"So with each new version I tried to simplify the user interface, and dropped features & options that complicated the product. FeedDemon became more popular as a result, but you’d never know it if you visited my online support forums."

'Power users' know how to complain... sounds familiar to those of us who run Ubuntu...

Chording keyboards like stenographer's typewriters

The official history of Windows. As an Acorn Archimedes user, I refused to take Windows seriously until Windows 95.

"Today, PCs are in the kitchen, in the living room, at the coffee shop, in your purse, on the train, in the passenger seat of your car. Increasingly they are mobile, always connected, affordable, and beautiful."

Ubiquitous computing; but can you *really* have one interface for the whole dynamic range?

"See, all those little design decisions actually matter, and there were places were we could have stopped and said "no, don't do this.""

Via HN. Perhaps the fine grained options need to be discoverable? Simple surface, structure underneath? A personal computer in a few years will I suppose be a touch device the shape and size of a notebook with handwriting recognition. Bet it still runs a Bash prompt...

Aha, Canonical's real reason for developing the HUD exposed.

"To minimize processing, large parts of the file format exactly matched the data structures, so you could slam the bits right into memory. Unfortunately, this means that details of the 68000 compiler’s memory layout persist even in this new code, three processors on."

Bernstein is recoding Storyspace, and showing how the old machine layout lives on in the new code...

"But if it turns out that programming is like driving a car, and everyone can do it, and lots of people actually do it -- I would be very pleased. Because people who are making software for themselves are hard to push around. And they will demand real computers, not the limited kind ... that are becoming popular...."

Dave Winer, on the popularity of learning to program. I think 'end user' languages could become popular; R, puredata, macros, a subset of Javascript (perhaps using a library)

Gnome-shell on top of a command line Ubuntu install of 12.04 testing. In the Activities view you get duplicates of most of the application icons. The second icons are low resolution and obviously not designed for the shell. To get rid of them, you run Main Menu application, click on the Debian entry on the left hand side of the Main Menu window. You will see two folders on the right hand side, Applications and another one will be ticked. You have to remove those folders, unticking is no good.

April 1 joke that actually makes a few valid points by use of exaggeration.

These people have *printed out* all of the commit messages for an application, together with screenshots and so on. They have made it into a book, so the team can have a physical document of the development process. Wonderful stuff.

Via daringfireball

"This is where the designer looks at the scaled down version of the icon, for each resolution, and begins a sometimes painstaking process of pixel-perfecting the visuals."

Lots of work for things you just click on: maths here as well

"But the surprise is that the best possible design for many things, especially things perceived as work, requires no change in behavior for the person using the thing. These designs are so good they eliminate unnecessary interactivity: they just do what they’re supposed to do without bothering you. "

ready to hand

Usability testing set up used by twitter employees to test their Web interface. This is not a 'natural' user setting, so we are looking at people completing tasks suggested by the researcher under artificial conditions. Pretty big observer effects...

"With the exception of tactile feedback the experience is closing in on that of pen and paper – and for many, the benefits of digital malleability can outweigh the constraints of analogue tools."

A Mathematics Pad may be just around the corner...

Hibernation

"I installed it one evening on my regular Windows machine, and the next day set about attempting to do a full day's El Reg work, just as if I were on a Mac or PC."

This is going to be fun

"Basically, [some] people want [iPad] cases that (a) prop the screen up and (b) have a keyboard. The thing is, we already have a gadget that does these two things. It's called a laptop."

Most of the iPads I see in the wild (corporate types, the teenagers have phones) don't have extra bits, just a wallet style case. Interesting.

Bill Buxton's collection of input devices for computers assembled over a 30 year period. Be prepared to lose an hour or two when clicking on this link...

Discussion of a software issue (making paying for film content easy) by use of a physical analogy (design of loos in office buildings).

Englebart's report in a nicely formatted Web version. Annoying table of contents list that 'follows' you as you scroll. Readability version gets rid of the table of contents but also gets rid of the images.

