Microsoft has ditched Aero Glass for the Windows 8 desktop.

Git has plenty of great features. Using all of them can be difficult if you only have your command line at hand. That's why we built Tower.

Jason is a JSON viewer & editor for Mac OS X. It can open local documents as well as download JSON data via HTTP and, in case of invalid data, an error message is presented and the line containing the error is highlighted.

Xubuntu and Xfce is fine, but it's still a regression from gnome2 in allot of ways. It doesn't group windows on the panel as well as gnome 2 does. You lose allot of the nice easy features from gnome2 for doing things like using shared files or printers from windows computers. The panel is allot less flexible and harder to configure. There are also less panel applets available. Mouse-button back doesn't work in several parts of the interface. I'm sure there are workarounds for many of these issues but for an out of the box experience it is still a regression.

Minimalistic Text is a widget app that displays information in a minimalistic way.
It can be configured to display time, date, battery and weather information. The layout of the widget is highly customizable through the layout editor. Minimalistic Text is heavily inspired by BattStat and Clockr but adds extreme flexibility.

I have a pathological use of browser tabs: I use a lot of them. A lot is probably an understatement. We could say I use them as bookmarks of things I need to track. A couple weeks ago, I was saying I had around two hundred tabs opened. I now actually have much more. It affected startup until I discovered that setting the browser.sessionstore.max_concurrent_tabs pref to 0 was making things much better by only loading tabs when they are selected. This preference has/will become browser.sessionstore.restore_on_demand. However, since I only start my main browser once a day, while other applications start and while I begin to read email, I hadn’t noticed that this was still heavily affecting startup time: about:startup tells me reaching the sessionRestored state takes seven seconds, even on a warm startup. It also affects memory usage, because even when tabs are only loaded on demand, there is a quite big overhead for each tab. [ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2936369 ]

Simplify your design and editorial workflow Raskin is the perfect tool for designers or anyone that handles artwork on the Mac. Because it presents all your documents visually, you won’t waste time hunting for stuff and you’ll have more time to do what you do best. [ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2676296 ]

jQuery UI provides abstractions for low-level interaction and animation, advanced effects and high-level, themeable widgets, built on top of the jQuery JavaScript Library, that you can use to build highly interactive web applications.

Maqetta is an open source project that provides WYSIWYG visual authoring of HTML5 user interfaces. The Maqetta application itself is authored in HTML, and therefore runs in the browser without requiring additional plugins or downloads.

The OS X Menubar is that light-grey thing stuck to the upper edge of the screen. It’s stationary (with the exception for “fullscreen” modes) and thus is always visible. The Menubar is one of the core concepts of OS X’s UX which I really appreciate and which makes it hard to use OS'es which have one menu bar for each window.

Google is working on a “major” overhaul of its Chrome browser user interface (UI). Among the options on the table is the elimination of the URL bar, which could be the most significant UI change to the web browser since its invention. Another feature that appears to be already signed off is the support of multiple user profiles that can be used in parallel. [ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2242721 ]

Inspired by numerous tabs-on-the-side extensions (in particular Tree Tabs by Piro-san), hall-way conversations, and Oliver Reichenstein’s recent blog post, we’ve been thinking more about the possibilities and ramifications of putting “tabs” on the side of the browser.

Helvetireader is a hosted user stylesheet for Google Reader served via a user-script. It aims to make the interface a clean, minimal experience where you're not assaulted by an array of colours, social features and buttons (using Shortcuts instead). It's designed for people who just read the latest entries in expanded view without all the other gubbins.

Courier allows you to share files, images, photos, movies, and more with all your favourite online services - including Flickr and Facebook. Create an Envelope; drag on the stamps for the services you want to send files to; then just drag and drop on the files you want to deliver! Whether you're uploading files to one destination or three, Courier can handle it. Courier has a stunningly simple interface that hides all the unnecessary complexities of uploading your files to the internet, and has been built from the ground-up for Mac OS X Snow Leopard.

The Pencil Project's unique mission is to build a free and opensource tool for making diagrams and GUI prototyping that everyone can use.

About a month ago, I tweeted a link to a teaser video that showed off an Android icon generation tool I was building. The goal of the tool was to simplify Android icon creation for developers that don’t have access to design resources. Today, I’m happy to make this and a few other tools available as part of the new Android UI Utilities open source project. Included are the Android Asset Studio, a set of Android UI prototyping stencils for the very awesome Pencil GUI prototyping software, and some Photoshop icon templates.

