data visualization
In the spirit of Jennifer Tidwell’s excellent Designing Interfaces book, there are a few great catalogs of data visualization emerging online. Start with the oft-cited Periodic Table of Visualization Methods. There’s another excellent collection at Data Visualization: Modern Approaches. If you’re looking for visualization with a less
ui design
Google’s user interface minimalism is admirable. But there’s one part of their homepage UI, downloaded millions of times per day, that leaves me scratching my head: Does anyone actually use the “I'm Feeling Lucky” button? I’ve been an avid Google user since 2000; I use
programming languages
In response to Wil Shipley’s recent post about the lack of an iPhone SDK, a reader left this comment: I often enjoy reading these entries, but you always come across as a little bit of an a**hole. Full of yourself, overly critical and a bit mean. Dismissing and
lua
Garry’s Mod is a fascinating study in guerilla programming. It’s an incredibly successful mod for the game Half-Life 2 that essentially converts it into a giant sandbox powered by Lua. There are a large number of Lua scripted 3rd party modifications for Garry’s mod. In a server
installation process
Ned Batchelder shares a complaint about the Mac application installation process: Here’s what I did to install the application Foo [on the Mac]: 1. Downloaded FooDownload.dmg.zip to the desktop. 2. StuffIt Expander launched automatically, and gave me a FooDownload.dmg Folder on the desktop. 3. At this
programming languages
Tim Berners-Lee on the Principle of Least Power: Computer Science spent the last forty years making languages which were as powerful as possible. Nowadays we have to appreciate the reasons for picking not the most powerful solution but the least powerful. The less powerful the language, the more you can
user experience
One of my great frustrations with the Mac is the way the maximize button on each window fails to maximize the window. In a comment, Alex Chamberlain explained why this isn’t broken, it’s by design: This is a textbook example of how Microsoft’s programmers got the original
ui design
I bought my copy of Alan Cooper’s classic About Face in 1995. I remember poring over it, studying its excellent advice, reveling in its focus on the hot new UI paradigms standardized in Windows 95 – toolbars, menus with icons, tabbed dialogs, and so forth. Seems quaint now, if not
mobile devices
Let me start by saying up front that I am a fan of the iPhone. The mobile phone market is a sad, pathetic wasteland in desperate need of improvement. I’m hoping iPhone will the collective kick in the pants the smartphone market needs to finally stop making user hostile
advertising
I was saddened to read this blurb from danah boyd’s outstanding “MyFriends, MySpace” presentation at Harvard: My activist self wanted to believe that the users are aware of [ads], but sadly, that’s not the case. To them, seeing ads means that the service is free. Kids are so
legalese
If you’ve used a computer for any length of time, you’ve probably clicked through hundreds of End User License Agreement (EULA) dialogs. And if you’re like me, you haven’t read a single word of any of them. Who can blame you? They’re mind-numbing legalese. As
user experience
I’m a big fan of incremental search. But incremental search isn’t just for navigating large text documents. As applications get larger and more complicated, incremental search is also useful for navigating the sea of features that modern applications offer. Office 2007’s design overhaul is arguably one of