Acts of Volition

Doug Bowman and Adaptive Path have done great work with the Blogger redesign. The entire system feels simpler, more mature, and generally better. It is a pleasure to watch someone with such talent apply their craft.  •  Much has been and will be written about the new design. I agree with much of …

After getting some great feedback (and some really nice compliments) about my recent article, The Rise of Interface Elegance in Open Source Software, I was asked if it could be re-published at the O’Reilly Network site, OSDir.com.  •  I’ve always enjoyed O’Reilly publications, so it’s a cool … read more »

Open Source software is regularly criticized, often fairly, for lacking in ease-of-use and polish. When a developer wants a new feature - he can add it to the software, and if it gets checked-in by the project owners, it will be there for all to use. The obvious fault with this model is the now …

Following the updated artwork for the Mozilla Firefox browser, the Mozilla Visual Identity Team has finished new artwork for the Mozilla Thunderbird email client.  •  Again, the icon was based on sketches by Stephen DesRoches and ideas from the rest of the team and drawn by the talented Jon Hicks …

While on a recent trip to San Francisco, I took about 400 photos with my digital camera. A few of these were adjacent shots intented to be stitched together with panoramic photo software.  •  All kinds of software packages are available to stitch photos together into panoramas. My friend Nathan …

Here’s a prediction for you: At some point in the next few years Apple will return to the original colored-stripe Apple logo. It will be heralded as a great return to their “roots”.  •  Remember, you heard it here first.

Back in October of 2003, I wrote an article with a series of criticisms and recommendations for the branding and visual identity of the Mozilla software projects. Partially, I suspect, due to my cheap and somewhat inaccurate use of the “2.0” version in the title of the article, it got quite a bit …

For the last few months, I’ve been using Fedora, a Linux distribution, as my primary operating system along with the Gnome desktop environment. Linux as a desktop platform still has lots of weaknesses, but I’m generally pleased and am very much looking forward to the progress planned in the next …

I just came back from a grand tour of all establishments (that I know of) here in Charlottetown that sell car CD players. My sigfinicant other recently bought a used Toyota with a dud CD player. We like the factory default — it’s simple, it has a volume knob, it doesn’t light up live a …