Simon throws together a handy snippets which allows for orderable inlines using drag and drop (via jQuery) in the Django admin. Sweet. Visit site »
The latest from the amazing Aza Raskin, Ubiquity for Firefox is sort of a Quicksilver for your browser. Definitely cool stuff. Visit site »
Apparently is prototyping elements day on jeffcroft.com. Here’s an awesome-looking PSD full of iPhone widgets. Via Wilson. Visit site »
Small flexible magnets with GUI widgets on them, designed for use while prootyping on a whiteboard. Freaking great idea. Via J.B.. Visit site »
I’m not really sure I like the Coverflow-style UI CNN.com is using for this, but I like the concept, as it solves one of my longest-standing complaints about online news. As a person who doesn’t really keep up on news day-to-day, I often jump into a story several days in (when something gets really big, instead of at the very beginning). The problem I often have is that the articles I find at that point are all about the latest developments in the story, and often assume I already know how it all started and what has happened to date. This “backstory” feature attacks that problem by providing a chronological UI to all the stories related to a particular current event. It works, but I personally would rather just see a chronological list of bullet points that catches me up without all the glitz. Still, I’m happy to see someone trying to address the problem. Visit site »
In response to the question, “is an interface designer a salesman?,” Khoi answers affirmatively, saying, “interface is marketing, and unavoidably so.” He goes on with a very intelligent and thought-provoking piece that includes the following:
If you think about marketing as a way of communicating the benefits of a designed product to users, then it’s clear to me at least that good interfaces do that. To make an interface ‘user friendly’ is to communicate the value of features or content to a user, and to do so in as expedient and succinct a fashion as possible. At a low level, expressing functionality as a tab, or providing a summarized view of complex information, or positioning like features in close proximity to one another — or any number of nuanced decisions that designers make — is very much about marketing that functionality to users.
I think sometimes designers get a little too full of themselves, thinking of their work as “art,” and forgetting that, in almost all cases, we’re doing jobs for commercial clients whose end game is to make money. Ultimately, all designers are salesmen, no matter how many levels of abstraction away from the actual transaction we sit.
As a sidenote, Khoi’s writing really shines in this piece. Visit site »
Michael Heilemann says that pagination widgets should always point left for older stuff. I’m not sure I agree — but I totally se his point. It’s a tricky thing to solve with things like blogs, as they’re naturally in reverse chronological order. I know I’m not consistent about it; I tend to just do what feels right at the time.
To illustrate the problem, consider two scenarios: a blog has “next” and “previous” page links. I would say “next” should pointing to the right, so left is newer stuff. Now, a daily archive page shows all the content posted on one day, and has links to “next day” and “previous day”. I would say “next day” should be on the right, meaning left is older stuff. Clearly, this results in inconsistent interfaces (in one scenario, older stuff is to the right, and in the other, older stuff is to the left). What do you think? Should this be consistent? Visit site »
Gizmodo has some walkthrough videos of the Sprint Instinct, the company’s “iPhone Killer.” In watching them, I definitely feel like this is probably the second-best thing to an iPhone out there, UI-wise. It doesn’t look quite as simple, elegant, and sexy as the iPhone, but it is a pretty well-done copycat. And, it does have a few features the iPhone doesn’t (3G, GPS, text-to-speech). I don’t think it’s an iPhone killer, but it’s probably the closest thing to one made thus far. I wouldn’t blame a Sprint customer for buying this guy instead of paying $200 to switch to AT&T. Visit site »
My good buddy Boltron has a great little piece in the latest ALA about writing a style guide for interface design. Style guides are commonly used for more overarching brand guidelines, but much less commonly address interface design for digital products — which is a shame, because they’re really very appropriate for many organizations, especially larger ones who have several different teams doing this kind of work (like, oh, I dunno…the company Jina works for). Visit site »
Gruber compares web clients for Twitter on the iPhone. Personally, I think Thincloud is pretty good (and my favorite of the bunch), but it still hasn’t been enough to make me give up Twitter over SMS. Gruber says Twitter over SMS is too annoying — I disagree. I find it to be perfect. It has all the feature John wants, works well, and has the most “iPhoney” interface of all.
All that having been said, I hope (and suspect) someone will create a killer native iPhone app for release after iPhone 2.0 is out. Visit site »
My good friend Sarah Harrison (aka sourjayne) has started a blog about her UX research and thoughts. Good stuff so far. Check it out! Visit site »
Silverback, from our friends at Clearleft, is a really nice new Mac app for usability testing that makes uses of Macs’ built in iSight, the Apple Remote, and more. It’s a simple app, but it’s extremely well-designed (as you’d expect from Clearleft!), and appears to do what it does very elegantly. If you do usability testing with live subjects, you really should check it out. Also noteworthy to an animals lover like me: Clearleft is donating 10% of the profits to saving the gorillas. Awesome. Visit site »
Google’s Andriod mobile phone UI is heavily inspired by the iPhone, but not so much so that I’d call it a rip off. It’s not as sexy as the iPhone’s UI, but it looks every bit as usable. Bottom line: the iPhone trounces it in the style department, but Andriod still looks better than 99% of mobile phone UIs. Bring it on, Google. Visit site »
This is a freaking great idea. Sadly, it’s a pain in the ass to implement, so I won’t bother. But this is exactly the sort of thing Apple should have built-into Stacks to make them better. I love the concept of Stacks, but the implementation is definitely lacking. I’m sure it’ll get better over the next few releases of OS X — just like everything else has. Visit site »
Mad UX design skillz? Come work in my neck of the woods, over on the East side at Microsoft. Great campus, great pay. Can’t really beat it. Visit site »
Helen over at DesignInterviews.com talks with my co-worker Nick about Information Architecture and other web matters. Good stuff. Visit site »
Phill discusses the (apparent) new direction for the visual design of OS X in Leopard — an outer space theme. Personally, I like the futuristic look in general, but I’m a bit dismayed by the outer space photography as backgrounds in time machine and on the desktop. It’s just too over-the-top for my tastes.
Then again, I usually roll with a solid color for my desktop background. So I guess I’m dull. Visit site »
This, my friends, is why I keep trying to tell you all not to ignore Flash as a deployment platform. Sure, it’s not for everything, but it’s obviously the best tool for this job. don’t think anyone would want to try to do this with JavaScript. :) Visit site »
I got 23WPM. Thanks for the link, [dotsara]http://flickr.com/photos/dotsara). Visit site »
Joe’s clever JavaScript and other bits for quickly making iPhone-friendly web apps. When I get some spare time, I want to grab this and throw together an iPhone version of LOST-Theories.com. It would also make for a great tutorial on how to create a mobile (read: differently-templated) version of an existing Django site. It’s astonishingly simple! Visit site »