Membranophonist's Ramblings

Interaction and interface design, technology, politics, music, and random thoughts…

May 8, 2012
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Zee Index!

A little feature for design apps that would make it a bit easier to keep your layer stack straight.

Notes

  • The indicators in the Layers panel could be larger.
  • Ideally, the object bounds handles and layer position markers for selected and hovered would be different shapes. Squares for the selected objects, diamonds or circles for hovered, perhaps.

April 1, 2012
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Anything for you, money

AT&T Inc. got more than $16 million from the U.S. government to offer a calling service for the deaf that the company knew was being used by Nigerian fraudsters to steal from American merchants, the Justice Department said.

—AT&T Accused of Billing U.S. for Nigerian Fraud Calls

JPMorgan Chase & Co. took procedural shortcuts and used faulty account records in suing tens of thousands of delinquent credit card borrowers for at least two years, current and former employees say.

—OCC Probing JPMorgan Chase Credit Card Collections

March 31, 2012
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Historical Exposé

As of Mac OS X 10.7, applications that provide a list of Recent Items display these documents as thumbnails at the bottom of the screen in the App Windows Exposé mode. The concept could be expanded to allow developers to specify what information appears in this section.

Users could navigate the history by two-finger swiping left and right or clicking the page dots immediately above the thumbnails.

Browsing History

Current browser window with history thumbnails

  1. Notice the bookmark icon displayed atop the page third from the left; I’ve bookmarked the page, so the mark appears to help me identify it.
  2. Modified behavior should apply to clicks/taps on thumbnails just as with links; if I hold Command and tap on a thumb, it should open in a new tab or window as specified by the browser settings.

Listening History

Audio player window with previously heard track thumbnails

  1. Star ratings or a favorite icon could be displayed for tracks.
  2. Hovering over a track thumbnail could trigger a fast crossfade between the playing track (if any) and the hovered track, making it easier to relocate a song you don’t know by name. The key would be a bit of a delay on hover so it doesn’t trigger as you are simply moving the cursor across the screen.

March 28, 2012
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Fecund

I want to make sure we can do what we want on these machines. We need the ability to experiment. We used to be able to experiment a lot more. But in the world of day-to-day trade-offs between security and innovation, we’re out of balance. We talk a lot about what we need to do to keep things secure, but nowhere near enough about what we need to do to keep things fertile.

—Dan Bricklin in an interview with Bob Lewis