there’s another side of this, the people paying us to do the designing we love doing. It begs the question for someone trying to commission design work, looking at budgets and pricing: what value does design have for me?

I’m trying to be better at giving these kinds of answers to clients and people I’m pitching. A lot of the small business owners I talk with are interested in the bottom-line and understanding why they shouldn’t pay for a service like Fiverr or 99Designs. I never find myself thoroughly prepared to give satisfactory answers in these situations.

But I think the answer might be simpler than I might be making it. Design isn’t as much about choosing colors and lusting over typefaces (not to say that isn’t amazing) as it about making and collecting thoughts and making them tangible and sharing them with others, just like any other form of communication. It gets lost in the abstract because it can more visual than something like written communication.

That doesn’t entirely answer our question yet. When we can make thoughts about who a business is, what they do and what values they have we start to really discern the value. We can build loyalty with their audiences and customers. We can distinguish them from other businesses like them. We show the extend of which they care about communicating with their audiences/customers. We can build systems to commuicate with them better.

At the root of things, that’s design work we end up doing in one way or another and I would think that anyone would find valuable.

I’d like to find more/deeper/better answers to what value design as to those on receiving end of it, I don’t think I’ve reached it in this post. I want them to get the most value of the services I can provide. But mostly I want to understand how to provide them better.

Moments

Tue, 12 Aug 2014 00:00:00 -0700

It is no secret that I am often cynical and at other times radically depressed. Somewhere along the way I find it really helpful to know that life is composed of moments that pour out in so many different varieties. Some are wonderful, some are unpleasant, some are downright cruel; there are even some moments that even drown out the others.

In some of those moments that I find particularly awful or depressing, I try to list some of the things that make me the happiest. Most of the times I find myself doing that, I think about the moments that on the surface are trivial but are really beautiful and drown out all the unpleasant moments.

Our lease is almost up and the apartment we fell in love with too quickly has lost its luster. It’s in a far too noisy corner of Main Street and not really handy to anything that we need like a pharmacy or store or our bank. Plus the property management make us feel like we’re in a state ward. We are definitely planning on finding a different place.

That conversation has been compounded with a few other conversations Sabrina and I keep circling: starting our family, furthering our careers, buying a car, moving to the PNW. There is quite a bit up in the air and it’s generally a fucking drag.

One moment when I looked at my project lists then my bank statement and reconsidered my whole life trajectory, I remembered another moment. It happened when Sabrina and I were closing in on more definitive plans for the future.

We found ourselves lying disarranged on the bed. She was wearing my Radiohead t-shirt with absolute apathy to their best albums or their most celebrated songs. She stole it a long time ago and severed everything I loved about Radiohead and assigned its meaning to the fact it’s comfortable and that it’s mine. She did the same thing to my Foo Fighters hoodie but that was more about how warm it is than perhaps anything romantic.

But I watched her lie there, chasing a list of possibilities, each more absurd than the last, her smile was perfect. It could’ve cut through from this world to the next.

We entered the realms of truly just ridiculous speculation when in a moment of pure daring, one of us suggested that we buy a car and a hitch to pile in only the things we needed: clothes, work stuff, and the mountain of books amassing in the living room. Every city an obstacle in the path of the journey we would take. No destination would satisfy our thoughts and only the movement and momentum could bring us any joy. I can’t remember which of us proposed that idea, but her eyes lit up like a pinball machine and she let out this sigh that comprised the whole of my universe. It stretched each of these possibilities and exalted the most absurd as the formalized battle-plan for just a second.

The ceiling fan rotated, chasing each of these ideas, clacking, moving the air and drifting us back to reality. She closed her eyes and laughed something sweet and somber and I would not have traded that moment for anything.

The Day Robots Came Alive

Mon, 19 May 2014 00:00:00 -0700

This side of the earth lazily drifted back toward the sun and then suddenly rushed into the clatter of my alarm on my phone. In the midst of finding the snooze, 5 notifications from a select few news outlets rattled off not-too-dissimilar headlines about the Ukraine and Pakistan.

My wife rolls over and wakes up. She’s immaculately beautiful without any effort as she forages for my oldest and most worn hoodie to put on as she makes coffee.

She finds her phone and sees a few texts from her mother, an off email from our church, a series of tweets with subjects that don’t relate to me at all. From there I find her immersed in an article that returns an incandescent blue light obscuring her otherwise beautiful face.

My iPad opens to alert me to a few desperate work emails that I will more or less ignore until I can refuel, ideally, with coffee or Coke Zero or something that less resembles flat water. More alerts come in reminding me of the books on the tablet I haven’t looked at since Sunday and the deadlines of impending projects. I open my own Twitter client to find tweets about web design and code that would be of little interest to my wife.

A curious notification comes in about a band releasing a new record from Rdio. I hit play and the wondrous sounds of synths fill the wireless speakers in the corner. The melodies resonate and sound like a delicate cross between a secret war or the furious erotic lovemaking of two (or several) computers. The beats are programmed on repeat; any existence of analog sounds or human touch seem long since diminished. They leave the haunting of electronic sounds in this apartment.