For some time now I was looking for a simple but comfortable backup tool for Windows. Finally I found rsync. The only but profound drawback was the lack of a GUI interface. Of course there are a lot of GUI front ends but none of them met my needs.

VidCoder is a DVD ripping and video transcoding application for Windows. It uses HandBrake as its encoding engine.

Calling directly into the HandBrake library gives it a more rich UI than the official HandBrake Windows GUI.

This analysis assumes that if any of the five testers identifies an issue, it's an actual usability problem that needs to be addressed. Or, in other words, it ignores the fact that users tend to point out scads of issues that are problems for themselves and no one else. Or, at best, are problems for which no better design alternative solution exists. Sometimes you just can't please 100% of the people 100% of the time, so you gotta go with what pisses off the fewest people least often.

Flux is an advanced Web design application, capable of creating stunning sites from scratch. Flux isn't a template based solution, it's a creative design environment.

DMG Canvas builds disk images from template documents that you create. Simply design your disk image's appearance using the graphical editor and click Build. Each time you release a new version of your disk image, simply click Build again and DMG Canvas will pull together all

of the latest versions of your files. DMG Canvas also allows you to specify the license agreements displayed when the disk image is mounted, and use localized versions for non-English end users.

This app makes working with LESS a snap by turning it into a graphical interface.

Sikuli is a visual technology to search and automate graphical user interfaces (GUI) using images (screenshots). The first release of Sikuli contains Sikuli Script, a visual scripting API for Jython, and Sikuli IDE, an integrated development environment for writing visual scripts with screenshots easily. Sikuli Script automates anything you see on the screen without internal API's support. You can programmatically control a web page, a desktop application running on Windows/Linux/Mac OS X, or even an iphone application running in an emulator.

Graphical user interfaces are full of symbols. Symbols need to be reduced to their essence. This helps avoid cluttering the user interface with meaningless distractions, and makes it easier for people to «read» the symbol and figure out the meaning of an interface element. Realistic details can get in the way of what you’re trying to communicate to your users.

Irssix is a Free (GPL) irc client for Mac OS X. It is based on the fabulous unix irc client Irssi.

With regard to Cmd-H, Photoshop's keyboard shortcut editor has long made it possible to assign Cmd-H to hiding the app. Doing so takes just a few seconds, yet many people are unaware of this or unwilling to invest the time. Therefore our plan is that in the future, the dialog you see above will pop up once (on Mac only) the first time you hit Cmd-H, asking which behavior you prefer. Special thanks to John Gruber (who independently suggested this solution) for offering the team some timely words of encouragement.

The results of a new study show that you could get serious productivity gains by disabling visual alerts on incoming email, tweets, instant messages and the like. This isn't a big surprise I'm sure -- companies have been stamping down on 'rampant email reading' throughout the work day for a while now -- but what is surprising is just how much a single alert window can throw you off-track. It's not simply a linear relationship: when you take 5 seconds to look at a notification window, you lose more than 5 seconds of work time. Another study recently found that, after reading an email, it takes users 64 seconds to return to a normal work rate. The researcher behind the new study, Helen Hodgetts, suggests that we use auditory indicators instead -- they can be registered by your brain while you work, but don't pull you away from what you're currently working on.

In spite of some of the reaction to it, I find Google Wave to be surprisingly useful. One thing I don’t really understand, though, is its scrollbars. They behave quite differently from regular scrollbars, and I can’t discern any overwhelming advantages of Google’s implementation. It seems I’m not alone. The unofficial Google Wave manual deems it necessary to explain how the scrollbars work. Google’s own support site for Wave has an entry titled What’s the deal with the scrollbar?, Google has a video explaining the scrollbars, and there’s even a Chrome extension which replaces Google’s scrollbars with native scrollbars.

Here it is: my crazy summer project to reinvent desktop human-computer interaction. This video examines the benefits and limitations inherent in current mouse-based and window-oriented interfaces, the problems facing other potential solutions, and visualizes my proposal for a completely new way of interacting with desktop computers.

