 We're here with Khoi Vinh, the CEO and founder of Mixel, a social collaging app for iPad, but he also helped curate part of apps in this beautiful gallery here. He's also worked as a designer on the New York Times dot com, he blogs at Subtraction dot com, very influential. So what exactly are we doing here and what threads do you see between the seven apps that you picked to display here? We really tried to gather some of the most interesting user interface designs going on iPhone and on iPad. And I think the common thread is that everybody's still figuring it out, it's a really young platform. If you go back to the beginning of the iPhone, it's five years, but the iPad is certainly only about two years old or so, so people are really trying to figure out what makes sense for all the really different kinds of creative uses that they're putting these multi-touch devices to. And when you look at the size of the iPad screen, do you feel like app developers are taking advantage of it? Because I feel like the Apple model is kind of like, well, the menu bar is going to be the exact same size, no matter how big the screen is, and I don't really feel like that works. Do you see a lot of guys taking advantage of the screen size or just maybe inflating the iPhone UI? That's a really interesting question. Mixel is on iPad only, and in some ways, I guess the question isn't really are we taking advantage of it, it's do we know what to do with all of the space? Because compared to iPhone, it's a lot of space, and the way that you create a user interface for the iPad is very, very different from both the phone and from the web. I think on the web, there's a compulsion to cram as much as you can in there, but iPad is just this middle ground where you really want to put as little as you can in there, and yet you have a lot more space than you do on the phone. So it's just a very, very strange thing. I think in a lot of ways, the iPad is still evolving. It's in this awkward teenager phase where people don't really know yet how it's going to turn out, and you really see that in a lot of apps. How do you compare that to looking at the site for like the New York Times where there's so much text? It's like those sites began before tablets even existed. How do you visualize those types of sites changing to be more like paper, for example, which really doesn't... You're using your fingers to interact with it. There's not much navigation. Well, I think that's a really big open question. If you look at a lot of the ways publishers are tackling the phones and the tablets, they're very much still in the experimental phase. As I said, everybody's figuring it out. Phone is a little bit more straightforward because we really understand the use case of the phone in that people are on the go. They need a quick hit of whatever content they're consuming, and then it needs to be highly optimized for speed and download and so forth. Tablet, the use cases are really evolving still. People aren't really quite sure how they're using tablets. A lot of folks will leave their tablets at home and not pick them up until seven or eight o'clock at night. Right, when they're on the couch. Yeah. That's really the predominant pattern for most people, but that's really changing as tablets enter the workforce. I think you'll see in the next year or two people being issued tablets more and more, and then they'll have these tablets with them all day long. How that impacts the way they want to access information and how the apps respond to that I think remains to be seen. It's interesting. Another thing is all the apps here are iOS. To go back to that a little bit, why is that? Why do you think perhaps a higher quality of development is happening to iOS, or is it just the fact that there are only a couple screen sizes and resolutions you're developing for it? I think that has a lot to do with it. Why did you pick iOS apps? Well, we picked iOS because we're most comfortable with iOS. The people that we know, the companies that we know that are producing really beautiful apps, the ones that we look to, they're doing it on iOS, on phone and on tablet. I fully believe that there are going to be some beautiful apps on Android, and there are right now. I think if we've talked about potentially doing another installment of this show at some point in the future, it would be great to get Android companies in at that point. I think right now it's so clear to me that the interface design being done on iOS is really leading the way for all the platforms. When you look at some of the apps around here like Path or Pic2 or Instagram isn't here, but it's this everywhere mentality. You have the bottom navigation bar, you have this fuzzy top bar with the name of the app or something like that. Then you see something like Tweetbot, which you have here. What do you think is interesting about that? What are they doing right, I guess? It's modern in different ways than some of the other apps. We really wanted to get Mark Jardine from TapBots to bring Tweetbot to the show because they really are a very interesting argument for how Apple's UI foundation is really just the beginning and you shouldn't take it at face value. Right, because they have