April 25th, 2004 by Daniel J. Wilson
Via Usability Views:
“Wave Goodbye To The Ordinary User Interface”
Andy Wilson and Nuria Oliver of Microsoft Research are working on new ways of interacting with objects. I imagine the XWand is a stop-gap solution until tracking cameras allow users to point with their fingers. Remote controls make sense for complex interactions like controlling media [...]
April 24th, 2004 by Daniel J. Wilson
I think the future of human-computer interaction lies more in the multi-modal realm than the keyboard-centric approach used in Jef Raskin’s Humane Interface project and advocated in his recent Desktop Linux Summit keynote.
The keyboard is very efficient for some tasks (text input and editing being the best examples), but it doesn’t allow people to take [...]
April 22nd, 2004 by Daniel J. Wilson
Since all but one of the default admin menu titles start with a different letter, a simple Access Key system could be set up:
Menu Item
Access Key
Post
p
Edit
e
Categories
c
Links
l OR i
Users
u
Options
o
Templates
t
My Profile
m
View Site
v
Logout
l OR g
Links and Logout are the only problem.
I easily saw how to set this up for the My Profile page, but I’m not familiar enough [...]
April 21st, 2004 by Daniel J. Wilson
We want things to flow.
You mean like Aqua? :-)
I’m glad Microsoft now seems to understand that OS X isn’t just “pretty widgets” as Chairman Bill implied in the past.
Microsoft has a chance with Longhorn to get aesthetics right for once. The screenshots I’ve seen don’t look too bad from that standpoint, but it [...]
April 21st, 2004 by Daniel J. Wilson
The iCal standard includes a way to mark items as confirmed, so how about tying that in to an IM client, automatically setting the user’s status to Away or Busy if an event is confirmed by the user? This would cut out one step of the current “acknowledge alarm, set IM status, go to [...]
April 17th, 2004 by Daniel J. Wilson
Window layering is wonky - if I switch out of OmniWeb while the Bookmarks, Downloads, Error Log, Source Editor, or Network Activity windows are the frontmost and switch back, the first browser window comes to the front.
Address bar click/drag-through has been (intentionally?) disabled. It’s very nice to be able to grab an address from [...]
April 17th, 2004 by Daniel J. Wilson
Cool Features
Fast page rendering.
Adherence to W3 standards.
Tab grouping (off by default).
Built-in RSS subscribing.
I’m not personally a fan of it, but some like their e-mail client and browser in one.
Bugs
Copying images to the clipboard does not appear to work.
Drag-and-drop of images does not appear to work.
Select-and-drag of text does not work.
Suggestions
Where to begin…
General
Menu command capitalization style [...]
April 15th, 2004 by Daniel J. Wilson
The New York Times > Business > Media & Advertising > RealNetworks Seeks a Musical Alliance With Apple
Since Apple makes money off the iPod and loses or breaks even with the actual iTunes Music Store, I think they should forge some sort of alliance with Real and open licensing of FairPlay to others.
April 14th, 2004 by Daniel J. Wilson
A while ago, I threw out the idea of a bezel to indicate when a secure connection to a server has been established. As was pointed out by Marc Nothrop in the comments on the post, a global bezel would be confusing due to the window-specific nature of the information. The bezels displayed [...]
April 13th, 2004 by Daniel J. Wilson
“The No. 1 misconception is that usability is a major barrier to adoption and that’s not true. It used to be. There was a study done recently with a group of 20 users who had never used a computer before. Ten were put at a Windows PC, 10 at a Linux PC and they were [...]
Category :
Interface 
0 Comment » 