Mechanically, we continue, our morning coffee being offered and the reminder about when she would leave work. Then each of us in turn regaling the other with headlines, link bait and jokes that emerge from Twitter. My eyes finally opening all the way, taking in a slew of articles I’ve just read or committed to read later, I find myself in the shower when the hot water decides to quit trying.

The sounds of those war-strewn or ravenous computers still flies around this apartment.

My phone pipes in a few more messages that for some reason need my attention, asking almost politely for a response. I open Twitter up again and stories of the repercussions of Adobe’s hack, the fake attacks on Dropbox’s servers and Facebook privacy settings are starting to come in, along with those about the NSA. The attacks (or lack thereof) on Adobe & Dropbox feel like a friend just got mugged in a bad neighborhood. They feel a lot closer than the stories about Obama, the budget or even a story my dad told me about a childhood friend’s father dying a few days ago.

I open Dropbox on my phone to look at some files and accept invitations to new folders. Their new redesign feels like a friendly wave to me. I send my sister a quick encouraging message (she just moved to a new city). Then I jump into another app to let someone in Houston know I’ll be ready to talk in 5 minutes and tell another in Colorado the same, with a few taps that feel like nothing. A notification arrives from an RSS reader about something about Backbone.js and leveraging data objects or something in Laravel and it feels like a new trail opened up for me to go running on, a new challenge emerging. It is followed by a notification about Samsung releasing wearables and I’m instantly excited.

I drop a mug on the floor, it completely shatters and I feel exceptionally indifferent. A newsletter comes to my inbox that I have no memory of subscribing to. Unsubscribe. I get another email confirming I’m unsubscribed. I’m pissed.

My face is just as likely a glow in that pale shining blue light as when I noticed it on my wife.

I decide to microwave an egg and a package of breakfast sausages. A minute later it beeps and I realized the music stopped and it recommended similar artists and their most popular albums. I hit play on one; more electronic sounds pivot around the apartment and the sensual/aggressive computer noises melodically cycle again.

I sit down at my computer and open a terminal & text editor. I start typing and fall back into the flurry of messages I was ignoring. My rhythms seem close to automated. The text editor feels like my childhood bedroom did sometimes, where my imagination can run safely rampant. The whirring of the monitor in front of me is steadily keeping time

My wife comes into my office at home 5 minutes before she has to catch the bus to work, to tell me she’s heading out the door. A notification follows on the side of screen 15 minutes later to tell me that she arrived at work and she loves me.

I fall further into work drumming out some of the same responses, “is their browser up to date?”, “clear your cache”, “are they running the latest version of Wordpress?”, “could you be any stupider?” as if running on a loop. Feeling a drag set in I replace the electronica with a comedy album, Rdio has kindly remembered my favorites and greats me with them.

Each movement feels like a gear turning, more notifications trickle in like clockwork with news updates, RSS feeds, emails, instant messages, invitations, replies and payments. This pattern just exists on repeat.

These machines are running synchronously with my day and remind me when I’m out of step, they can be kind, courteous, helpful and even demanding. They’ve commanded my attention, my affections and are integrated into my thinking. I don’t know what day the robots came alive. But they most certainly are.

How We Learn

Thu, 16 Jan 2014 00:00:00 -0800

When I was 16, I read an interview about Beck. He learned to play guitar in such a peculiar way. He started with a single string on his guitar: the top string. He played the guitar with a single string until he felt he had learned everything about it. Then he would add another string and another until he had 6 strings.

Each time he would learn the interactions of each string with each previous string, their sounds, their resonance, their timbre, their details. He approached learning guitar as more of a science than an art, intimately understanding the power & quality of each string with their relationship to each other. Bit by bit, he took each detail in intervals.

At the time it struck me as odd. If you were going to learn to play the guitar wouldn’t you want to learn with all six strings at once? Aren’t you going to play with all six strings when you play for other people?

Beck’s method stands out to me. At the time I thought it was eccentric and one of those weird things artists did. I didn’t really consider how intimate and methodical it might be.

When I talk to students I know who want to learn something about web design, they usually want to learn everything at once. For them, it’s either quick bullet points or simple instructions. They want to drag the tools for print design to the web, because writing markup and codes isn’t as simple as they’d like it to be. Or worse, they want to slap things together and put them out on the Internet. Each time I hear these things, I’m a little disquieted because they have little reverence for the complexity of the Internet, end users and the understanding needed to really build websites and web applications.

The Internet is rich with complexity, detail and interactions. To want to decompress all of what it takes to build something on the web down to simple bullet points, is like cramming a whole city square onto a park bench.

Then I remember Beck and he doesn’t seem so eccentric anymore.

Command Line Phobia

Wed, 08 Jan 2014 00:00:00 -0800

I like to learn. Probably that’s what I spend 80% of my time doing on the web: just learning. Whether it’s jQuery tutorials or a screencasts or Lynda videos, I’m always trying to learn something new. There’s definitely always so many new things to learn to make the work you do better and with better methods.

When I started to learn about Sass there was a bunch of stuff I had to do to set it up. It said to open Terminal and to sudo gem install sass. Naturally, I was a little confused. I never used the Terminal for anything except that Star Wars thing. I tried it and it didn’t work. Tried it again, didn’t work.

