Posts Tagged: Usability & Design
Firefox 2
Posted by on Tuesday, October 24, 2006 in - 7 comments
Since you are on the internet right now (admit it, you are), you are probably aware that Firefox 2 has been released. My congratulations to all involved. While I was much less involved in the visual design this time around, it was still a pleasure to have been involved at all. • The Mozilla.com …
On Bullets
Posted by on Tuesday, September 19, 2006 in - 1 comment
Me: “bullet lists are awesome” • Me: “they are the new paragraph” • Friend: “they take up so much space with so few words”
Gaim Needs You
Posted by on Monday, September 18, 2006 in - 3 comments
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 …
Cable Not Included
Posted by on Tuesday, September 5, 2006 in - 4 comments
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 …
How to tell if your web-mail system is any good
Posted by on Wednesday, April 19, 2006 in - 12 comments
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 …
CNN/Netscape Synergies
Posted by on Thursday, January 19, 2006 in - 14 comments
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 …
Announcing the Tango Project: Making Open-Source Software Beautiful
Posted by on Monday, October 10, 2005 in - 62 comments
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 …
Fedora Logo Development Process
Posted by on Thursday, September 15, 2005 in - 16 comments
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 …
Using MediaWiki to Build a “normal” Website
Posted by on Friday, September 9, 2005 in - 22 comments
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 …
Thoughts on Tabs and Windows
Posted by on Wednesday, May 18, 2005 in - 16 comments
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 …