OSX Lion brought a lot of multitouch gestures into applications. One of my favourites is the two finger swipe right/left to go back/forwards in Safari. When you scroll to the page limits, Apple shows off that elastic rebound they mastered so well on iOS.
If the back/forward function is available on that page, your swipe will slide the current page aside showing you a screenshot of the the previous/next page behind it. Release to slide the page away, or just pull it back.
Google brought it to Chrome.
Two finger swipe right = back a page.
Two finger swipe left = forward a page.
And like the engineers that they are, it does exactly that. No unnecessary visual flair like Apple, just the ‘minimalist’ function. They’re so smart.
But what they don’t ever seem to comprehend is that all of that unnecessary flair is purposefully included. It describes more information to the user than the Googlers ever seem to realise. Frankly, Apple’s designs can sometimes seem a little over the top but with a little investigation you’ll see that they are perfectly minimal in themselves. Every piece of visual feedback they include is functional, you just have to find out why.
You see if I scroll horizontally on Chrome — which is also two finger swipe — as soon as I hit the edge, Chrome sends me back or forward a page. Sometimes, just nothing happens. Wow, that is predictable, informative, and not ever going to get annoying.
I saw this in Chrome Canary build a while ago so I checked my browser version for which build channel I’m on. Not even beta… this is the public release version!
Google, I love you, I use your products more than any other product in my entire life (maybe not a pen). But you’re fucking idiots when it comes to design. Dustin Curtis said recently: with 500,000 tiny tweaks Android could be as a good as iOS. Who knows the number, but he’s right. Start looking after the details and you’ll find a much larger userbase readily embracing your products.
