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Thursday, November 29, 2001
Damn is it hard to use Photoshop in German.
Wednesday, November 21, 2001
Never heard of it before. Lots of good stuff at the SAP Design Guild site, including some stuff on Contextual Design in the "Philosopy" section, and some teachniques for designing 'MiniApps', single purpose, self-contained UIs.
Dave's Quick Search Toolbar is so great, I'm linking to it again. It's interesting to read an interview with the guy at Webword.com, too, where he points out that since it's just a teeny HTML page, he was able to build it all in Notepad. He also has some interesting comments at the end, beginning with "Small software is important."
The Quick Search extends the "Google is the command-line interface to the web" idea so well, it makes me sing and dance. I mean, it has a word descrambler in it. Just having a little calculator there does it for me. It sure beats Apple's Sherlock.
Still, this little explanation makes it seem like there's a world of unsecurity in the Windows taskbar: "The search bar depends on the ability for IE to be hosted in the Windows deskbar: it runs inside a little IE browser just a few pixels high on the deskbar."
Saturday, November 17, 2001
At the last Doors of Perception conference, the two coolest talks were about wireless network services based on the user's location. Here's a Wired article about other location-based services.
Friday, November 16, 2001
I am really getting tired of this kind of thing: a usability professional seeks out a complex Flash site then acts all shocked and angered when it doesn't conform to various apparently inviable rules for the web, then happily invites others to react as indignantly on lists. It's gotten to the point where it's clearly disingenuous; professionals familiar with the web and who use it daily just aren't really that flummoxed by complex interfaces. So posts to CHI-WEB like Kathy Gill's just strike me as simple trolling. Some excerpts from her post:
"[yugop.com] is being discussed on Digital Eve Seattle. Several of us have
said, "huh?" and a couple of the Flash designers have written about
it as though it were the Holy Grail. If you want an exercise in frustration (correction: if you want to
see something that led to my frustration) go to
Thursday, November 15, 2001
My recent comments below and at Elegant Hack were, I think now, wrong. The more I've thought about it and looked for it, the more I do see IAs getting excited and even inspired by "structure." For example, Peter Morville's newest essay which talks about faceted classification, is an insightful and detailed discussion of innovative information structures. (Aren't there any examples of this besides Wine.com, though?) In places, it dovetails nicely with some of the how-to content of Adaptive Path's just-released presentations. I'm pleased to be wrong about this!
Tuesday, November 13, 2001
Strategies of Influence for Interaction Designers is worth reading. This stuff is important no matter what your job is, and I admit I'm lousy at it. I knew a guy in grad school who was a very good thinker and decent writer. That was actually bad: many others in our program were exceptional thinkers and terrific writers. Know what? This guy could get up in front of a group and present, and he could talk with and understand people and their interests better than almost anyone I've met. He's also got job offers in a field where there aren't any, and gets project after project done and noticed.
Stupid. (That is, the book chapter that's behind the registration form.) Smart. (That is, Textism's response. Thanks to Victor for pointing that permalink out.)
Also handy from Textism: AppleScripts that add direct-to-Google search from any application.
Monday, November 12, 2001
Adaptive Path's presentations from various conferences and workshops are available at their site. I have to say, I'm shocked that this stuff is there for free; two years ago, work about a third this thoughtful and valuable would have gotten them millions in VC funding and would have been "proprietary methodologies." It's not that it's profoundly innovative, but it's probably the best collection of meaningful information about IA yet published, including the Polar Bear book. The first two, Designing the Complete User Experience and From Construct to Structure, are better than almost anything else I've read on these topics. Expect these documents to quickly become standard references.
Saturday, November 10, 2001
There's an interesting discussion going on in the comments to one of Christina's posts. I'm really interested in this issue of "if we're architects, where's the love of form and structure?" IAs do not talk about structure like "real" architects do. There's no vocabulary of structure to draw from and explore; there's no subtlety or room to work with, say, Alphabetical information organization, in terms of structure (the visual design of an alphabetical list would be a different issue).
Wednesday, November 07, 2001
This section of Winer's essay You're Free to Think is probably a bit over the top, but maye just a little.
"[MS has] to get people to upgrade to Windows XP -- that's the final step, the one that fully turns over the keys to the Internet to them, because after XP they can upgrade at will, routing through Microsoft-owned servers, altering content, and channeling communication through government servers. After XP they fully own electronic communication media, given the consent decree, assuming it's approved by the court."
How does Phil Agre have time to just sit around and write long, thoughtful essays day after day?
Monday, November 05, 2001
If I used Windows, I'd sure like this search utility. I like that the syntax to use it is derived from punctuation we already associate with various search brands: a search ending in ! does a Google "I'm Feeling Lucky!" search, a search ending in ? searches Yahoo ("Do you Yahoo?" although I guess ! is part of Yahoo!'s name....), stock quote searches end in a $, phone numbers in a #, weather in a * (a snowflake, perhaps?), and the thing acts as a simple calculator as well. Why can't we have this on the Mac somehow? Like a control stip module?
