O'Reilly Network Column Discusses New User Interface Possibilities Offered by XUL

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Seminars Offered on Embedded Design
with a Voice User Interface

Seminars Offered on Embedded Design
with a Voice User Interface 08/18/2004 03:18 AM
Training targets developers implementing speech I/O through low cost chips [PRWEB Aug 18, 2004]

O'Reilly Network: O'Reilly Network --
2004 Emerging Technology Conference
Coverage [Jan. 16, 2004]

O'Reilly Network: O'Reilly Network --
2004 Emerging Technology Conference
Coverage [Jan. 16, 2004] 02/11/2004 08:18 AM
O'Reilly Network: O'Reilly Network -- 2004 Emerging Technology Conference Coverage [Jan. 16, 2004] .. the DDTI's own aggregation page

oreillynet.com/et2004
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MUG chat discusses user group 'youth'

MUG chat discusses user group 'youth' 08/19/2004 12:27 PM
World Without Borders is hosting the monthly MUG (Macintosh User Group) Center Chat tonight at 10 p.m.ET...

On Beyond Help: User Assistance and the
User Interface

On Beyond Help: User Assistance and the
User Interface 09/09/2002 06:29 AM

New User Group Report, more MUG news
offered

New User Group Report, more MUG news
offered 11/03/2003 01:23 PM
Sarah Friedlander, the newest member of the Apple Campus Group Advisory Board will give her first interview in this week's User Group Report, which will also offer reports on Mac User Groups from a Unix perspective, the first Platinum sponsors for User Group University, and why this UGU will be even better for vendors and attendees alike.

O'Reilly: User-Friendly Form Validation
(PHP/CSS)

O'Reilly: User-Friendly Form Validation
(PHP/CSS) 04/23/2004 08:00 AM
On O'Reilly PHP DevCenter this morning, there's a new piece that will make a lot of PHP coders' lives easier - U ser-Friendly Form Validation with PHP and CSS

The Zooming User Interface

The Zooming User Interface 08/15/2004 08:45 PM

Even in the present day, the desktop metaphor still pervades, but with increases in the amount of information available to any one person, this metaphor is felt to be in need of a reworking. The zooming user interface (ZUI) is an idea first discussed by Bederson (1993) as a radical change to the way in which a person interacts with a computer. This paper will initially discuss how a ZUI works, followed by a review of the empirical literature available.

Zooming User Interface (ZUI)

Zooming User Interface (ZUI) 08/17/2004 04:46 PM

Here's a fascinating rap on a new way to do UI's.

It's called ZUI.

Always interesting in that.....

Found via Advogato

Other pages on OS X user interface

Other pages on OS X user interface 06/05/2005 11:39 PM
Other developers write about walking the user interface line—trying to be consistent but also having to create custom widgets to stay modern.

Michael Dupuis: “Sure there are ‘lesser’ elements available to us as developers, but they often don’t have the ‘bling’ that users come to expect.”

Dan Wood: “We have to walk the line in our user interface decisions all the time, trying to make an application look consistent with the Mac interface, and also ‘modern.’”

User Interface Design

User Interface Design 06/14/2002 12:15 PM
"(...) good design always involves a process of compromise."

Location X gets tweaked user interface,
more

Location X gets tweaked user interface,
more 10/30/2003 01:40 PM
Shareware authors Alex Keresztes and Greg Novick have updated Location X, the US$20 location manager for Mac OS X, to version 2.0, which offers a new user interface, new customization options and more.

User Interface Design for Programmers

User Interface Design for Programmers 05/31/2004 11:33 PM

I read Joel Spolsky's book over the weekend: "User Interface Design for Programmers." This is an excellent guide to usability — for client apps and for Web development.

The strength of the book is that it doesn't start by presenting many hard-and-fast rules, but instead concetrates on general concepts that you really need to understand to develop an effective user interface. People Can't Read. People Can't Remember. People Can't Control the Mouse. Design for Extremes. These principles then naturally lead to more specific guidelines.

