For those of you browsing the site directly, you may notice that things look a little…strange today. I’m playing around with the templates and trying to convert the site over to a three-column layout. There are a few things not behaving like they ...
Jan Miksovsky, formerly of Microsoft, and presently of Cozi (a stealthy Seattle startup), is a huge believer in the power of task-oriented user interfaces. Five years ago, Jan published Microsoft’s official Inductive User Interface Guidelines on M...
Pop quiz: what was the correct size of an OK button back in Mac OS 8? If you answered “I have no idea,” you would be in the same boat I was only a few minutes ago. It turns out that the correct size for your OK and Cancel buttons on Mac OS 8 was 5...
The tab control is a fantastic tool for grouping large numbers of related UI elements into a limited amount of space. Jennifer Tidwell, author of Designing Interfaces, provides a set of reasons, use cases and common designs for correctly applying ...
Apple’s yearly bring-out-the-faithful shindig, WWDC, kicked off this morning with Steve Jobs’s keynote. I read through the coverage at engadget, and I must say that I am distinctly underwhelmed. Sure, the dual-proc Mac Pro is a lusty piece of hard...
The Ribbon is the biggest new feature in Office 2007, and probably the biggest new feature for the past few releases of the product. It’s an incredibly cool new feature, and makes Office 2007 significantly easier to use, in my opinion. I’ve seen ...
Paris Hilton claims she’s going celibate for a year. Unlike Rivers Cuomo, I think she’s a damned liar.
Since Tiger shipped in early 2005, Mail.app has gone from being one of my favorite mail clients around, to being my absolute least favorite mail client. It frequently displays unintelligible warnings like “The message could not be saved,” or it si...
I, like many of you, spend most days thinking about how to put forth the most professional and attractive experience possible in my software. I used to think that as long as I could create high-quality, professional-looking software with a fantast...
Drunkenbatman wrote a scathing review of the Meetro for OS X Alpha preview last December. I read his complaints about it last year when it was first published, and it caused me to go give their Windows version a shot. I found that the Windows vers...