So I found my way to CodeKit and it kept me from having to touch the command line. It let me use Bourbon & Neat without any installing or worrying (or really thinking too much).

I wanted to get on GitHub for a while to contribute and make things, but I didn’t understand how Git worked and the tutorial was all command line related and involved making SSH keys for stuff and made absolutely no sense to me.

Then along comes Grunt.js and it promises to do way more stuff that CodeKit ever could, like make my Javascript better and concatenate those files for me without error, push to GitHub and my FTP. But it too uses a CLI (Command Line Interface) so I had to open Terminal and get to it.

I looked at Laravel, same story. The install required the command line.

I kept running into it everywhere. So I broke down and took it bit by bit. I started with Grunt and followed the instructions carefully. Took some getting used to but it made my workflow faster.

I ran into a problem using Bourbon and Neat when I switched to using Grunt. It didn’t load those libraries automatically. So I just did an install command.

Then came Git. Not as hard as I thought it would be to clone repositories and change directories and make commits and push them up to GitHub. I’ve been loving putting stuff there and forking repositories and it’s amazingly simple.

A little bit of trial and error made things to much faster. Like making & changing directories and touching files, simple. After going through this I realized, I had this irrational worry that I could really fuck something up in Terminal. On top of that I was kind of worried that it would be too complicated or I wouldn’t get it. Lesson learned, dive in, fail, try, repeat.

2014

Fri, 03 Jan 2014 00:00:00 -0800

It’s a new year and here’s what I’d like to do more and less of.

Writing & Reading More

If there’s anything I’ve learned about working on the Internet, it’s that you need to be able to communicate well and talk about the things that matter to you. I’ve always been okay at writing and loved the process, but I haven’t done a lot in 2013. So, I hope 2014 can change that.

I’m working on a blog called ARWHD, where I’m going to be working on writing about freelance stuff, web design and more stuff, it should be the thing to kick my ass in gear. Plus I’ve really wanted to write some art directed posts on this blog to talk about a few things like SASS and RWD.

We should all read more and I feel like I should not be in front of a screen so much. There’s a real value to analog things like reading a book made out of a dead tree that doesn’t have a backlight. Sabrina and I are gonna try to read a book a month together. She’s like really good consuming a lot of books and she’s amazing, so it should be easy.

Get More Serious About Javascript & PHP

I can follow instructions on plugins and can write simple jQuery. But I can’t write Javascript well. I need to be more disciplined about learning. Working with CSS & Wordpress is great but I’d like add more interactivity to the work I do and build web applications.

I’ve kinda had a mental block about it. Jon Duckett’s book HTML & CSS: Design and Build Websites was a really great way to be introduced to web design when I wanted to learn in the first place. He has this follow up book called JavaScript & jQuery: Interactive Front-End Web Development that I really wanted to get and keeps getting pushed back from the publisher. I keep saying, I’ll get started when it comes out and it was supposed to last May and it still hasn’t. A little stupid, I know, but I haven’t found a great place to start other than CodeAcademy, which is great for basic stuff but not much further.

PHP is kinda the same story, I have an idea for a database driven application I’d like to build, but I haven’t moved much further past the basics. Wordpress theming is easy and involves PHP but it’s more like template-making than it does programming.

If you know any good places to start, let me know on Twitter.

Stop Being Involved in Religious Debates

In 2013, I got really sick of the absurd deluge of just stupid conversations about Christianity. At the end of 2013, between Dave Ramsey’s stupid blog, Mark Driscoll’s plagiarism & Phil Robertson’s comments, I was sick to death of people talking about these things. I unfollowed a lot of people on Facebook and Twitter just to not hear about it.

I’m generally a lot less cynical when that stuff isn’t in my face so much. Honestly, I’ve never walked away from one of these discussions feeling like I changed someone’s mind or that I’ve gained some new perspective.

Let’s see if I can keep at some of these things.

Focusing

Wed, 18 Dec 2013 00:00:00 -0800

I’ve been reading about this idea of mobile first design. It’s the idea that you start with the mobile device and work your way to larger screensizes. At first it seemed really backward because we generally work and create from a desktop context when we design something. But the more I use it the more it seems like the only real way to work.

It’s the only way to account for anomalies in your breakpoints and create a wholistic experience for your users versus one where everything less than ideal is an after thought.

Losing 80% of your screen space forces you to focus. You need to make sure that what stays on the screen is the most important set of features for your customers and your business. There simply isn’t room for any interface debris or content of questionable value. You need to know what matters most. — Luke Wroblewski

Thinking though this rhetoric, I started asking more questions about the projects I’m working on; more or less a way vetting the design decisions being made.

Do you really need that carousel?
How are you helping the user get to your content?
How are you distracting them?
Are we creating a natural flow to our call to action?
Do we even have a call to action?
Is our navigation accessible?
How accessible is it?
Do we really need all the images on this page or are we just trying to fill space?
Are we being redundant?
Is our content geared to a mobile audience?
Are we distributing the same content to all devices?

I ask these questions to focus everything and bring in back to center, towards the work that needs done.