a lot of the same visual motifs, but then there's so much for power users. Right, and they've also reinvented almost every little widget in the UI toolkit and in many cases improved upon them. I think it's really important especially to get that work here to show that people are improvising and are figuring out what works for their app, their features, their content and their users. When you look forward at the way these apps are being seen by the public, I haven't heard of any other art galleries of apps. How are apps working as a platform for designers now? There are a ton of great looking Mac apps, but people are just for some reason getting really, really excited about iOS development. Is it just that people are using these things a lot more, like on their phones every day? It's a platform for artists now. How does that work? I think that's part of it. I think it's kind of hard to... You chose to focus your time on this after working on some cool projects already. It's hard to remember what phones were like before the iPhone. They were not very capable of showing really, really beautiful user interface design. Now all of a sudden you've got this beautiful screen that in many cases has got more resolution than we had on our desktops five years ago and you're carrying it around with you all the time. On top of that, Apple did this terrific favor for designers in fixing the resolution so you don't have to design for an umpteen number of screen sizes and so forth. That's huge. I think the biggest thing is, as you said, these apps are more integrated in our lives than desktop apps ever were. It's a great opportunity to do really focused design but also to have a great impact on people's lives and to meld with their usage patterns and the way they think about the world. I think that's why user interface design in the next decade is going to become more and more important and more and more interesting to people as a kind of an art form. It's like a competition. People are going like, who can do the best job? It's like paper, I mean there are a million drawing apps on the app store that came out of nowhere and built something that nobody was doing. I think the key thing about paper is they made it look like magic as soon as you opened it up. It was like, wow, that's what a tablet can do for you that you couldn't do with a Wacom tablet and Photoshop or something like that on a desktop. That's really, really a huge breakthrough. We are in a gallery after all. There are a lot of galleries where you're mining things. I think most of the apps here are free, but when you look at putting a price on this kind of art, it's like not that many apps. TweetBug, TapBots is doing well selling a lot of products, but do you think this is a sustainable industry and to be building these mobile apps, especially free ones where you can buy little pieces of it. How do you see that as a business that you're now in? Are you asking me if every app is worth a billion dollars? I don't know. I can answer that if you want to. As the co-founder of a startup, as the CEO, we spend all of our days thinking about what is the worth of this thing that we're building. What's nice about this show is you just get a chance to really admire the work. I'm going to punt on that question. I don't know how we really value these UIs for the time being. All I know is I think the work is interesting enough. It's beautiful enough. What is it that you don't like about the show? The work is interesting enough, it's beautiful enough, and it's pushing enough boundaries that I think it really bears closer inspection. That's what the show is about. Do you think that there are going to be a lot more things like this popping up? Even WWDC sold out in two hours this year. Are you going to be there? My co-founder will be. I was actually out at a breakfast, so I was too late to score a ticket. Too late to order tickets. Have you heard of any other events like what you guys have done here? We haven't. That's why we're so excited about this. I would hope to see a lot more of this because a whole generation of people are focusing their energy on apps and they're doing amazing work. I think it really deserves this kind of showcase. It really deserves people looking at it more closely and having a dialogue about it. You're obviously a busy guy. What part of you wanted to spend a month putting something like this together and reaching out to companies and bringing this type of work together? When you're in a startup, your head's down so often. As a designer in a startup, you're often sort of drowned out by the business dialogue and the technology dialogue. Just to get a place where people can look at the artfulness of the user interfaces that are being made all the time, I thought that was really valuable. I really wanted the opportunity to let a lot of these app designers shine. It seemed totally worthwhile. Plus, the gallery space just made it really easy because it's ideal for showing digital art. Yet, there are no iPads to play with the apps. There is one downstairs. You can play with Mixel downstairs. Yeah, we saw that. Yes. Speaking of Mixel, what do we have to look forward to for your company and your app? We're going to focus on the