Victor

A fair article about bikeshop.com, a site I helped design.

A new addition to the Common Ground patterns could be Filter, in which some function is applied to content and results in a new set of content. An example would be filtering search results using a date range.

I was citing lists of heuristics yesterday, and another good one is The Human Interface Design Principles of MacOS 8.

On Saturday I was outside in a t-shirt and hot in the sun. On Sunday I woke up and saw a few inches of snow on the ground. Today is still cold, but there’s no trace of yeterday’s snow. All those poor, fragile buds that excitedly came out early were frosted.

Being away at a computer conference for a week, around so many different people doing research in such diverse areas, helped my realize how I should look more at the long term of my career. This also affects the short term: I must stop getting so worried and caught up with work matters. I think…

My notes on the aforementioned The Origins of Pattern Theory: The Future of the Theory, and the Generation of a Living World: Coplien says in the intro, “Focusing on objects had caused us to lose the system perspective. Preoccupation with design method had caused us to lose the human perspective.” Alexander wrote the introduction to…

Great find – Christopher Alexander’s The Origins of Pattern Theory: The Future of the Theory, and the Generation of a Living World. IEEE charges $10, which is a reasonable price for this speech for anyone interested in the application of pattern languages. Here’s an excerpt from the introduction: The timing and audience of the venue…

A new Susana Baca album – very exciting.

I heard a speech this morning about the humanitarian effects of the embargo on Iraq. While I agree the Iraqi citizens are suffering and the embargo has largely failed, I don’t think the embargo is the cause. Regardless of the amount of resources Iraq has, the government will always syphon off what it needs to…

Of the folks I met at the HCI Pattern Languages workshop, I was most interested in the work of Austin Henderson, Tom Erickson, Lyn Pemberton and Richard Griffiths, Adam Stork, and Jan Borchers. Also, John Thomas had a way of always coming up with the insightful question, regardless of the topic.

James Landay is working on a book about applying design patterns to web site design. Nothing there yet, but must revisit in the future.

Super-cool insight from Microsoft regarding web browser UI design. Last year I corresponded a bit with the head of Apple’s Quicktime UI design and discovered they’re not allowed to talk about their work in these sort of forums for legal reasons.

Doors of Perception PLAY demo. It can be “playfully navigated.” I know I sound like a party pooper, but I wonder if people (meaning real people, not other designers) like playing with media like this (for more than a few seconds)? They strike me as rarely-visited museums, or toys initially enjoyed and now abondoned. Essentially,…

Just downloaded Netscape 6 PR 1 and there’s about a 6:1 annoyance to possibly interesting feature ratio. It’s small in size, but takes longer than Photoshop to install. It’s too slow on my humble PowerMac 8500, the initial registration procedure is lifted verbatum from the frustrating procedure on NetCenter, and they changed the command key…

back from The Netherlands, and my head is a blurry, hurtin’ jumble. Got a cold following crazy Scandanavians through a freezing wind on the boardwork at Schevining (I know that spelling’s wrong). Much to write about in the next few days…