Google's House of Cards

theodp writes "In 'The Design That Conquered Google,' The New Yorker's Matt Buchanan reports that 'cards' — modeled after real cards — are set to become one of the dominant ways in which Google presents certain types of information to users. The power of a card as a visual-organization metaphor according to Matias Duarte (lead designer of Android), is that 'it makes very clear the atomic unity of things; it's still flexible while creating a kind of regularity.' Hey, maybe that Bill Atkinson was really on to something with that dadgum HyperCard software of his back in the '80s!"

Words

[Hypotensive]

The main advantage of presenting something as a card is that the word "card" is different from the word "page", and people are kind of tired of hearing the word "page" now.

Re:Words

[tnk1]

Well, for those who remember actually making out notecards for school work, there was a sense that a "card" actually represented a different way of presenting data that was more concise, and the understanding that space was at a premium. You also were able to manipulate them a lot more easily than pages of paper, as they were both smaller and made of more rigid stock, so the understanding was that ordering would not always be sequentially in a fixed page order.

Whether that is what people are thinking of today when they talk about "cards", I don't know. It did make sense as a metaphor back in the days of HyperCard, though.

WebOS

[dloflin]

Also sounds like the dominant paradigm in WebOS...

Metro

[jader3rd]

The power of a card as a visual-organization metaphor according to Matias Duarte (lead designer of Android), is that 'it makes very clear the atomic unity of things; it's still flexible while creating a kind of regularity.'

So... they're Live Tiles?

Re:Words

[fwarren]

Much like classic FORTH programming widh disk blocks. 1 BLOCK = 1K = 16 lines of 64 characters. Any word/function/definition needed to fit in 15 lines of text (The 1st of the 16 lines was used for comments). You had the ability to extend a definition beyond one screen of text but it was usually considered bad form. Typically if it would not fit, it was natures way of telling you that you did not undertand the problem well enough to code a proper solution. Clarity comes as you are forced to break things down into there smallest components.