ui
I somehow doubt this is what Joyce Kilmer was thinking of when he wrote the poem, Trees: I think that I shall never see A poem lovely as a tree. It’s unfortunate that the TreeView is one of the standard widgets in a usability designer’s toolkit, because trees
programming languages
I’m currently whipping up a mini-API for the BetaBrite-specific subset of the Alpha Sign Communications Protocol. Naturally, I want it to be easy to use and understandable for other developers – a classic usability problem. How do you approach usability when your audience is other developers? The answer is, unsurprisingly,
keyboard shortcuts
Like Scott Hanselman, I view the mouse as an optional computer accessory.* Manly coders love the smell of compilation in the morning and we know that speed = keyboard. A mouse? C’mon. That’s so teenage girls can pick emoticons in AOL Instant Messenger. And for flash “developers.” Us tough
software development
I’ve always discouraged ivory tower development – teams where developers are cloistered away for years in their high towers, working on technical software wizardry. These developers have no idea how users will respond to their software they’re creating. They probably couldn’t even tell you the last time they
ide
In VB.NET vs C#, round two, I realized that choice of IDE has a far bigger impact on productivity than which language you choose. Lately I’ve started to think the relationship between language and IDE is even more profound: the future of programming languages isn’t a language
remote controls
Alex Gorbatchev posted his very favorable review of the Harmony H659 universal remote: This weekend I made one of the best purchases ever and I’m not exaggerating. Up until now I have been in the remote hell. Let me describe my living room setup: TV, DVD, Receiver, PVR and
software development concepts
Jack Black, in the DVD extras for School of Rock, had this to say in an interview: I had to learn how to play electric guitar a little bit because all I play is acoustic guitar. And I’m still not very good at electric guitar. And the truth is,
design
The appeal of the Mac Mini is totally lost on me. It’s an underpowered, expensive box – like every other computer Apple has ever introduced. And yet, a certain contingent of PC users are buying this thing on release day. I never understood that. Ed Stroglio may be the best
user experience
You may be familiar with Bruce Tognazzini, who is widely considered the father of the Macintosh UI. He’s no longer at Apple, but he is part of the Neilsen Norman dream team. He also maintains a website with the 10 most wanted UI design bugs: 1. Power failure crash
multithreading
As a follow-up to my caution about exceptions in Form.Paint(), I wanted to illustrate why this technique is so effective. Let’s say you had a form with this code: Private IsFirstPaint As Boolean = True Private Sub DoWork() Cursor = Cursors.WaitCursor StatusBar1.Text = "Loading..." System.Threading.Thread.
web design
From the Articles That Unintentionally Parody Themselves department: In the last article we listed some of the seemingly good but superfluous elements with which Web designers clutter their sites. We covered: • Counters • Close, Bookmark and Print this Window links • Flashy menus that don't help the user • Right-click protection
user experience
Per Steve Krug’s excellent book, Don’t Make Me Think: We all know happy talk when we see it: it’s the introductory text that’s supposed to welcome us to the site and tell us how great it is, or to tell us what we’re about to