Acts of Volition

The fabulous instant messaging client, Gaim, could use your help. That is, you’re a talented and generous web designer.  •  With the impending release of Gaim 2.0.0, the Gaim website is in need of an update to be as slick as the application it represents. If you are a web designer that is …

When did it become acceptable to sell printers without the cable to connect them to your computer? I’m not only talking about those crazy-cheap practically-disposable ink-jets either. I’m talking about $400 color-laser printers with no cable. Isn’t that like selling a toaster without a power-cable …

Commercial Web Mail providers  •  HotMail  •  No  •  Yahoo Mail  •  No  •  Gmail  •  Yes  •  Open Source Web Mail packages  •  IMP/Horde  •  No  •  RoundCube  •  Yes  •  SquirrelMail  •  Yes  •  Hula  •  Yes  •  Here’s a quick test to see if you web-mail system is any good:  •  When you first log …

I’ve long found CNN.com to be at least as funny as The Onion. The robots that control their homepage “top stories” have a knack for ironic juxtaposition, amusing corrections, and being just plain wacky.  •  All along, though, there was been an odd little blob of pixels floating in the top …

Today at the Gnome Summit in Boston in the MIT Stata Centre, Jakub Steiner of Novell and I announced the Tango Project. We’ve been working on it for a few months now, just getting the basics figured out before we started bragging.  •  The Tango Project is a collaborative effort of a variety of …

Matt Munoz, a designer at Red Hat, has posted an interested walk-through of the development of a logo/visual-identity concept for Fedora Linux. It’s fascinating to see the process and justification behind a logo idea like this.  •  This isn’t an official logo yet. It has been proposed and is being …

Despite the misleading title, this is not a tutorial on how to use MediaWiki to build a website. Rather, it is an observation that MediaWiki can be used to build sites that look and feel like tradition (non-Wiki) websites.  •  What the heck is a “wiki”?  •  First, some background. A wiki is a …

If you had asked me, before Firefox came along, if tabs were a good idea for a web-browser, I would have said no, absolutely not. The old Mozilla Browser had them, and Opera had them. Both were clunky and intrusive.  •  The real reason I would have thought it was a bad idea, though, is that tabs …

We don’t often think of Windows 95 as a shining example of user interface design and usability. It was slow on the hardware of the day, it crashed often, and many of its claimed “innovations” were copied from Apple and others.  •  All of that said, Windows 95 was a big leap for visual …