There some innovative user interface ideas for reading on electronic devices at the lexiaProject Public GUI Initiative by Toby Braun.
Category: Unfiled
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sub rosa \sub-ROH-zuh\ (adverb) : in confidence : secretly Example sentence: Several military leaders were meeting sub rosa, plotting to overthrow the king.Makes me think of last night’s West Wing episode (a great show, btw). I’m not usually a sap, but their appeal to patriotism and service gets me all choked up.
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Once in a while I wonder back to WikiWikiWeb because the environment is so fascinating; so close to a true, unfettered combination of hypertext and community. But just now I became convinced WikiWikiWeb doesn’t have any actual content. It’s just an elaborately constructed collection of meta-content, always describing, teasing, instructing, guiding, but never yielding any actual stuff.
Oh, there it is, like this gorgeous, Specialization Is For Insects
post. Funny, the intro pages are one big silo, and the content pages are one big silo, and the RecentChanges page is a crosswalk between the two. If you get dropped (linked to) either silo you would think that’s the whole site.
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Here’s a great summary of user interface book reviews. It makes so much sense that, with a list of books in one industry, all of which will have some interest to the reader, to put not only title, subject summary, and link in this list but to sum up the review. ‘Cause basically I’m in show-me-the-books-that-are-going-to-make-me-a-smarter-designer mode when I read this.
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I just discovered a new interaction element in SoundJam for the Mac. I’m calling it the “column control”:
Clicking the plus sign gives you one more column of information (like album, artist, time, date, size, etc.) and clicking the minus sign gives you one less. This is different than making the window bigger to expose more columns, which doesn’t happen; the window simply gets bigger. So you can have lots of columns in a compact space if you’re an information slut, or fewer columns for a minimalist approach. You can then change any column to display any category of information, and use the first column to sort by any of those categories.
In other apps I’d think it was overkill, but in this case people may keep long lists of mp3s and may want a variety of ways to sort, view, and play them.
The size of the controls, though small, is sufficient IMO since I don’t think people will be using this control often. It’s one of those things that could almost live in preferences, but some folks may want more frequent or immediate access to it. But it’s taken me months to even notice it, wonder if anyone else does?
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Peter Morville’s take on the dot.com crash:
Picture a long, dark tunnel with a light at the far end. Imagine a number of sheep in the tunnel. They are shuffling slowly forward through the tunnel. Suddenly, they begin moving from side to side, flying through the air and bouncing off the walls at almost the speed of light. Every few seconds, a sheep or two explodes into a brilliant ball of fire. It’s a fascinating spectacle but smells really bad. This is how I see the past year’s dot.com experience.
OK, so I’m taking it out of context a bit so it’ll sound funnier. But it’s still a funky metaphor any way you spin it.
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Challis Hodge, CEO of H A N N A H O D G E, has some wonderful thoughts on technology, such as this:
My vision, or should I say hope, is that by 2003 we’ve created a
people-centered world where the development and use of technology is based
on human needs. We as designers and developers of technology based products
and services need to stop thinking about how to make technology better fit
into people’s lives and instead focus on real people’s needs and the
solutions that would best fulfill them. I believe this also allows us to
achieve parity between the goals of businesses and their customers and
that’s just grand!
…and I just discovered they have a blog with lots of juicy bits.
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Seen on blackbeltjones:
Professional ‘voice of reason’ Jeff Veen on the broadband myth“You know what’s really striking, though? I heard a VP at Yahoo talking recently about the speed of their site. He said that even corporate users with massive connections within the enterprise complain about slow sites. They’ve got all the bandwidth they could need, and are accessing one of the leanest sites on the Web, and they want it even faster. They want Web sites to respond as fast as the apps do on their new gigahertz computers. Know what that means? Broadband won’t solve any of our interface performance problems on the Web. Your company doesn’t need a broadband strategy. You need to solve these problems with design.”
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As someone born in a territory formerly ruled by France, Bill Clinton can run for President of that country.
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“TomPaine.com seeks to enrich the national debate on controversial public issues by featuring the ideas, opinions, and analyses too often overlooked by the mainstream media.”