michael-mccracken.net (ui)

Links for January 23rd through January 25th

Michael McCracken — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 19:57:00 GMT

My shared links for January 23rd through January 25th:

Introducing the HUD. Say hello to the future of the menu. « Canonical Design - Canonical is moving towards no menus and just using a quicksilver-style "HUD" smart text interface. That's great - menus stink and this gives a path to voice control too, but there's a big discovery problem to be attacked (which menus also have but not as bad).
Ubuntu One Blog » Blog Archive » U1DB technical preview release: tell us what you think! - Blog post announcing u1db preview
U1DB -- u1db v0.0.1.dev.0 documentation - Developer preview documentation. Their summary: " U1DB is a database API for synchronised databases of JSON documents. It's simple to use in applications, and allows apps to store documents and synchronise them between machines and devices. U1DB itself is not a database: instead, it's an API which can be backed by any database for storage. This means that you can use u1db on different platforms, from different languages, and backed on to different databases, and sync between all of them. "

Links for July 5th through July 6th

Michael McCracken — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 17:08:00 GMT

My shared links for July 5th through July 6th:

Overlay Scrollbars - Update « Canonical Design - They have a video of the new scrollbar design for Ubuntu. I'm not sure I like it but it's hard to say without using it first.

One nit - I don't think it's obvious what happens to the red position bar (what to call that?) when you just press the arrows on the thumb instead of moving it around.

pulp-or - puLP: An LP modeler in Python - Google Project Hosting Linear Programming solvers!
CouchDB: The Definitive Guide - The couchdb oreilly book. (free full text and drafts)

Software aging well vs. UI that triggers OCD

Michael McCracken — Tue, 25 May 2010 17:30:00 GMT

I had an idea the other day that I shared on Twitter:

@mikemccracken: It would be cool if there was a way for well-used & loved GUI software to gracefully show its age, like a good leather wallet…

I still like this idea, and I loved the example that Bryan Knight replied with - the OS 8 Color Picker crayons, seen in the third "Colour Selector" image on the OS 8 GUIdebook page.

However, it just occurred to me that it'd be hard to design a UI that shows its age or use gracefully without looking "dirty" and triggering the kind of OCD that makes some of us empty the trash just because the icon looks full. I can think of a few other things that do that to me:

Of course, the full trash can
Unread counts of all kinds
MS Word 08 showing "[Compatibility Mode]" in the window title for files that aren't .docx format
Badges on files in the finder that show source control status - I tried this once and it drove me crazy

There are probably more. Share yours in the comments if you like. I'd also be really interested in other examples besides the crayons where UI changes gracefully as you use the software more…

Measuring PDFs with Skim

Michael McCracken — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 01:00:00 GMT

I love it when I can guess how to do something new in a program. Skim just did this for me - I needed to figure out how big the rectangle of text in a paper I'm working on is, in inches. I looked for rulers, and then decided I'd just see if I get any size feedback when I make a rectangular selection. Turns out there's a nice feedback status line in the bottom right - clicking toggles between measurement in pts and in inches.

I like how this solves my problem without adding a lot of new UI for measurement - no rulers, no extra tool to measure length.

With all the news about web fonts lately...

Michael McCracken — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 16:30:00 GMT

With all the news about web fonts lately, I've been thinking about typography as a difference between web apps and desktop apps. No one expects web apps to conform to any standard UI, so designers can experiment and give us distinctive interfaces, using different fonts and color schemes.

It seems like there's less room to play in desktop apps - you'll see unique interfaces with new button styles, new controls, different color schemes, but as far as I can tell, not much variation in typography.

The only example off the top of my head is Panic Sans, used in Coda.

Why so little variation?

Is it the presence of a standard system font, UI guidelines, or just habit?

Is there a licensing issue for redistributing fonts with software? I tried to look for licensing terms, but this doesn't seem to be a common question.

I wouldn't mind some more tasteful variation in my desktop apps - I think the best web apps have shown us that different isn't always bad.

iCal's Text Field Jumble

Michael McCracken — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 22:38:00 GMT

I've written here before about text fields, particularly the problem of having a good-looking 'display' mode and a separate 'edit' mode for data you don't edit so often, like in AddressBook.

The most recent version of iCal decided that events are write-once-read-many as well. You now have to use cmd-E to get into edit mode, while cmd-I just gives you a small display mode.

I'm mostly OK with that, although I find I edit events about as often as I look at their info windows - after editing I usually just deal with alarms, not the events themselves. The casual glance at the time and title is always enough - I think either you're looking at the time and title or you're editing. I don't see the appeal in the new 'info-only' mode (if it's actually new - it seems new.)

However, the change does highlight the jumble of editable text fields and text-like fields in the edit window:

The "Add Attendees" link and the "None" placeholder for url act the same - you click on them, and enter text. One's a link and one's mute gray text. Why? For my part, I think the gray text is too understated, and the link is too garish.

There are other differences: you can tab to the "url" field, but you can't tab to "attendees"... until you add one, then you can. Once you click on either of them, the url field pops up a plain white raised NSTextField, but the attendees field is sunken and translucent, apparently an NSTokenField?

Both of the blue links could also be buttons. I'm still not completely sold on replacing buttons with links, but I can understand the trend. I think a small plus-sign button would be fine for "Add File", though, and "Attendees" ought to be a text field. Why force the user to use the mouse when adding data to an event?

All in all, I think the "Add Attendees" link/field is pretty strange. I'm curious if I missing a precedent somewhere.

Locations and Travel Time in Calendar apps

Michael McCracken — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 01:05:00 GMT

Now that we've got Google Maps, I'd like to see my calendar program (iCal) extended to pay more attention to the location of events. Show me how long it'll take to get to events I've scheduled, based on where they are. Traffic estimates would make this really killer (at least here in So-Cal)

It might sound like you would need to tell the app where you will be at every point of the day for this to work, but you could avoid that by storing a 'coming from' location for each event - it could be the previous event, but you could also just pick it from a list of default places, like 'Home', 'Work', and 'Hockey Rink'.

In my dream world, they'd look like error bars on a plot, they'd even have data about variability of the traffic estimates, and they'd be in the next version of iCal.

Here's a quick visual, in case I didn't describe it well enough:

Assume home is south of the office and the basketball court is north. Traffic is bad going north around 6. What it's telling you now is you can go home fast, and have 30 minutes there before you have to leave again, go straight to the court, taking 45 minutes in traffic and getting there 45 minutes early, or have about an hour at the office, wait out traffic, and get to the court on time in about 25 minutes.

Update: I changed the example to be a little clearer - I added an option to show traffic choices, showed the times by the routes, and made one event appear selected, since you probably only want this extra info for the selected event.

I also made it a basketball game because everyone knows you'd need to go home to get your gear if you were going to the rink anyway. Seriously.