January 2001

Temptation With a Titanium G4 and a copy of Reason, I’d be unstoppable. But given the state of the Internet industry right now, I might be wise to save my pennies in case I end up jobless soon. Or do I spend money in order to make money? Yeah! That’s it…

Mutopia is free, legal sheet music. A longer description from the Scout Project: Modeling itself after Project Gutenberg, this volunteer project aims to make copyright-free musical scores available to everyone. Although copyright on a score expires 70 years after the composer’s death, music publishers retain copyright on their typeset editions. Thus, the only legal way…

User interface designers of audio software seem to be doing the most interesting work around, even more adventerous than on the web. Take for example this emagic ES1 screen shot. It looks confusing at first because it’s unconventional, but (assuming you’re familiar with these functions from prior audio experience) you quickly understand how to operate…

The New York Times self-reflexively looks at its five years on the Web. Meanwhile, the home page has balloned to 60K of HTML plus at least 14 images, a slug even on my cable modem. They have officially crammed too much garbage on the home page.

There some innovative user interface ideas for reading on electronic devices at the lexiaProject Public GUI Initiative by Toby Braun.

Hi Owen! ;-)

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.

Woohoo, nice deliverables! (apologies to CarbonIQ, I pulled that page out of their frameset).

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…

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…

Gary Perlman‘s list of important user interface books.

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…

What a great idea, Daisy Rock Girl Guitars.

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…

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…