Flyover Country

The single most beautiful thing I have ever borne witness to was a Sigur Ros concert in Seattle back in May 2006. There’s a point in one of their songs, entitled viðrar vel til loftárása, where the lead singer, Jónsi, pauses mid-lyric, holding his breath, as the audience waits with a sense of rapt attention [...]

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This month in ACM Queue, John Canny, a distinguished Professor of Engineering at UC Berkeley, poses the question “Is an HCI revolution just around the corner?” Although I generally find breathless prognostications of amazing possibilities Right Around the Corner to be a little overbearing, Professor Canny does a good job of providing a balanced perspective [...]

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I’m off to not-so-warm-and-sunny San Francisco until Tuesday night. I may have time and opportunity to post, but I’m not counting on it. See y’all Wednesday at the latest!
In the mean time, go take a look at the following blogs I read on a regular basis:
Wil Shipley
Cabel Sasser
[...]

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A fantastic blog entry on 37Signals’ Signal vs. Noise explores the complexity of creating effective, simple user experiences:
Sometimes there’s a lot more to simple than meets the eye. To the customer, this is just a few obvious words in a small box. But really, that’s the point.
The sheer amount of work that can [...]

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I found a video of the new start menu for KDE on the Web the other day. It’s actually pretty cool; it looks far more polished than previous versions I’ve seen, it’s resizable, and includes some nice integrated search functionality.
One complaint I have with it, though, is that the search field resides at [...]

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I just found a bolus of information on a concept phone produced by Synaptics, makers of touchpads everywhere and Pilotfish, a German/Taiwanese design firm. The concept incorporates some unique elements to enhance usability, such as automatically answering a call when the phone is held to the user’s cheek.
While Onyx features convenient and intuitive new commands [...]

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Every year, Apple celebrates the best-of-breed applications on their platform with the Apple Design Awards, which are presented at WWDC. This year’s winners include the fantastic text editor TextMate and the eBay power sellers’ tool, iSale. The awards are presented in the following categories:

Best Mac OS X Developer Tool - This category highlights innovative Mac [...]

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I recently got into a disagreement with the Director of Marketing for a Seattle startup that shall go unnamed. Her company recently went through a logo redesign project, and got a new default Powerpoint template out of the deal. I think it looks decent enough, except that the fonts selected for use in the Powerpoint [...]

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An editorial on MacObserver has an interesting round-up of newer UI metaphors seeing some traction, and some that are a bit futher out there. The author, John Kheit, links out to a ton of interesting content including videos, prototypes, and research papers discussing topics ranging from “wobbly-window UIs” to the much-further-out-there brain implant interface.
The current [...]

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Markus Mielke, a Program Manager on the Internet Explorer team, has published an exhaustively thorough list of changes to IE 7’s CSS support on the IE Team blog on MSDN.
Markus also makes mention of the IE 7 Readiness Toolkit, which provides:

Pointer to the latest publicly available build of Internet Explorer 7.
Developer Checklist including [...]

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