November 2007
62 posts
UI Patterns →
A nice library of common UI patterns. Seems to be a more web-specific version of some of the patterns in Jennifer Tidwell’s book.
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What the Google Intranet Looks Like →
A rare look at some of the internal tools used by Googlers. (via Dan Rockwell)
“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People...”
– Steve Jobs and this is exactly how I feel about the definition of design
Design Meltdown § Principles of Design →
A new series discussing web design principles by studying real examples. Emphasis is the first topic covered.
Product pages: so much suck, so easy to fix →
Good article by Amy Hoy, a look at how to improve the user experience of pages - product pages in particular.
Building a Custom Multiple Selection Widget
I was originally going to write this up in the style of an A List Apart article with lots of detail, but I am going to try to stick with a more tumblelog-friendly version.
Sometimes when I’m designing a user interface, I feel that the standard form controls don’t give me enough flexibility for coming up with a good solution. Or I feel that if I did use only the vanilla controls, the...
Lost Theory
I don’t follow the Lost scholars online and their frighteningly deep analyses of the show’s meaning, but I stumbled across this particle accelerator theory recently and it made a lot of sense to this layman.
Coding Horror: Recommended Reading for Developers →
Jeff Atwood’s list of books is almost 4 years old, but it’s still a fantastic lineup for developers - especially for those with at least some interest in UI design and usability.
“Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage...”
– Zeldman
Who Says Geeks Aren't Tough?
Congrats to UFC fighter and fellow computer geek, Joe Lauzon, in his first round victory Saturday night in UFC 78. Joe got a computer science degree in 2006 and worked as a network admin briefly before making a name for himself in the UFC lightweight division.
respond_to brainwashing
Wow, I’m glad to finally find that I’m not the only one who thinks the whole RESTful movement is a bit silly and out of control - especially in the Rails community. Certain applications lend themselves to having an API baked in from the start, but for the vast majority of websites it just seems like a lot of cruft to add to your code just because the powers that be have decided you...
“I think that I would have had a much nicer time these past three and a half...”
– Khoi Vinh
Amazon's Kindle
As much as I hope for someone to nail a great e-book reader someday, I don’t think the Kindle is it. I don’t care for the form factor and, for as impressive as the e-Ink technology is, it still has that annoying blackout when the screen updates (just like the Sony Reader). I don’t usually get worked up over DRM issues, but I have to agree with Gruber on this one:
The only way...
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Menu Bar Tint →
I don’t like the transparent menu bar in Leopard nor the blinding white color that OpaqueMenuBar gives you, but this app restores a pleasant gradient as we had in 10.4.
Dashboard Web Clip Widgets
I never thought I’d have a real use for the new Web Clip widget feature built into Safari 3 and Leopard’s Dashboard, but indeed I did. Cuban Council has long been one of my favorite design firms, but they don’t have an RSS feed of any kind (that I know of). They do, however, have a small news block on their site that they update once in a blue moon. So I used the Web Clip tool...
New Leopard Theme for TextMate →
Jawbone
At the meetup last night, I noticed that Alex uses a Jawbone headset. I had never seen that brand and then one of my transcribed Jott messages included an ad for Jawbone. Do they really work as well as they show in their demo video? Form follows function, but I love when smart teams figure out how to deliver both.
First Coworking Meeting
Last night’s Coworking Meetup was a success. About a dozen people showed up and we talked about the basic expectations we each had for a coworking facility. It’s still very early in the process, so if you’d like to get involved keep an eye on the wiki.
Repurposing the iPhoto '08 Photoscanning Effect
For those of you who have used iPhoto ‘08, you’ve probably noticed the slick new UI feature that allows you to preview what photos are in an album by just moving your mouse back and forth across the album’s thumbnail. It’s pretty slow, but here’s a sample web gallery (created by iPhoto) showing this idea.
Steve, The Big Dumb Developer (his title, not mine), did...
favikon →
Very nice online tool for generating favicons for your sites. Via Dan Cederholm.
Small Affordances
Lighthouse by Active Reload is nice issue tracking application. Most apps in this category are extremely bloated [cough] Bugzilla [cough] or way too complicated and a nightmare to use [cough] Bugzilla [cough], but Lighthouse seems to find a nice balance between features and ease of use.
With that said, I recently spent an embarrassingly long amount of time trying to figure out how to assign an...
Jott.com →
Very nice way to send yourself reminders over the phone. Voice memos are transcribed (very well actually) and emailed to you.
You Will Never See Ants Stuck in Gridlock
The New York Times has an interesting piece that discusses how researchers are starting to discover the rules that allow swarms to work so well. This is an area of study called emergence which deals with the ability of thousands of simple animals to form a collective brain and behave like a single organism.
And people look at me strange when I tell them that I chose my company’s name...
Mike Rohde Turns Down Apple/iPhone Design Gig →
While reading his thought process, I think I would have done the same thing. Congrats nonetheless, Mike.
Wasted Space in Android's Browser
The first thing that jumped out at me while test driving the emulator in the Android SDK was how clunky the browser’s UI looked. The rendering engine itself is WebKit, but the UI chrome is Google’s doing.
Maybe later versions of the SDK will be different, but I think my main issue with the current browser is the giant page title bar.
BEFORE
A quick measurement shows that 9% of...
Delicious Monster Avoids Testing
It almost seems taboo to dismiss automated testing practices this day in age, so it came as somewhat of a shock to read that Delicious Monster avoids it:
To questions about unit and functional testing in general, Mike had a simple
reply: we don’t do it. All the testing in the world won’t make your software free of bugs, and there’s just no way to account for things you can’t account for.
...
“A nerd needs a project because a nerd builds stuff. All the time. Those lulls in...”
– Rands
Columbus Coworking Meetup →
Bryce Glass and a couple of others took the initiative to investigate starting a coworking space in Columbus. Come to the meeting November 14th if you can.
“Ever since I was a kid I pictured myself working at home. I thought it would be...”
– Brett Simmons (NetNewsWire developer)
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WatchMark Boulton’s typography presentation at the Web 2.0 Expo.
Dijkstra's algorithm →
The core algorithm behind the way Google Maps determines the best driving route.
