Igor Delovski Board

[delovski]

Digg: The Future of GUI on Mac OS X

"Your worry about the color glosses over the real problem, and is
typical of Mac users, who totally overlook Apple's failure to advance the
Mac UI beyond simple window-dressing. You're worried about the color
choice? Windows users haven't had to worry about that... ever. In
Windows, you simply set up your own color scheme. Window background,
menu bars, borders, menus, highlights; it's all user-configurable. Yet the
vaunted Mac UI STILL doesn't offer this simple feature."

[Karlo]

FileBrowse

"FileBrowse is a new, easy-to-use file/media browser for Mac OS X with
many unique features, such as 3D icons/thumbnails, large in-context
previews, and powerful grouping and sorting."

[delovski]

Software makers learn that improving disability access helps everyone

"It turned out that 57 percent of computer users between 18 and 64
could benefit from some such feature, such as increasing text size or
screen contrast to ease the job for tired eyes."

Shell Blog: The UI design minefield - er... flower field??

"It isn't just that Windows is a huge software project with a jillion lines of
code and dozens of languages. Windows has really gone beyond software -
it is a kind of ecosystem with dozens of different interests, concerns, and
agendas all interacting with one another."

[delovski]

Shell Blog: What happened to the menu bars?

"One of the first things people notice when they start using Vista is the
absence of menu bars. Explorer, photo gallery, media player, and IE all
don’t show menus by default and just use the so-called “command module.”
What is up with that? Do we hate menu bars? And more importantly – what
is the guidance that third-party developers are supposed to follow? Let me
break it down for you."


*** Personaly, I think this is wrong because it brings us back into DOS user
interface chaos. But, since Microsoft developers think this is the right direction
I have no choice but to enjoy the view and wait for them to change their minds
back.

[delovski]

Slashdot: Microsoft Vista User Interface Guidelines Published

"Microsoft has published the preliminary Official User Interface
Guidelines for Windows Vista. Highlights include Top 12 Rules for the
Windows Vista User Experience — and the use of screenshots from
Windows XP as examples of what not to do. The full guidelines are as yet
incomplete, but what is there makes for interesting reading."

Dec 10, 2006

Update, new version: Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines

"The goals for these official Windows Vista™ User Experience Guidelines
(or "UX Guide" for short) are to: Establish a high quality and consistency
baseline for all Windows Vista-based applications; Answer your specific
user experience questions; Make your job easier!"

[Igor]

Joel Spolsky: User Interface Design for Programmers

"To make people happy, you have to let them feel like they are in control
of their environment. To do this, you need to correctly interpret their
actions. The interface needs to behave in the way they are expecting it to
behave.

Thus, the cardinal axiom of all user interface design: A user interface is
well-designed when the program behaves exactly how the user
thought it would."

[delovski]

Raymond Chen: Why does Windows hide keyboard accelerators and
focus rectangles by default?

"What does frustrate me about this setting, though, is not its design but its
implementation. Using the arrow keys to navigate a pop-up menu doesn't
appear to count as a "demonstration of keyboard navigation by the user",
which is particularly frustrating since you can't use the Alt key to make that
demonstration, for the Alt key dismisses the menu!"

[Igor]

Shell Blog: Back in Black! Or rather, back OUT black!

"In Vista, we are really trying to reduce the amount of high contrast
visual noise in the UI to make it more comfortable for daily use. Part of
that is make the taskbar darker, and another aspect is making the
maximized windows match the taskbar by tinting toward black also. The
black taskbar and black titlebar produce a kind of letter-boxed effect,
drawing your eyes toward the contents.

The trick of working in Windows is to have a thick skin while still
remaining sensitive to potentially serious issues. "

>> But a screenshot would be nice :)

Next day: By popular demand...

"...here is a picture showing what the default window colors look like
maximized. Note that none of the default colors are particular saturated. If
you make a really saturated color, the blackness is even more reduced."