Everything is hidden but the tabs, but is all accessible via the default keyboard shortcuts. ⌘-T opens and selects a new, empty tab; ⌘-L shows and selects the location bar; I type something in there and hit return; the location bar hides again and the tab loads the URL I entered (or search term, in the Google box). My most-visited sites are in the bookmarks bar, all reachable via ⌘-(1-9), and Facebook is my homepage (⌘-Shift-H). Shortwave is on ⌘-5 though I haven’t gotten used to using that yet.

Watch Android engineers demonstrate that applications on Android exist without borders. Apps on Android can access core mobile device functionality through standard APIs. Through intents, apps can announce their capabilities for other apps to use.

GitX is a git GUI made for Mac OS X. It currently features a history viewer much like gitk and a commit GUI like git gui. But then in silky smooth OS X style!

Yes, there are JavaScript libraries that allow you to create drag-and-drop interfaces within the browser, but that’s not what we’re talking about. Rather, HTML5 offers the holy grail — drag a file from your desktop straight to a browser window and it will magically upload. Of course, for developers, nothing is every that easy. The drag-and-drop portion of the HTML5 spec is very new, incomplete and at the moment, really only works in a very limited form in Firefox 3.5 and Safari nightly builds. But that doesn’t mean people are starting to experiment with it. Leslie Orchard of Mozilla recently posted a very nice tutorial that will walk you through the basics of the HTML5 drag-and-drop API and help you create a little demo app (another nice working demo can be found over at The CSS Ninja).

Allows you to view and manage your feed subscriptions of your Google Reader account on Mac OS X.

Read your newsfeeds, manage them in folders, tag them, and much more – all in sync with your Google Reader account.

The custom File Info panel for XMP metadata allows you to define, create, and manage custom metadata properties using standard Adobe applications. You can do this by creating a Custom Panel Description file, and placing it in a common location referenced by Adobe applications that support this feature. You can also supply localization dictionary files to localize the contents of your Custom Panel Description files. The resulting custom dialog panel is seen by users when they select the File Info menu option.

The File Info panel allows you to support paths to metadata properties that are not defined in default or other standard XMP schemas, but are needed for your application, company, or industry. By using XMP for that metadata, you take advantage of the potential of XMP for interchange and participation in asset management systems, while providing the ability to use standard Adobe applications to manage it.

Show tabs like a tree.

Supports to hide your Mainmenu Toolbar automatically,
you can press the ALT key to show it temporarily.

A visual and spatial way to organize temporary files.

Just another GUI for diskutil to mount / unmount volumes

Hewlett Packard has released a custom version of Ubuntu Linux designed for netbooks. For the HP Mini 1000 Mi Edition, to be exact. Under the hood, the operating system is based on Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron. That means it can run pretty much any application that runs on Ubuntu including OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird and Pidgin. In fact, it comes preloaded with all of those applications plus a few more. It's also fairly easy to install other Linux staples like image editor GIMP. But what makes the Mi Edition software stand out is the graphical user interface which looks nothing like Ubuntu or even Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

Download Bwana and drop it into your applications folder. Then, without even running it, you can start looking for man pages using your browser right away. Just type "man:" followed by the man page you're looking for into your browser's URL field. Hit enter and let Bwana do the rest.

ManOpen is a MacOS X GUI application for viewing Unix manual pages, which are the standard documentation for Unix command line programs, programmer libraries, and other system information. It can open files directly or be given titles, in which case it will display the output from the `man' command-line program. An apropos interface is also provided, which is basically a quick-and-dirty search of the man page databases. Services are provided to other applications to open selected files/titles or do apropos searches using the selected text.

Me moaning about shoddy UI inconsistencies and mistakes in Adobe products and how they get shitter with every release and especially since they took on Macromedia's idiotic philosophies.

To celebrate the release of our new O’Reilly book, “Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions”, I wanted to share the full set of principles and patterns I use for RIA design. These concepts are central to enterprise application and web productivity application design.

Windows 7 with classic theme. Calculator and Wordpad looks like crap deluxe. Not promising.

Adobe Configurator, a new utility that's due to ship on Adobe Labs around the end of the month, is a key part of our strategy. Configurator makes it easy to snap together your own Photoshop panels (a.k.a. palettes). Think of Configurator as a box of Legos--an app that lets you drag and drop all the tools and menu items in Photoshop, call actions & scripts, and add widgets (images, videos, other SWFs, etc.). I've posted a 10-minute demo on Russell Brown's site. (If you don't have QuickTime installed, you can watch it on YouTube as well, though the compression quality there is pretty abysmal.)

