The coder of Balsamiq prototyping software has a great article about the dilemmas that a small dev shop faces when its product starts to sell. Interesting read for those who have the goal of writing and selling their own software.
Seek Attention is a jquery plugin will dim everything but the selected element, thus bringing the selected element to the user’s attention. This is a cool idea and very effective. Go check it out!
Fitt’s Law says that the larger a target is, the easier it is to click on (duh).
This jquery plugin will make a link’s container element clickable, thus making the links target size much larger and easier to click. Super cool and easy to implement. Go check it out!
I have worked on many large software projects during my career, and unsurprisingly the quality of the product’s design is directly related to the quality of the design process. Yet so few companies actually look at their design process; they think that hiring a designer is all they need. Yet it is so much more than that.
The guy who created T9 input for mobile phones has come up with w novel method for text input for touch screens. The technique is very similar to Bill Buxton’s “marking “menus”; you draw out the word you want to spell on the screen in a continuous motion; of course you hit letters that are not in the word, but the software predicts what word you intended. Watch the video and it will make sense instantly.
Much like French cinema in the 60s, there is a “new wave” going on in web-based application development right now.
When I attended the iPhone dev camp here in Austin, one of things that I learned was that Cocoa had MVC concepts built right in to the language. This approach works very well for interfaces, and this has not gone un-noticed by a few web developers.
Sproutcore and Cappucino are very Cocoa-like languages that run completely in the browser and offer a very desktop-like experience in the browser without Flash or Silverlight. Apple used Sproutcore for Mobile Me and 280 North used Cappucino for 280 Slides, which is a very nice Powerpoint/Keynote app for the browser.
Both of these frameworks offer near desktop-like performance and allow apps to run on/offline. I fully expect to see a lot more apps built on these in the near future. The hard part is that programmers are going to have to learn new concepts to make the most of these new environments; they are a pretty big change from doing an app in a framework like Rails.
In this video, Al Dblasi (ex-Apple guy) gives a complete rundown of the Lisa hardware and software. What is super interesting is that he worked for Apple when the Lisa came out and is intimately familiar with the history and technology of the device. For those who may not be familiar with it, the Lisa was the forerunner of the Mac.
for UI design it gets super interesting about 9 minutes in.
I have to admit that I am a sucker for a well designed admin interface. This article at nemetral.net links to 10 great admin interfaces.
I am curious what apps you guys think are examples of great design… ones that not only look great, but are highly functional and joyful to use. The type of app you open for the first time and things just seem to make sense.
To start things off, here are a few of my favorites:
Snagit: Screen capture for Windows
I love this app. I don’t have to use it very often, but when I do I can always figure it out right away and it does exactly what I need.
The great folks over at the Yahoo have a TERRIFIC set of stencils for UI design. They cover the following topics:
* Ad Units
* Calendars
* Carousels
* Charts and Tables
* UI Controls
* Form Elements
* Grids
* Menus and Buttons
* Mobile – General
* Mobile – iPhone
* Navigation and Pagination
* OS Elements
* Placeholder Text
* Screen Resolutions
* Tabs
* Windows and Containers
They are available in Omnigraffle, Visio and PNG format, so
go get them at the yahoo developer site