minimalism
John Maeda created quite a stir with his montage of the Yahoo and Google homepages from 1996 to 2006 in simple is about staying simple: Although Philipp Lenssen has posted on this topic before (he calls it the portal plague), it’s still striking. Altavista made the same mistake, and
ides
I just installed CodeRush, and now my IDE looks like this: From Mike Gunderloy’s review of Refactor! Pro: Refactor! uses the same drawing technology as CodeRush, making a video game out of your code. When you introduce an overload, for example, you actually see strikethroughs appear on parameters being
programming languages
I have nothing against World of Warcraft, but the Gamasutra editorial World of Warcraft Teaches the Wrong Things highlights one problem I have with the entire MMORPG* genre: [WOW teaches players that] investing a lot of time in something is worth more than actual skill. If you invest more time
user experience
Pop quiz, hotshot. What do these toolbar icons do – and what application are they from? Okay, maybe that’s a bit too monochrome. Does color help? Okay, let’s try something less abstract. Does a more traditional look help? So we can see there’s some kind of VCR-like functionality,
user experience
Darwinia is the third game I’ve played with mouse gesture support: 1. Bungie’s classic 1998 game Myth used gestures in a limited way to indicate squad facing post-movement. 2. Lionhead’s 2001 game Black and White used gestures to invoke various spells. 3. Introversion Software’s 2005 game
markup languages
Black and white works fine when I’m reading newspapers. But when I’m reading computer languages of any kind – from Perl to SQL, from C# to Regular Expressions, from HTML to XML – I can’t bear to read them in black and white any more. Consider this Infocard XML
keyboard shortcuts
All modern browsers have extensive keyboard shortcuts: * Internet Explorer * Firefox * Chrome * Safari I tested every shortcut, and here’s my list of keyboard shortcuts that work in all browsers – or, for the rare keyboard shortcuts I found especially useful, those that work in at least two of the above browsers.
enterprise software
Via Ole Eichhorn, the UK Guardian’s Survival of the Unfittest: Lotus Notes is used by millions of people, but almost all of them seem to hate it. How can a program be so bad, yet thrive? We’ve all had bad software experiences. However, at one of my jobs,
music technology
I’m a big music fan. And as a longtime computer enthusiast, I’ve always been intrigued by the intersection of computers and music: audio visualization. The first experience I had with visualization was the 1993 CD-ROM add-on for Atari’s short-lived Jaguar console. It included Jeff Minter’s VLM-1
software development
As a commenter noted in my previous post on how not to give a presentation, I have another complaint about software development presentations that I didn’t list. They’re chock full of meaningless acronyms. SOAP, BI, SOA, RDBMS, SGML, CRUD, RMS, RDBMS, XML, ORM, FAQ. I appreciate the need
user experience
Here at VSLive! 2006 San Francisco, I’ve been sitting through a lot of presentations. Unfortunately, I’ve spent a disproportionate amount of that time staring at tiny, unreadable 12 and 10 point IDE text. Presenters, please don’t do this to your audiences. If you can’t pre-scale the
usability
Jensen Harris recently cited some Microsoft Office usability research which produced a rather counter-intuitive result: One of the most interesting epiphanies I’ve had over the last few years seems on the surface like a paradox: “help” in Office is mostly used by experts and enthusiasts. How can this be?