The following is a list of all entries tagged with interfacedesign.
CommentMulti-touch trackpad. For me, that was the most interesting aspect of the just-announced-days-ago Apple Macbook Air. Unlike normal trackpads, a multi-touch trackpad also accepts input from two or more fingers. Before, you could only point, now you can pinch, swipe and turn; any gesture that requires more than one digit (or person).
2 CommentsGoogle has started rolling out colored labels in Gmail. It’s smart, I like it a lot, especially how removing a label is now no longer an option in a pulldown menu, but actually related to the label you’re removing. I am, however, ready for a label manager redesign. The whole “search don’t sort” thing, at times, seems a bit too smart compared to good ol’ folders.
CommentNow this is a multi-touch interface. I particuarly liked his comment on the interface seen in Minority Report.
3 CommentsIt’s made the rounds by now, but it’s still a good collection of stupid interface decisions in Mac OSX Leopard. My props to Apple for allowing users to choose a simpler dock design than the “wet desktop” one. Now if only they’d allow you to turn off the dock altogether. Also, the folder icon designs seem like a step back from the OSX Tiger style.
7 CommentsAn increasingly prevalent problem in this age of smart webpages (dubbed “Web 2.0″ by the marketing department) is the visualization of inline links. That is, links that when clicked immediately change part of the page you’re looking at, as opposed to slowly loading a whole different page.
11 CommentsIt’s been around, probably, since the dawn of the mouse. The double-click has become synonymous with “open”. The purpose of the double-click is to allow one to do two things with the same button. So far this has meant that single-click selects, double-click opens. It’s worked so well and has become so ubiquitous that it’s been a while since anyone thought it could be different. Even so, I’ll bet my mouse that we won’t be double-clicking in 5 years.
5 Comments
Apple just redesigned their website. Along with that, they’ve released a few videos of Leopard, the next version of OSX.
Some interesting pieces from the desktop videodespises the dock. In any case, it looks like Apple really shines with their incremental improvements. Still no fullscreen, though.
4 CommentsSo Microsoft just unveiled “Surface“. It’s a table with a flat screen that’s sensitive to multiple pointers (fingers). It’s pretty much what we’ve Apple does wants to do with the iPhone, except larger.
This seems to spell the arrival of multi-touch interfaces and I think it’s great. How long untill I’ve got this on my work-table as an addition to my mouse? Not soon enough, I’m sure.
21 CommentsDespite what I’ve said in the past, I do not despise the Mac. I like many things about the Mac — the look of the hardware, the clean and crispness of the operating system, the modern feel it exudes.
But it’s not all strawberries and sunshine. Criticizing means caring.
42 Comments
If you’re reading this, chances are you’re also subscribing to a feed that has recently informed you about the new Apple iPhone. You might have even heard that the next Mac OS X will probably get a new UI.
Keeping this in mind and looking at the video depicting the phone aspect of the iPhone, I’m wondering if we aren’t being dropped hints at the new OSX look. I spy some iTunes 7 like chrome and some new fancy semi transparent (* cough * Vista) black glass. Your thoughts?
9 CommentsMy favourite usability guru, Jakob Nielsen, lists his top 10 movie UI mistakes:
As usual, I’ll have to agree with Jakob Nielsen. I’ve always gotten either a good laugh or cry from movie computer interfaces. While I understand the dramatic overstatement and readability screen graphics need, some of them are simply lame (Swordfish, anyone?). Jakob concludes that we should demand more realistic UI design in movies, otherwise your mom will think it’s her fault when she can’t immediately access a random UNIX system.
4 CommentsI’m just now surfacing after 7 days of the flu, trying to catch up on the feed-reader. Being interested in interface design, one thing sprung out; if you’re a mac fan, you might have already read it: rumor has it that the next mac operating system, OSX, will get a new interface. The rumor elaborates that this new interface will feature black gloss, lights, and be codenamed “Illuminous”.
Now whether this rather baseless rumor is true or not is less important; some time in the future, OSX will get a new interface, if nothing else because the OS will become vectorized and resolution independant. As such, speculating on the look is less important than what this’ll mean for the interaction between man/machine.
As the attentive reader will know, I’m personally hoping for a true fullscreen option and close buttons that actually closes their applications. Why do I care, when I use Windows, you ask? Well because I might one day switch, should Apple choose to fix these nuisances.
What would you want changed/fixed/added in a future OSX?
[Update]: ThinkSecret has posted possible screenshots.
9 Comments
Since trying out Opera 9, I’ve been slowly warming towards the browser. It’s really fast, it does most of what I need, and it does it all pretty well. There are some quirks and ifs here and there, but generally it’s rock-solid competition for Firefox.
This got me thinking. Why didn’t I even consider running Opera before? Why is the Opera browser share as low as 1.5%, when the browser is, in fact, more decent than that?
In this entry I’d like to touch upon some design issues, usability issues, interface design decisions and naming issues I personally think could use touch-ups or changes.
9 CommentsEveryones favourite gadget site Engadget has just redesigned. The new design is stretchy and liquid width. That’s not all: their images scale-to-fit too using the following markup:
img.biggie { width: 98%; max-width: 860px; }
On the downside, letting the browser do the scaling means the image will be resized using nearest neighbour interpolation as opposed to bicubic interpolation (at least on the browsers I’ve tried). The result is jaggies in the resized image. This is the main reason I chose to not do this when I redesigned a while back.
Penny for your thoughts? Are scalable images an improvement or not?
In my experience a good interface design goes by unnoticed. I jump in and know how things work, how to go about my business. The cog-wheels of the engine beneath grind creak and turn exactly the way I expect them to.
In my first article for the Titoonic website, I dive into discussing what really makes a good interface design. Feel free to comment on the titoonic website: Pretty is relative.