"Ubuntu’s push towards Unity bothered me, but given how easy it is to replace the UI with something more helpful it was easy to ignore. On the other hand, the way they’re increasingly pushing proprietary software is harder to ignore."

Microsoft breaks backward compatibility... and more details about win8

Work around in post #5 and the original locator of the changed behaviour.

Narrowing of repertoire of behaviours caused by testing regime? 'First Hour' tests -> narrow 'monotonous' (Raskin) behaviour?

"Why don't computer calendars work like that? Because they're
governed by skeuomorphs --bits of design that are based on old-fashioned, physical objects. As Google Calendar shows, skeuomorphs are hobbling innovation by lashing designers to metaphors of the past. Unless we start weaning ourselves off these defunct models, we will fail to produce digital tools that harness what computers do best."

So how do you devise interfaces that are not suggested by existing objects?

A blog about making the help systems in software more, well, usable. The blog has been produced using Eastgate Systems' Tinderbox, and the last 10 years' worth of posts are held in the same xml format file. That's from Mac OS 9 to now. One file. The whole site.

Tinderbox is one of the few reason's I'd ever start using Mac OS again.

Scholarly work on how people ignore what the computer says when they are trying to work out how to do something.

Nicely illustrated essay on Apple's use of iOS features in Mac OS

Funny summary

I can now hibernate the PC from a menu. Giant leap forward.

Vim grammar of commands

"We noticed in testing that new users found the HUD faster than the old menu, as did power users who hadn’t memorised the shortcut for a given function."

Typing the name of menu commands into a special overlay window... sort of ubiquity for your computer

'for instance' is dangerous

Stuff about desktop metaphor from an Ubunty

Gruber thinks it's ok for the alarm function on a phone to sound when the phone is switched off. I think 'off' should mean 'off', not functioning, not taking power, not operational. The issue is one of control over the device and expected behaviours, not simply the New York Phil nightmare.

"The next major version of software for PC’s, Windows 8, will look a lot like Windows Phone, which Microsoft hopes will help it work better on tablet devices."

"Tog invented the concept of the mile high menu bar to explain why the menu bar on the Macintosh, which is always glued to the top of the physical screen, is so much easier to use than menu bars on Windows, which appear inside each application window. When you want to point to the File menu on Windows, you have a target about half an inch wide and a quarter of an inch high to acquire. You must move and position the mouse fairly precisely in both the vertical and the horizontal dimensions."

UI design walk through by an ex-microsoft programmer who worked on Office. Practical, aimed at programmers.

An example of an activity based interface running on Mac OS. Has a section looking at desktop metaphor.

"The problem, however, is that HCD has developed as a limited view of design. Instead of looking at a person's entire activity, it has primarily focused upon page-by-page analysis, screen-by-screen. As a result, sequences, interruptions, ill-defined goals — all the aspects of real activities, have been ignored."

"The purpose of this essay is to provoke thought, discussion, and reconsideration of some of the fundamental principles of Human-Centered Design. These principles, I suggest, can be helpful, misleading, or wrong. At times, they might even be harmful. Activity-Centered Design is superior."

Can a change in UI design be described as a bug if it breaks a commonly used work flow? Interesting dialogue, and some examples.

My own use of computers in general is not sufficiently intense for this to matter much to me, I spend most of my online time in a Web browser, slightly less in an office package, and a lot less in a photo editor, audio editor and a drawing program. Finally well back in the long tail is some programming using maths related languages (pyxplot and R).

The famous demo of a mouse to a hall of thousands of people with the strange sound caused by the microphone on his headset picking up the audience. This is a sequence of 9 short videos due to YouTube's limit of 10 minutes. This was 1968, so years AFTER sketchpad

"I like to try and review what the lessons are of the fun that I’ve been describing. There is an argument I can make that I have never done a days work in my life. I have always had the luxury of doing things that I find to be fun. And when the fun goes away, so do I." --Transcript of a talk and access to a video of the whole talk

Video demo of sketchpad with commentary by Alan Kay

"A display connected to a digital computer gives us a chance to gain familiarity with concepts not realizable in the physical world. It is a looking glass into a mathematical wonderland."