First, I'll say the new app looks clean. A definite improvement.

But... and I may be being too critical. Google's Material Design ostensibly draws the bulk of its inspiration from the real world -- materials like cards, motions mimicking those governed by the laws of physics, etc. And yet they make some odd choices in their interfaces that, I think, work against the models they're trying to create.

For instance:

1. As mentioned already, the main view is the draggable map, yet you can slide from the left to open the side drawer. To me that is not consistent with a design based on materials because the map is an endless canvas. It would make more sense if the main view were not draggable, and thus opening the side drawer would be akin to sliding cards away or into view.

2. I'm a little bothered by the placement of the hamburger icon. It lies within the element that is used for searching, but is in no way related to that, and it almost decouples the icon from the element it summons.

3. When you tap the blue direction button, a new view slides up, as a card would, from the bottom. On this view you're given a back arrow, indicating a horizontal motion, which is inconsistent with the vertical movement bringing the screen into view. Perhaps an X would be better.

Again, maybe I'm being too critical or my expected models are too literal, but Google is really pushing this Material Design concept, and personally I think the implementations have fallen short.

Just wanted to say thanks for all your hard work.

I've long been meaning to learn animation and motion design, but never had the time or energy to fully invest in developing that skill. Do I pick up After Effects? Quartz? Maybe I should just learn JS from the ground up? Being prone to analysis paralysis certainly didn't help.

Well last week I took on a new project and decided to check out FramerJS again, noticed you guys had developed Studio. Looked easy enough, so I downloaded, browsed a few examples and jumped right in. A week into it and I've got my first fully animated design prototype and could not be more pleased with it and myself. And now I'm trying to think of new apps to design as an excuse to make more animations!

It's enabled me more in my work than any other (design) app I've used. (Sketch, I love you, but the relationship is still pretty unstable.)

Anyway, thanks again. You guys have helped this guy, and I'm sure many others, take their game to the next level.

Thanks for fixing some huge frustrations. I was wondering when you guys were going to release the update for non-App Store purchasers.

Good stuff, man. How'd you get to this point?

Ah, cool. Did many of the skills transition over, or was there a lot of self-teaching involved?

Design school -- degree in graphic design, etc.

I learned a few weeks back that this site isn't about discussion of design philosophy, concepts, design critique, the role of design in our world, design interactions and human behavior, basically what Design really is, but more about dribbble shots, links to new apps, and photoshop scripts.

I played with Sketch before and found it to be a bit too dumbed down for me, but after reading this, I think I'll give it another try. I won't use it as an outright replacement for Photoshop just yet, but it'll serve as my wireframing tool now.

I'll throw one into the agreement box as well. LayerVault sounded like a super useful service to me, and I'd been considering checking it out for some time. So I eventually took the leap, registered, put in my cc info and tried getting acquainted with their interface. It was way too confusing for me. I want to use and love the product; I'm convinced it's something I'd find invaluable, but I don't feel comfortable with being lost and wondering what different components of the UI mean/do.

Fully agreed. I wrote a similar comment about this on HN yesterday in response to an article on Flat Design. I'd love to know what you guys think.

The issue isn't skeuomorphic vs. flat design. Let's reframe it to be about the inclusion of affordances and constraints. What makes a tool easy and intuitive to use is the careful attention given to both enable and restrict the user from performing a set of actions. When a user clearly sees what he/she can or cannot do, they understand the purpose of what's in front of them. Gradients and dropshadows help with that, but even ignoring these aesthetic qualities, we have a whole host of other concepts to utilize, like consistency, proximity, structural heirarchy, and more conceptual digital analogs of real world entities. Let's compare apples to apples: the iOS home screen to that of Windows. Let's go further and ignore the aesthetic differences, like gradients and dropshadows. What are we left with? The iOS screen has a table of app icons, all consistent in size and alignment. It's easy to see that at the highest level, these are all applications I can access. Let's look at Windows, more specifically the screenshot in the blog post. We see no consistency in size, and further, that grouped set of minicons on the left are of a confused relationship. 3 are music apps, and the fourth looks like maybe text messaging. The iOS apps are laid out in a way where a user can easily tell what is tappable from what is not tappable -- "this is an actionable element in a sea of inactionable whitespace." Contrast this with the billboard-like layout of the Windows Phone UI. You are bombarded with colors and pictures and icons, mere millimeters away from one another, leaving a user in confusion and sensory overload because it's difficult to isolate the various elements. The iOS app screen has an icon and a text label for every single app. The Windows Phone does not. It almost seems like tiles are arbitrarily assigned to be little/big or to have icon-labels/photos. After playing around with a friend's Lumia for some time, I'm still confused when I stare at the screen of a Windows Phone.

I'm not trying to spark an Apple vs. Microsoft debate. I'm trying to show that stripped of all gratuitous skeuomorphism and subtle aesthetic qualities, UIs can still be usable given they clarify to the user what they can or cannot do. I could've done the same mini-analysis with an Android home screen compared to a Windows one and Android would've come out on top for many of the same reasons.