programming languages
As far as I’m concerned, you can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much screen space. By “screen,” I mean not just large monitors, but multiple large monitors. I’ve been evangelizing multiple monitors since the dark days of Windows Millennium Edition: * Multiple Monitors and Productivity
usability
Writing code? That’s the easy part. Getting your application in the hands of users, and creating applications that people actually want to use – now that’s the hard stuff. I’ve been a long time fan of Krug’s book Don’t Make Me Think. Not just because it’
usability
If you’ve ever wrangled a user interface, you’ve probably heard of Fitts’ Law. It’s pretty simple – the larger an item is, and the closer it is to your cursor, the easier it is to click on. Kevin Hale put together a great visual summary of Fitts’ Law,
laptops
As a long time reader of Joey DeVilla’s excellent blog, Global Nerdy, I take exception to his post Fast Food, Apple Pies, and Why Netbooks Suck: The end result, to my mind, is a device that occupies an uncomfortable, middle ground between laptops and smartphones that tries to please
microformats
I recently added microformat support to the free public CVs at careers.stackoverflow.com by popular demand. Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. The official microformat “elevator pitch” tells us nothing useful. That’
usability
After I posted my blog entry on Treating User Myopia I got a lot of advice. Some useful, some not so useful. But the one bit of advice I hadn’t anticipated was that we were not making good use of the area “above the fold.” This surprised me. Does
usability
I try not to talk too much about the trilogy here, because there’s a whole other blog for that stuff. But some of the lessons I’ve learned in the last year while working on them really put into bold relief some of my earlier blog entries on usability
programming languages
Xanadu, a global hypertext publishing system, is the longest-running vaporware story in the history of the computer industry. It has been in development for more than 30 years. This long gestation period may not put it in the same category as the Great Wall of China, which was under construction
writing style
Are you familiar with happy talk? If you’re not sure whether something is happy talk, there’s one sure-fire test: if you listen very closely while you’re reading it, you can actually hear a tiny voice in the back of your head saying “Blah blah blah blah blah.
web programming
Michael Braude decries the popularity of web programming: The reason most people want to program for the web is that they’re not smart enough to do anything else. They don’t understand compilers, concurrency, 3D or class inheritance. They haven’t got a clue why I’d use an
user experience
Will Work for Praise: The Web’s Free-Labor Economy describes how many of today’s websites are built by the users themselves: It’s dawn at a Los Angeles apartment overlooking the Hollywood Hills. Laura Sweet, an advertising creative director in her early 40s, sits at a computer and begins
windows
While I haven’t been unhappy with Windows Vista, it had a lot of rough edges: This is why the screenshot of the Windows 7 Calculator, although seemingly trivial, is so exciting to me. It’s evidence that Microsoft is going to pay attention to the visible parts of the