[delovski]

Raymond Chen: 640 x 480 is still not dead

"When the user boots into Safe Mode, they're already anxious. Their computer
doesn't work; they're trying to fix it. And then they boot up and are faced
with a new interface that they're not familiar with. This doesn't do much to
calm their anxiety."

[XNote]

How to Think About User Experience: System Models

"The truth is, many programmers write code and documetation that is
just as worthless when it comes to helping others form an accurate system
model.

The best remedies for this situation are to communicate your code’s
purpose and to actually have a domain model."

[delovski]

Joel: Choices = Headaches

"See, for example, Barry Schwartz's book, The Paradox of Choice. Let
me quote from the Publishers Weekly review: “Schwartz, drawing
extensively on his own work in the social sciences, shows that a
bewildering array of choices floods our exhausted brains, ultimately
restricting instead of freeing us."

[delovski]

RC: It's not surprising at all that people search for Yahoo

"If I type what I want into this box here, I sometimes get a strange error
message. But if I type it into that box there, then I get what I want. Therefore,
I'll use that box there for everything."

[delovski]

Coding Horror: This Is What Happens When You Let Developers Create UI

"Deep down inside every software developer, there's a budding graphic
designer waiting to get out. And if you let that happen, you're in trouble.
Or at least your users will be, anyway"

[Ike]

DevSource: Color Theory for Developers

"Color theory may sound like a subject for the Art Department, not for
developers. But we've all had the experience of choosing a color scheme
using the property grid to select named colors and ending up with a really
garish color scheme. In an ideal world it might be the case that only our
software's functionality really mattered but, in the world that we actually
live in, users are likely to prefer software with a sophisticated color
scheme over software with an ugly color scheme."

[Ike]

Slashdot: 15 Things Apple Should Change in Mac OS X

"Two of Computerworld's top operating systems editors, a Mac expert
and a Windows expert, compare notes on what Apple should reconsider
as it develops Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Mac OS X 10.4, or Tiger, is (in
their opinion) a noticeably better operating system than XP or Vista. But it
is not perfect. OS X has its own quirks and flaws, and they set out to nail
down some of the 'proud nails' for the next release."

"Inconsistent User Interface. Open iTunes, Safari and Mail. All three of these
programs are Apple's own, and they're among the ones most likely to be
used by Mac OS X users. So why do all three of them look different?

Safari, like several other Apple-made apps such as the Finder and Address
Book, uses a brushed-metal look. iTunes sports a flat gun-metal gray
scheme and flat non-shiny scroll bars. Mail is somewhere in between: no
brushed metal, lots of gun-metal gray, and the traditional shiny blue scroll
bars. Apple is supposed to be the king of good UI, and in many areas, it
is. But three widely used apps from the same company with a different
look? Sometimes consistency isn't the hobgoblin of little minds."

[Ike]

Digg: Apple's HIG is dead, long live the IndieHIG!

"The Human Interface Guidelines, where Apple says how application UI
should look, are pretty much dead. So some Mac developers took it upon
themselves to make a wiki where a more complete and up-to-date standard
can be created."

[delovski]

RC: Stop the madness: Subdirectories of My Documents

Nice rant from Raymond and a link to similar topic in Omar Shahine's blog:
Omar Shahine points out that Apple has similar guidelines for the Macintosh.

[Ike]

Coding Horror: Non-Native UI Sucks

"When two applications with rough feature parity compete, the application
with the native UI will win. Every time. If you truly want to win the hearts
and minds of your users, you go to the metal and take full advantage of
the native UI."

[Ike]

AppleInsider: Apple's Mac OS X may gain multi-sized icon interface

"Apple Inc. has developed an enhancement to its Mac OS X Finder user interface
that will allow for different-sized icons within the same window as a means of
representing their importance, a recent patent application has revealed."

[XNote]

Slashdot: On the Widespread Misuse of the Mouse

"Recently launched blog "The New Interface Advocate," has an entry about
how mice are being applied to situations they are intrinsically poorly suited
for. It also has an interesting proposal for how to keep most of the current
paradigm of GUIs and still take advantage of the other control devices, such
as the keyboard."

