Software As She’s Developed

Jeff Attwood encourages developers to eat their own dogfood: I’ve found that much of the best software is the best because the programmers are the users, too. It is UsWare. It behooves software developers to understand users, to walk a mile in their shoes. If we can bridge the gap between users and ourselves– even if only […]

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It’s no secret that clipboards in all the major platforms suck, hence any number of third-party apps to do things like save multiple buffers (like Vi did in the mid-80s). There’s also initiatives like Ray Ozzie and MS’s Live Clipboard for transferring data between web apps and the like. For many years, Sony researchers have […]

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Poking fun at hollywood depictions of computing is an old favourite on the net - compilations of dumb computing scenes outshadow even mentions of anomalies in the star trek universe. Meet The Hollywood Operating System, you know it well: The Hollywood operating system, or Hollywood OS, refers to any fictional computer operating system clichéd in movies […]

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I’m constantly amazed at the amount of documentation people are inclined to create without including a single example. Man pages that devote pages worth of command-line options, flags, grammar, caveats, historical anecdotes, and NOT A SINGLE EXAMPLE. Textbooks that devote pages to a particular API, then expose it all in one monolithic program. Countless reference documentation on HTML […]

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Sound Thinking Where’s that sound coming from? An app inside my box? Is it ITunes on the desktop Or YouTube in the ‘Fox? A Skyper shouting at me? Or Pandora playing faves? Media Player come to life? Hmmm … Real with recent saves? A podcast I’m preparing? A vidcast made for nerds? Nope, it seems to be this picture, It says a thousand words! Huh? I started writing the […]

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Setting up a new Windows PC today and not loving the browser warnings. The messages, as I recall them: “You are about to submit the form. It’s dangerous.”, “You’re going to leave the page. It’s dangerous.”, “This page is encrypted. It’s dangerous.”, “This page is not encrypted. It’s dangerous.”, “This is H20. It’s dangerous.” So my question […]

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Someone sent Don Norman a critique implying that a machine was more usable because it contained only one button. His response is interesting: Nice story, but wrong. Fewer buttons do not necessarily mean easier use … When assessing simplicity, don’t get all hung up on the number of buttons. Look at the whole picture: more is […]

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‘Tis Goud reports from Mix ‘06, Microsoft’s web bash currently happening in Vegas. One of the presentations focused on the most important thing about Ajax: Usability. The session started with referencing two sites with information on: Usabillity Patterns, Michael Mahemoff Usabillity Guidelines, Thomas Baekdal Thomas’s guidelines were the first […]

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How long until wikipedia becomes a honeypot? “Who wants to be a millionaire” contestant is struggling to answer the question, “What year did the Fonz jump the shark?”, and calls out to Lifeline Buddy. Back in 2005, Lifeline Buddy would have googled for the answer. But this is 2007, and “wiki” is now a household name […]

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Matt @ 37Signals discusses new countdowns being used at pedestrian crossings (crosswalks). Did you ever count how many redundant messages are available at a pedestrian crossing? Good, let’s be sad together and count them, then. At a workshop one time, various attendees from different countries came up with a list of cues, something like the […]

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