The problem is that while the underlying framework works well enough to provide base functionality, the experience of using it on a Mac is dreadful. Even very basic platform interface elements have not been ported — menus are attached to the window rather than the typical toolbar along the top of the screen. We aren’t going to argue about which is the better UI paradigm, but a true port should at least use the conventions of the platform.

Here you can find the GTK+ Framework ready to download and install on your Mac OS X system. Then you are all set for developing GTK+ applications on your Mac.

Although I’ve been a Windows power user for years, the transition to Mac couldn’t have been easier and more pleasant. I don’t want to turn this article into some endless rambling about how great Mac is, but as the user of both systems I can speak from my own experience quite objectively. Let’s take a look at some of the spots where Apple really has done it better in terms of user interface and usability.

It aims to evolve the existing functionality of Twitter by taking an abundance of information i.e twitter feeds, and breaking it down into more manageable bite sized pieces.

iLeopard is a free theme for Mac OS X that looks gives the look and feel of iTunes 7 to all the interface.

A fork of the apparently defunct CocoaMySQL project. The goal of Shift is to enhance upon the CocoaMySQL project and provide Mac OS X users with a completely free and elegant way to handle their MySQL databases.

The hard part of learning Unix is memorizing command names as unfathomable as Stonehenge’s origin. I still have to ask my co-workers what flags are needed for untaring a gzipped file. “tar -xfvz”. How could I forget?

The history of user interfaces can be very briefly summarized into two distinct eras: the command line, followed by the graphical user interface. Interactions on the command line are very fast, but the set of possible commands is not discoverable.

An OS X application (Leopard only!) to search faster and better using Spotlight.

Jens is working on a new style engine for Qt that can leverage the user's default GTK+ theme. This will make it possible for Qt applications to optionally share the GNOME look and feel when they are running in the GNOME desktop environment.

This time around, I'm going to highlight Pashua, a freeware tool which allows you to have richer Mac windows for setting options, popup menus, finding files, checkboxes, and more.

Scientists often have traditional UNIX tools, and this is one way to handle background tasks which require little user interaction. What if you need a bit more interaction?

This tutorial series will look at a variety of options to make native applications for CLI programs, shell scripts, Perl, Python, Ruby you might run from the terminal. This week's installment looks at simple drag-and-drop launchers.

Exposé for Windows Vista.

It looks like Mark Hamburg, an Adobe Systems Photoshop and Lightroom programming guru, will be leading work to give Microsoft Windows a better user interface.

The confusion stems from the fact that focus-follows-mouse comes in not one, but two, yes that's right, two yummy flavors.

Man viewer is a easy to use program to view the man pages that are installed on the current system. The user can search and filter the man pages based on name and section. The user can also export the man page to plain text and styled PostScript.

Apple recently updated their HIG to include the way the visual theme Aqua has evolved in Apple's latest operating system, OS X 10.5 Leopard. This is the first update since 2006. Lets take a look at how this affects icon designers.

Desktop environment for Windows. Our goal is to develop a desktop experience that increases productivity and advances current technology standards. With a focus on stability, performance, and productivity, Cairo is sure to turn a few heads.

An IPFW firewall frontend for Mac OS X with a easy interface and many options. Features include dynamic rules, bandwidth management, NAT configuration and port redirection, pre-defined rule sets and a wizard for easy configuration. You can also watch logs

defaults write -g AppleAntiAliasingThreshold 8 | defaults write CoreGraphics CGFontDisableAntialiasing NO | The AppleAntiAliasingThreshold is the smallest font you want to have Anti-Aliasing.

Tired of the regular Mac OS 10.5 Leopard dock? So were we. Finally, a place where you can download and submit your own docks. And more.

Get iTunes style scrollbars in Mac OS X 10.5. Awesome!!

OpaqueMenuBar is a tool for Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" to make the menu bar non-transparent, so you cannot see through it any more.

Clutch is a menu item application that provides a web interface for Transmission daemon the bittorrent Client. Using AJAX, and HTML it allows the user to manage torrents remotely over the internet.

Jem is an easy to use GUI front-end for the synergy client.