Category: Interface

Keynote presentations from the WWDC are always very entertaining to watch – even though the author of this Wired article thinks the presentation was uninspiring. I don’t think so. The business numbers were impressive. Apple sales and market share is growing. That is a change. Apple always had a small market share. The machines were…

Tim and Simon from send|recieve presented a verly early alpha version of Mnemomap one week ago on the Webmontag event in Cologne (which happened to be the first one in Cologne I couldn’t attend). I am sure they’d love anyone to try Mnemomap and drop some feedback about it. The About page states: mnemomap is…

James Edwards from Sitepoint.com looks at AJAX and Screenreaders: There doesn’t appear to be any reliable way to notify screen readers of an update in the DOM. There are piecemeal approaches that work for one or more devices, but no overall approach or combination that would cover them all. The Mozilla Developer Center offers some…

Tim Bruysten forgot his »Apple Mighty Mouse« after his presentation on Web Monday meet-up. I took it with me to hand it back to him later. I am using it now. And I have to say: I don’t like it. I don’t want to go into too much detail, but generally the absence of physical…

Jared Spool points out that consistency is a matter of dealing with user’s current knowledge – not with formal elements of the visual design. Unfortunatly he uses a very misleading headline for is article which is really not in line with the point he is trying to make. The headline is »Consistency in Design is…

The Stanford HCI Group is working on car dashboards that discourage drivers from speedig. They’ve put some of their early brainstorming results online.

Actually I wanted to join the 2nd DenkWerkzeug meeting in Karlsruhe (organized by Heiko Haller) tomorrow but I can’t make it. I would have been glad to discuss strategies for knowledge tools and possible approaches for a PKM introductory course. Better luck next time…

I upgraded my PowerBook to the latest Tiger release. In 20 years of working with computers I never experienced a system upgrade that was so easy. After cloning the complete internal harddisk to an equally sized external one (with Carbon Copy Cloner) I did a clean re-install of MacOS X 10.4 Tiger. Tiger comes with…

This application simply rocks: Delicious Library You can hold a book with a barcode in front of your iSight camera and it automatically gets added to a virtual book shelf (with thumbnail, price tag and summary). You can then create and export sub-collections. I would have bought this application for $40 instantly – if only…

One of the most challenging issues for software user interface design is to provide a 2D surface to a 3D design space. SketchUp is some kind of sketching tool that seems to be full of ideas of how to solve this problem (at least it appears to be from the training videos).

I remember when there was a discussion about “Notebook universities” in and around some universities in my area. They were supposed to conceptualize how they would utilize notebooks. These concepts were evaluated to decide which universities get funding for WLAN and Laptop equipment. If I remember correctly the concepts were usually not very inspired. Few…

Sun released a public version of their 3D desktop Project Looking Glass. There is a demo video with Jonathan Schwartz (weblog), Executive Vice President of Software at Sun Microsystems, who claims: The dominant company that provides the desktop doesn’t want to show you that [innovation on the desktop] because they do not want to do…

I just had a look at the WWDC 2004 keynote (did I see Francis Ford Coppola in the audience a couple of times?). The upcoming release vo Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger comes with a collection of features that in general appear to be focussing on productivity and efficiency. Spotlight – the instant searching –…

Apple posts some notes on developing software for Macs. Brent Simmons recommends it not only for other developers but also for anybody who enjoys thinking about software.

ZDNet recently published a Meta Group report by analyst Mike Gotta that suggests collaboration is a business strategy, not a tool strategy. Through 2004, organizations will rein in tactical collaboration products (instant messaging, teamware, and Web conferencing) for companywide deployments, driven by architecture needs, product standardization benefits, and shared infrastructure flexibility. By 2008, “contextual collaboration”…

What users will see in the next few years is a replacement of the filesystem storage paradigm with a database storage paradigm. Microsoft is working on it and Apple seems to develop something similar as well. Oracle already stretched their database to accommodate some kind of filesystem like access – which is not aimed at…

Andrei Herasimchuk wrote an open letter to Jakob Nielsen in response to this Alertbox story: […] Mr. Nielsen, I respectfully request you stop posting articles like this. You do yourself and the usability field a disservice by speaking in terms that are vague, not backed up with research data, and filled with hyperbole. Further, until…

Whitney Quesenbery has a very memorable explanation about usability: The 5Es are helpful in planning your usability testing, because each suggests specific techniques: