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,
audio visualization
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
acronyms
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?
design patterns
A recent post by Steve Makofsky reminded me that the excellent UI Patterns and Techniques site is now a book from O'Reilly – Designing Interfaces. There’s technically no reason to buy a book on visual design patterns when you can find the same information online... * GUI design patterns
responsive design
From the “why I don’t read Robert Scoble any more” department: One thing I wish is that Web site developers/designers would look at their site on a small screen with limited bandwidth. So many sites suck really bad. I’m going to call these sites out with increasing
software development
A co-worker and I went over to Scott’s house today at around 1pm PST to pick something up for work. Scott just got a new television, so he demoed it for us, flipping through the channels, comparing HD signals to regular signals and so forth. As we were doing
web development
Every few years, Jakob Nielsen takes websites to task with a Top Ten Web Design Mistakes article. Although things have clearly improved since the original 1996 list, I’m particularly concerned that in the competitive frenzy to get all JavaScripted up for Web 2.0, we may be defeating the
file systems
Don Park recently made an interesting observation about how his family uses the computer: When I observe how my wife and son uses the family computer, I can’t help noticing how little use they have for the desktop. They look bewildered when I open the Windows Explorer. To them,
software development
For better or worse, I’ve been a Microsoft fan since Windows 3.1. Microsoft is far from perfect, but the alternatives were always so much worse. Can you imagine a dystopian future where we’re all running IBM’s OS/2 2004 and Lotus Notes Express? Brr. I get