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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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Discussing some quirks of dialog design in iCal’s event edit window.

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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 [...]

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