February 2005
Sadly, Jef Raskin passed away a couple of days ago. More on Raskin and his recent work.
TypeNavigator is a visual search engine for fonts. It’s great for when you know the form you want, but don’t happen to know a specific face. And, interestingly, works much much better in many real-world cases than concept-based font search engines. (via)
FontEditor lets you design your own bitmap font and then download it as a TrueType font. (via kottke, who appreciates your support)
Jesse has a nice concise description of what he’s calling Ajax, a much, much better name than “dynamic interfaces using JavaScript and XMLHTTP” (which is what we used to call it back in 2000). This capability has been around for years, but it’s taken Google (yeah, sure, and flickr, but really it’s all about Google) to push everyone to take it seriously. I actually think one big reason behind the change is that the push for CSS+XHTML for presentation has gotten folks to jettison support for older browsers (yeah, yeah, they can still access the data, blah, blah, blah, but that’s just what you tell the CEO; no one really cares about those poor Netscape 4 users anymore). Still, I’ve been looking forward to this for years, and can’t wait to break free of that damn call-and-response model of application design we’ve been stuck in. As Jesse says, “It’s going to be fun.”
Microsoft has posted a parent’s primer to computer slang, which will do them no good but is pretty amusing.
This lamp has knobs that you turn to create any color. Cool. (ps - If you asked why then it ain’t for you.)
If you’ve never read Ellen Lupton and Abbott Miller, you’re in for a treat, and I just noticed that they have a web site with a whole buncha essays. Poke around and you’ll find gems like this: “Typography is an interface to the alphabet…Readers usually ignore the typographic interface, gliding comfortably along literacy’s habitual groove. Sometimes, however, the interface should be allowed to fail.”
Greasemonkey is a plugin for Firefox that “lets you to add bits of DHTML (‘user scripts’) to any webpage to change it’s behavior.” As a designer, there’s a side of me that hates the idea that someone might use CSS to make my pages look like useit.com. But as a user I love the fact that I can fix annoying UI issues, many of them small enough (or me-specific enough) that I’d never expect (or want) the “fix” to get hard-coded.
We’ve always known that ants are cool. (via)
Google is really pulling out all the XMLHTTP DHTML stops with Google Maps. Still some bugs (and it doesn’t work on Safari), but there’s definitely some sweetness there.
I recently installed iPhoto 5, and wow I can’t tell you how much Apple does not get keywords. This is the third completely different interface they’ve tried for tagging photos and they are all completely lame. First came this:
Which was cumbersome and semi-useless as we’ll see in a moment. Then, in iPhoto 4, they created this multi-modal abomination:
Which was so bad that people went and modified the code to make it at least suck a little less.
Now, they’ve gone partway back to the original (using rigid tiles for each keyword):
Which would be bad enough because it won’t scale past about 20 tags, but it’s made so much worse by the fact that in order to edit the tags for a given photo you have to select the photo, then choose Get Info, then choose the Keywords tab and then check the boxes for the tags you want to add:
What’s that? You want to add a new tag? Well, of course, you simply go to the iPhoto Preferences and select the Keywords pane and use a third (!) totally distinct UI there:
Feh! Compare to, say, Flickr, where you simply click on “Add” next to the list of keywords for the current photo:
Now, I have a few gripes with the flickr tags UI, but next to iPhoto it’s the most natural, transparent mechanism in the world. But this is only interesting because it reveals a huge difference in the way that Apple and flickr’s respective designers seem to envision people using tags. The Apple model assumes several broad categories (the defaults are things like “Family” and “Vacation”) while flickr assumes actual descriptive metadata (like “red” and “insect” and “banal”). Which makes flickr’s tags useful and interesting and Apple’s not.
ps - I have more to say about tags, but I’ll save that for a later post.