Industry News

Ivan Hewett did a write-up on some very interesting neuroscience research in Why your brain loves music:

When [participants] were willing to pay [for a song] there [was] a strong correlation with one brain region in particular, called the nucleus accumbens. This is the area responsible for the sensation of “pleasant surprise”.

It might seem surprising that people should enjoy having their expectations contradicted. But these results only reveal the physical basis for something...

With Google Now coming to iOS, a whole new audience using iPhones and iPads are about to meet Google’s predictive search service. It’s a feature that’s gone from interesting novelty to being downright amazing, in less than a year. Here’s a look at how the “predictive search” service has evolved and where it may head next, including perhaps to desktop computers. Wow, It Really Does Work

Google Now, showing time to airport and navigation option

Google Now, showing translation and currency...

Matt Alexander wrote a guest post on 512pixels while Stephen Hackett is away on vacation with his family. It’s called Community, and it really hit home for me:

Perhaps we’re brought together by a foundational love of design or genuinely good products — often embodied by Apple — but I believe we remain, regardless of evolving opinions, because of a visceral sense of community.

I encourage you to read the whole post, as well as Stephen’s letter to his son, which Matt links to at the...

What to do if Google sends you a penalty notice and you can’t figure out exactly what it’s for? Turn to Google’s webmaster help forum, says the head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts. If you’re still confused after that, you can file a reconsideration requests where you might be given more details.

The issue of confusing notices came up this week after Mozilla received a “manual” penalty notice because of a single page of spam found on its site. This followed the BBC receiving an...

In the past twenty-four hours, it seems as if Google sent out a message to thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of site owners, that there is a problem with their site.

Typically, you never ever want to ignore a webmaster tools notification but in this case...

Google has officially dropped the Instant Previews from the search results due to "very low usage" by searchers...

In a recent interview with Intercom, Joshua Porter expands on his “Wireframes are dead, dead, dead!” tweet from a while ago:

I think you can capture almost everything you need to capture in a pretty detailed sketch. Not a high fidelity sketch by any means. Not the ones where you use five different kinds of markers and you shade everything or whatever. The purpose of sketching is to communicate the major ideas, like, “What’s going to be on the page? What are the objects on the page? What...