Posts Tagged: Usability & Design
Inconsolata: Quality Free and Open Font for Programmers
Posted by on Sunday, September 9, 2007 in - 19 comments
If you spend a significant amount of time working with any type of scripting, code, or markup, then you’re probably looking at a monospace (fixed-width for each character) font. • The quality of these fonts varies, though the defaults that ship with Mac OS X, Windows XP, and Windows Vista are …
Solitaire: The End of Desktop Applications
Posted by on Monday, August 20, 2007 in - 2 comments
The web-based version of Solitaire at WorldOfSolitaire.com is as smooth and playable as the version included in Windows or Gnome by default. This is the end of desktop software - Solitaire was the final frontier. • Note that it is not built with Flash, but Javascript, CSS, HTML, via YUI.
“This Apple ID has been disabled for security reasons”
Posted by on Saturday, July 28, 2007 in - 7 comments
Tonight I got home from a movie (Everything’s Gone Green - good movie) and headed to the iTunes Store to listen to some previews from the soundtrack. I was greeted by this message: • I suspect this is because I have used SharpMusique, an unauthorized Linux-based client for the iTunes Store (that …
Phantom Cell Phone Vibrations in Print
Posted by on Wednesday, June 13, 2007 in - 7 comments
A few weeks ago I got a call from Angela Haupt, a reporter for USA Today. She wanted a few quotes for an article she was writing about phantom cell phone vibrations. Thanks to Google, a short post I made in 2004 makes me a leading expert on the topic. • The article went up on the USA Today …
Tango Icons for Thunderbird 2
Posted by on Thursday, June 7, 2007 in - 1 comment
With help from Nico Kaiser, the Tango icon theme has been released for Thunderbird 2. Looks great.
Tango Icons for Gtk-Stock
Posted by on Friday, March 30, 2007 in - 19 comments
Today the community behind the Tango project re-drew over 190 icons from the Gtk toolkit behind the Gnome Linux desktop. The old icons were showing their age and they now match the style defined by the Tango project. • I participated just enough to be able to pretend to have been helpful (or …
Remove Customization
Posted by on Wednesday, March 7, 2007 in - 6 comments
The new like-myspace-but-more-hip website Virb has a feature worth noting. Like many sites where you can create a page about yourself, you can do all kinds of visual customization to your page. On the same place (notably) on each page, though, there is a “remove customization” link. Clicking this …
Cairo Corners in Firefox 3
Posted by on Wednesday, December 13, 2006 in - 6 comments
The latest alpha releases of Firefox 3 use a library called “Cairo” for much of the graphics work (note: I don’t understand exactly what that means, but it doesn’t matter). • Thanks to this new graphics infrastructure, boxes with corners rounded by the pre-CSS 3 property border-radius are …
Windows Vista: Right on the Button(s)
Posted by on Sunday, November 12, 2006 in - 9 comments
After experimenting briefly with a beta version, I have determined the best new feature of Windows Vista. • I complained back in 2001 about the rough edges on large form buttons in Internet Explorer. After installing Internet Explorer 7 on Windows XP, this was one of the first things I tested. I …
Tango Theme for Firefox
Posted by on Thursday, November 9, 2006 in - 5 comments
Garrett LeSage and a group of other good people have completed a nice upgrade of the Tango theme for Firefox 2. The theme brings the icons from the Tango Desktop Project to Firefox along with many improvements in making Firefox look and feel more like a native application on Linux. • There are …