[XNote]

Codding Horror: Don't Click Here: The Art of Hyperlinking

"Knowing how to hyperlink effectively is fundamental. But as software
developers, we can go farther when writing code -- we can control the
text of the links we generate, too."

[XNote]

Adobe: Welcome to opensource.adobe.com

"opensource.adobe.com is the home of the Adobe Source Libraries (ASL)
and information about other Adobe open source projects.

ASL provides peer-reviewed and portable C++ source libraries. The libraries
are intended to be widely useful, leveraging and extending both the C++
Standard Library and the Boost Libraries.

The first two significant libraries in ASL are known as the property model
library (Adam) and layout library (Eve). They are components for modeling
the human interface appearance and behavior in a software application.
The property model library and layout library are described along with
related libraries.

opensource.adobe.com is maintained by Sean Parent and Mat Marcus."

[XNote]

This is the story of when I rewrote the Lotus Notes Formula Engine

"UI stuff is hard, but not many people actually appreciate how difficult it
is to do correctly. Everyone thinks they're an expert, but very few have
actually spent any time thinking seriously about it, reading any article or
books on the subject, watching users behind one way mirrors during
usability tests and seeing how easily users get confused and distracted."

[XNote]

asktog.com - Jef Raskin: INTUITIVE EQUALS FAMILIAR

"One of the most common terms of praise for an interface is to say that it
is "intuitive" (the word should have been "intuitable" but we will bow to
convention). Yet the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) literature rarely
mentions the word, and for good reason. This note attempts to clarify the
meaning of "intuitive" for non-HCI specialists."

[delovski]

JoS: Video on user interface Design

"If anyone into the science of building a user interface, here is a really great
video that delves deep into how the new interface was built for office."

[XNote]

jonathanhedley.com - Why are mouse sensors in the middle of the
mouse? (When they should be at the front)

"Matrix found that the best place for the ball was up front as far as possible
between the users thumb and forefinger. The forefinger can be controlled
very precisely — much more so than the wrist and forearm."

[XNote]

reddit - Have you ever seen an uglier user interface?

"don't blame the programmer, this is what happen when you do exacly what
the client want. i'm sure there have a mp3 playing in the background."

[Ike]

RC: What's with this MSH_MOUSEWHEEL message?

"On the other hand, the MSH_MOUSEWHEEL message works from the outside
in. It is delivered to the foreground window (in the SetForegroundWindow
sense). If the window procedure doesn't want to handle the message, it can
forward the message to child windows of its choice, until one of them returns
TRUE to indicate that the message was handled, or until no further candidates
exist."

[Ike]

reddit - "click 'ok' to cancel or 'cancel' to continue the installation..."

"There was a decent article about how to name buttons in your software.
Something like this would be easier to understand if the buttons were named
"Cancel Install" and "Continue Install"."

[delovski]

msdn - Design case study: iPad to Windows 8 Metro style app

"iOS is a popular platform for creating apps that are touch first, fun, and
engaging. With the introduction of Windows 8 Consumer Preview, designers
and developers have a new platform to unleash their creativity."

[Ike]

Is neumorphism the big new look for iOS 14?

"Take one look at any screenshot from a pre-iOS 7 iPhone, and you'll wonder
how we ever used such a hideous interface for so many years. The skeu-
morphic design language included so much fake wood, glossy plastic and gray
gradient that there's almost nowhere to put the actual contents of the app.

iOS 7 went way too far in the opposite direction, with flat white pages and
skinny text. Is that a button? Is it just a label?"

[Ike]

im - Apple, Big Sur, and the rise of Neumorphism

"Neumorphism has been making the rounds on Design Twitter for a little while
now, and most of the response to it has been negative. There are plenty of
valid criticisms out there, primarily that early design experiments were focused
on design differentiation and not actual usability. But if you look beyond specific
implementations we've seen thus far -- usually created by designers whose
focus is formalism as opposed to usability -- to the base concepts, there is
something that's actually quite exciting and sustainable; something that has
yet to be fully realized."