phone next. Right now, Mixel is iPad only. We're taking a look at all of the interactions that we have on the iPad and seeing how they make sense in your hand and on the go. That's interesting because people see the iPad as a creation or consumption device, whereas the phone is more so communication and consumption. I think multi-touch in general is much more conducive to creation than people really give it credit for when it first debuted, especially on the iPad. I think the amount of screen real estate you have on the iPad is just very, very conducive to doing really great creative stuff. Just take a look at the stuff that people are doing on paper. Our journey is to figure out how to get people to lower their inhibitions about expressing themselves with pictures and art, that kind of thing. We've learned a lot on the iPad. We've learned a lot about what it takes for people to dabble in this kind of stuff. We're going to apply some of those lessons to the phone next and reach an audience of people who are on the go and try to create a way of creating this kind of content that is complementary to the way people think about their phones. How are you finding the different ways? Were you surprised by any of the ways people engage with Mixel? When you look at the users and what they're doing? Everything's social these days, but what's surprising? What is unexpected? Everybody's got social in their app these days. There are a few things that I think are really surprising. First, the tools that we built into Mixel that allow you to edit and make a collage are really quite primitive. We didn't put a ton of engineering time into letting you crop things and letting you flip and duplicate things. Right, you just got to lasso. Basically, yeah. People have done some really amazing, impressive, jaw-dropping work inside. Very sophisticated and very, very complex Mixels. The other thing that has been really gratifying as well as surprising is the communities come together really, really quickly. They've jointly decided, okay, we're going to figure out how to use this tool and support each other and get to know each other. They very often refer to themselves as a kind of family now. A few of them are hitting these milestones like 100 Mixels or 500 or 1,000 Mixels. That in itself is amazing, but what's even more amazing is the community is waiting for each person to hit that milestone. As they get to 495 Mixels, they start making Mixels, cheering them on and really trying to root for each other to get there. It's just been incredibly gratifying to see that kind of stuff. A lot of this stuff is cool. People tend to put a lot of effort into one or two creative apps that they want to do. Do you think there's time in our lives for all these apps or do you think over time, let's say in 10 years, things are going to be distilled down to the point where... Or is it really just like, you know what, everybody likes different books, everybody likes different video games, that kind of thing? People always throw around the word bubble, but is there time for all these apps? Well, I think you hit on it. There's not enough time for all of the books that will be published this year or all the movies that will be released this year, but having that variety and especially with digital media, with the web, creating these apps where people who have passions that otherwise would be unmet can go and meet other people and engage in it and get encouraged to indulge those passions. I think that's incredibly valuable and we see people make time for it. The session links inside Mixel are really super healthy. People come home, they sit, they have dinner. They see how long they opened it for. They have dinner, sit down, maybe in front of the TV and open up Mixel and they're in there for a half hour or longer. They're incredibly engaged. That's part of the beauty of the iPad as well. It's a very, very immersive platform for creating experiences. When you look at just in the past few months or so since Draw Something started taking off, do you think style-wise is sticking around or are we going to stick with fingers? Don't tell the guys at 53 who make paper. I think that it's fingers all the way. I'm going to vote for fingers. But style-wise, there might be a market for them and if anybody can do it, those guys can do it. What about in terms of computers? You write, you mock things up, you sketch things out in applications. Is everything going to be touch at some point? I think there's always going to be a place for typing. I'll tell you, I got a Bluetooth keyboard for my iPad and I can travel just with the iPad now which is lighter, it has a longer battery life. It's a Logitech one, I think made by another company, I can't remember which one it is. It's a Zag in Logitech. Yeah, it's a Zag, exactly. And that's terrific. It doesn't replace everything that I can do on my laptop but I think in five or ten years it very possibly could if not sooner. And I think there's a pretty good bet that some touch properties will come to what we think of as desktops and laptops today. But I would be a fool to predict when. Well, thanks so much for your time. Thanks a lot. Really appreciate your wisdom and expertise. Yeah, thank you.