Posts Tagged: Usability & Design
four beautiful things
Posted by on Tuesday, September 25, 2001 in - 1 comment
Dodge Magazine #1 - Pixel art at its best. Messy and perfect at the same time. It's put together by the guys at super-design site k10k (in hibernation until Dec. 1) and design shop XL5. • Rustboy - A personal short CG film still under development by the aforementioned XL5's Brian Taylor. Some of …
Google is a better mousetrap
Posted by on Friday, June 22, 2001 in - 3 comments
Did you know: • Google gives more weights to links that are bold or have a larger relative font size? • Google uses the text in links to a page to help rank that page? As they "often provide more accurate descriptions of web pages than the pages themselves." • This all comes from an academic …
QWERTY, Cut, & Paste
Posted by on Saturday, June 9, 2001 in - 9 comments
Speaking of behemoths, Microsoft introduces a keyboard with the long overdue Copy, Cut, and Paste keys. A Microsoft Word key is lame, but anyone who has done the Ctrl-C + Ctrl-V a hundred times knows that the pinky and index finder were not meant to be that far from each other for any length of …
Tim Berners-Lee's Semantic Web
Posted by on Sunday, April 22, 2001 in - 4 comments
If you are interested in the future of the web and computing in general, read The Semantic Web in the May issue of Scientific American. Co-authored by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web, the article explores the possibilities of having a machine-readable web, rather than a web intended only for …
the 5k audi tt vr gallery
Posted by on Sunday, April 8, 2001 in - 3 comments
The5k is a web competition in which the entries must be less than 5 kilobytes (5,120 bytes) in total file size. To put that in perspective, the front page of actsofvolition.com today is 28 kilobytes of text/HTML and over 41 kilobytes of images. From the5k.org: • “ • PURPOSE • The idea behind …
the future of (non)interface design: it's in the game
Posted by on Friday, April 6, 2001 in
The fundamentals of the computer interface have remained basically unchanged since 1973 when Xeroc PARC came up with the mouse-based window interface concept. A quick look back at Apple in 1980 will show you how similar your current OS interface is to these supposed antiques. • This isn't …
blind progress in the visual sciences
Posted by on Monday, March 26, 2001 in
I think the logic goes something like this: • “ • Premise #1: • 1995 was better than 1985 • Premise #2: • T2 was better than Terminator • Conclusion: • The higher the number, the better. • ” • While I worry that much of what is happening in the world is powered by such logic, my …
Coffeepot for Masochists.
Posted by on Saturday, March 17, 2001 in
Have you ever pushed on a pull door? Have you ever stood waiting for an automatic sliding door to open, only to find out it's a window? Are you sick of the blinking 12:00 on your VCR? Rise up against the tyranny of bad design! • I recently finished reading Donald Norman's The Design of Everyday …
is the Microsoft Office monopoly more dangerous than Microsoft Windows monopoly?
Posted by on Saturday, January 20, 2001 in
Jakob Neilsen, usability nut, offers this interesting proposition: • “ • “...the real platform these days is Office and that Microsoft's monopoly at this new level is of more concern than what they do with Windows...” • ” • To a degree, this is true. Most common business documents use the …
warning: involuntary microsoft promotion follows
Posted by on Wednesday, November 22, 2000 in - 1 comment
I hate to use the term technolust, but I can't think of a better way to describe my feelings towards Microsoft's new Tablet PC. • I want one of these, bad. To absolve myself of consumer-culture guilt, I offer these totally unrelated items: • Ralph Nader proves why he should have won the …