"We redesigned the BART ticket kiosk. Our goal was to improve the user interface software within the limitations of the existing 8-button, ATM-style physical interface. We believe our design offers major usability advantages, especially for infrequent riders." Interesting.

Well, there's a surprise. Boris Johnson finally gets wind of the minor press flap over the Tube map reworking, and blows a fuse. "I hope Londoners will imagine the Thames in place until it reappears on the maps, and will not forget their beautiful river."

"There is also the question of when and why a tag evolves in to being a first class data type and whether that’s actually reflected in how people use tags. Dates are one example, and geotags another. Each are uniquely indexed in the Flickr database and, still, people continue to add both as tags on their photos. The short answer, of course, is that it’s usually just easier to type 2008 or 2009 than to try and remember a specialized syntax for doing searches."

This is very funny. I could pull out huge chunks of it as quotes, but I don't think I could stay in the 1000 character limit, and anyway, the whole thing - on Wolfram Alpha, interfaces, usability, AI, compsci, and MySpace - is worth reading.

As alluded to by John Siracusa, the cheat-sheet for controlling a 3rd gen iPod Shuffle. Triple click and hold? For something that was a physical button on the previous generations? I suppose that's some sort of progress...

Hmm. "of all the viral loops that Facebook benefits from, its Photos app might have the largest viral loop of all built into it. Whenever one of your friends tags a photo with your name, you get an email. This single feature turns a solitary chore [into] a powerful form of communication" Personally, I can't imagine using FB, but I can see why this would work (especially as most people, oddly, like photos of other people, as opposed to, say, skyscrapers or trains). (The number of people using Photobucket scares me too.)

As Fraser said on Twitter, "they made this iPhoto stuff for Facebook and jammed the Flickr data model into it, square pegs be damned". A good overview of the failings in the Flickr integration (or lack of it).

A PDF thesis (full title: "Automatic Layout Of Metro Maps Using Multicriteria Optimisation") on using Java and graph theory to lay out rail networks using Beck-esque metro map principles. According to the research, the automatic maps were preferable to geographic and published ones. No London or NY (ie really big) networks, though.

Lots of interesting stuff in here, both about the iPhone's UI metaphors, and also pricing responses on the App Store.

So I'm late to this party, and it slightly states the obvious, but sometimes the obvious needs to be stated.

It's nice to know other people share my bugbears, even after all this time of Windows incomers diluting the Mac-ishness of the UI. I wish he'd expanded his point about Safari (which I still use without tabs on the Mac, damnit).

Oh please let this work. Includes a plist change, so you might need to repeat that after an update, but then that's only to show the icon in the Dock and task switcher.

Interesting piece on the fact that post-Panamax container shipping into New York / New Jersey might be stopped by the Bayonne Bridge, one of the more obscure NY bridges (over the delightfully named Kill Van Kull).

I hate this thing, and things like it. If you only use one browser with one set of cookies that never get lost, fine. If you don't, and haven't got browser sync, you'll see the "first time" message over and over and over again. Bah.

Even the relatively public-transport-friendly SF has rubbish bus signage. I was shocked at how poor it was in St Louis, but I did take a few buses in NY without mishap, so they must vaguely work. Not as good as London's, mind.

From Zeldman's comments, discussing the thinking behind a well-designed personal deeply aggregated site, pulling content from the usual suspects as well. Another example of verb-based URL design on a content site, too.

Sure, ok, stop doing this. But please do offer different content in different feeds (in the same format) if it makes sense to. I do, anyway, and I wish others would too (cf horizontal aggregation rants passim).

A fantastic piece about lifts, including phrases like "arrival immediate prediction lantern", "body ellipse" and "Improved Hoisting Apparatus", hung around the tale of Nicholas White, stuck in one for 41 hours. Lifts sound a lot like tube trains.

"We decided [to] run Pogo on a [PC] with two 3GHz CPUs, 4GB of RAM [and] 512MB of VRAM. From here, we were finally able to use Pogo enough to actually find out how well it works" This for a *web* *browser*.

It's this sort of thing that persuades me I'm right to reject tabbed interfaces. (Yes, even now, when Terminal has tabs, I don't use them. Not on the Mac, anyway. Windows is another matter.)

"Improved user experience" or "massive privacy invasion"? What will the web 2.0 koolaid commenters say? Bet now!

I thought this was worth noting, given it vaguely relates to the Coding Horror on sorting I posted earlier. Reaction to the change seems to be generally hostile.

A good piece on the friendlyness of natural sort vs ascibetical sort. I'm amazed anyone defends the latter, but they do. If EBCDIC had won, would they defend numbers after letters (as opposed to ASCII, which is the other way round)?

Tim O'Reilly expects devices to have touch screens, now he's used the iPhone. Funnily enough, I know an 18 month old who's the same.

Simon Batistoni on Facebook, and the fact that if you "leave" it freezes your social network and still, amazingly, offers to send you emails anyway. Of course, the truly hardcore never join, but who like that is left?

A wonderful rant about the state of music on the web, on the desktop, and in online stores, from one of the people behind Winamp, Gnutella and Yahoo's online store. Second thing I've seen online recently comparing iTunes to a spreadsheet. Hm.

"If you define a preference as a settings modification initiated by the user, then trashing these files as a troubleshooting strategy seems fundamentally disrespectful of the the time that users spend customizing their software."

OK, so everyone's posted this by now, but I liked the failed future feel of bits of it. Like "WriteRoom allows me to turn my whizzy modern computer into my old Brother typewriter and its six-line LCD. Except for the Live Word Count."

I hadn't noticed anyone else complaining about international number support, but I suppose we shouldn't be too surprised at UScentricity.

As a (very) occasional scripting user, both consistency and penetration (ie, making sure app developers want to write scripting interfaces) would be very welcome. The infrastructure's there, and it's good, but I want it to thrive, rather than merely survi

I hate the sidebar. It's vaguely useful if you're on a My Maps page or reading directions, but it really should go away if you tell it to.

Forensics on the Google Updater. I agree with the TUAW piece Gruber linked to earlier today: vendor-specific meta-updaters suck. Google is joing Adobe in, if not evil, at least grubby territory.

Gruber's fighting talk after a comment about Mac vs Windows security in a Vista release interview, "It’s either an angry, slanderous lie, or Bill Gates is an uninformed jackass". More good stuff further therein.

Typically mixed bag. For example: calling Apple UI consistency in Safari, Mail, iTunes - GOOD. Giving airtime to someone who hasn't discovered 'enter' for rename yet - BAD.

Might be usably good, but aesthetically it's awful. Is that Times New Roman? Where's New Johnston? Sellotape?? This thing annoys me every time I see it. Maybe I just hate tourists. STAND. ON. THE. RIGHT. DUMBASS.

via Gruber, who shares Skelton's misunderstanding- these options are all useful, but they don't belong on the Apple menu, they belong in the Shut Down dialog. Well, that's where I use them, anyway. Why the choice?

Daniel Jalkut responds to the talk by John Gruber at C4[0] about the HIG. Hopefully there will be a Daring Fireball piece, either reproducing the talk in article form, responding to this (and the other comment), or both.

Commentary on OS choice, Mark Pilgrim's reverse-switch and the Mac community's response to it.

The usual mix of idiotic bleating (no, you really don't need HDD lights, or an uninstall facility; your emails chew more inodes and disk space than the odd prefs file) and sensible points (Apple Mail sucks, window styles are inconsistent)

Detailed, scathing, amusing and a wonderful last paragraph