• Pearsonified’s Golden Ratio Typography Calculator – calculates line height, font size and content width appropriately for readability. Using the golden ratio might be bogus, but the point of matching font size to line width and height is well taken and the results look OK.

• The Acme User Interface for Programmers –
• UF Sparse Matrix Collection – SNAP group – collection of datasets including social networks
• Action Science Explorer (Formerly iOpener Workbench) –
• iOpener Project – The goal of iOPENER (Information Organization for PENning Expositions on Research) is to generate readily-consumable surveys of different scientific domains and topics, targeted to different audiences and levels, e.g., expert specialists, scientists from related disciplines, educators, students, government decision makers, and citizens including minorities and underrepresented groups. Surveyed material is presented in different modalities, e.g., an enumerated list of articles, a bulleted list of key facts, a textual summary, or a visual presentation with zoom and filter capabilities. The original contributions of this research are in the creation of an infrastructure for automatically summarizing entire areas of scientific endeavor by linking three available technologies: (1) bibliometric lexical link mining; (2) summarization techniques; and (3) visualization tools for displaying both structure and content.
• I regularly hire women for 65% to 75% of what males make | Hacker News – Lots of tips on salary negotiation for both sexes in the comments thread
• pjax – ajax with permalinks
• Moog (2004) – IMDb See also Walter/Wendy Carlos…

• Ragel State Machine Compiler – DSL for state machines in many languages
• The Kid Should See This. – Stuff on the nets that kids can get into that isn't dumb
• Zulkey.com – "They don't necessarily act like they're thinking, "get a load of my rad sock-shoes," but you can tell that there's something slightly suspicious going in their mind."
• SFMOMA | Exhibitions + Events | Calendar | Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams –
• Online Backup for Mac | Arq | Haystack Software – Backs up to S3 – selling point is it's careful with file metadata…

• Understanding Hardware Acceleration on Mobile Browsers | Blog | Sencha – Understanding Hardware Acceleration on Mobile Browsers | Blog | Sencha
• Scientists Turn to the Web to Raise Research Funds – NYTimes.com – Crowdfunding science. It can't replace existing sources, but it's a great idea for some projects.
• The rise and fall of the independent software developer – Seeing a lot of this lately – big enough to be a target but small enough to be unable to fight.
• Presentation Boot Camp (aka Tufte in Twenty Minutes) – A condensed 3-page summary of main ideas in tufte's books. Includes the idea of a handout – something I've used in the past and would like to use again.
• Rapid DHCP: Or, how do Macs get on the network so fast? : Caffeinated Bitstream – Very interesting comparison. I'm also curious what windows does here – it seems like windows xp laptops often take a long time to join a network, too.
• Why I will never pursue cheating again – A Computer Scientist in a Business School – Reading those automated cheating reports must be depressing. I wonder if it'd help for the system to just send the report back to the student every time?

• Crash Course: Design for Startups — PaulStamatiou.com – Some design tips and a big reading list.
• High Society (1901-1959) – Everything is a remix, including riffs in Jazz over forty years. Great YouTube examples. My favorite is the Benny Goodman.
• Distributed Bug Tracking Avoids Out-of-Sync Bugs and Code (Paul Roub) – Distributed bug tracking sounds great – I've had that idea before, and seen it elsewhere – but this post didn't explain much about how it works in veracity, unfortunately.
• Core77 intro to sketchnotes – How to start sketching notes. Step 2: Internet fame! Seriously though, I wish more people in research were comfortable sketching. So many dull labeled boxes on whiteboards.
• python-constraint – Labix constraint solving library in python. Nice API.

@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…

Jesper at waffle is starting an open-source web browser project to revive the spirit of OmniWeb, called rouse. He coins the phrase “delight innovation”. I love that phrase. He’s talking about taking a browser, something that’s relatively stable, and looking for ways to make it noticeably better again. I love that impulse – it’s something I’m hoping to see in email clients too.

Another place that delight showed up (along with Surprise and Joy), was at 52 weeks of UX in a post called “design for delight”. That post seemed to be a little more about the parts of design that don’t affect functionality, but do add personality. I really agree with this angle too – I like a program that has little details that are just for fun.

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.

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.