For example: you know how when you first learn CSS, you put a textarea rule in your sheet to change the font in text boxes from that ugly monospaced, Courier font to some slick variably-spaced font? Looks nice, sure, but Joel demonstrates how hard it can be to edit for some people. Sure, it's fine for you, but you're young and you have an optical, USB mouse, and you've been using computers since you got out of diapers.

Sadly, however, everyone isn't you. Some users don't have your eyesight, motor skills, or experience, and your tiny little variably-spaced font is now a problem for them. Lower-case L's, for instance, are now just one pixel wide. A lower-case I differs from a lower-case L by only a single pixel. If two lower-cased L's are next to each other ("allegory"), there's only one pixel of "gutter" space between them — ever tried getting the text insert cursor to land exactly between them? You're literally trying to hit a 1-pixel wide target.

Upon reading this, I went back to an app I was writing and changed all text inputs and text areas to Courier New, 12px. It doesn't look as nice, but I'll concede that it's easier and clearer to edit. Sometimes usability comes at the price of how things look, but so it goes.

Joel touches on the user model and system model that I read about earlier this year in Don Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things." Simply put, a user forms a model in his or her head about how your app works. That model may have nothing to do with how it really works (the system model), but that's your problem, not the user's. Your goal as an interface designer, is to make the implementation model (how the interface represents the system model) match the user model as closely as possible.

The book is full of good ideas and really solid, non-frilly advice. Joel's obvious experience saturates every page (I gather he did the UI for the ISP Juno, and was on the Microsoft Excel team). It's full-color with glossy pages and scads of screen caps.

I'll finish here by hand-typing an excerpt that's so good I'll risk the copyright lawyers. It addresses a point I talked about a while ago when I was struggling with the non-confirmity of the Linux interface.

I've seen companies where management prides themselves on doing things deliberately different from Microsoft. "Just because Microsoft does it, doesn't mean it's right," they brag, and then proceed to create a gratuitouisly different interface from the one that people are used to. Before you start chanting the mantra "just because because Microsoft does it, doesn't mean it's right," please consider two things.

One, even if it's not right, if Microsoft is doing it in a popular program like Word, Excel, Windows, or Internet Explorer, millions of people are going to think that it's right, or at least fairly standard. [...and] if you refuse to do it on some general religious principle that Bill Gates is the evil Smurf arch-nemesis Gargamel then you are just gratuitiously ruining your program so that you can feel smug and self-satisifed [...]

Two, don't be so sure it's not right. Microsoft spends more money on usability testing than you do; they keep detailed statistics based on millions of tech support phone calls; and there's a darn good chance that they did it that way because more people can figure out how to use it that way.

As much as I hate to admit Microsoft is right, amen to that.

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Report: User Interface Issues

Report: User Interface Issues 03/14/2005 05:07 PM
inconsistencies in Apple software, various design issues

Palm OS User Interface Guidelines

Palm OS User Interface Guidelines 12/06/2002 08:01 AM

nmap Graphical User Interface

nmap Graphical User Interface 06/15/2004 08:17 AM
NmapSi 0.2 Beta is Released!!

UIDK (User Interface Development Kit)

UIDK (User Interface Development Kit) 10/29/2003 11:26 AM
Homepage

User-Interface Designers Take Note

User-Interface Designers Take Note 06/05/2005 10:47 PM

Spencer Critchley is going to travel with a hammer from now on. Watch Out!

Resolver User Layer Interface 0.22

Resolver User Layer Interface 0.22 05/31/2004 05:41 AM
RULI implements a library aimed at querying DNS SRV resource records.

Resolver User Layer Interface 0.29

Resolver User Layer Interface 0.29 08/15/2004 05:59 AM
RULI implements a library aimed at querying DNS SRV resource records.

Resolver User Layer Interface 0.28

Resolver User Layer Interface 0.28 06/30/2004 07:24 PM
RULI implements a library aimed at querying DNS SRV resource records.

Resolver User Layer Interface 0.23

Resolver User Layer Interface 0.23 06/03/2004 06:48 PM
RULI implements a library aimed at querying DNS SRV resource records.

Mac User Interface Design for New
Developers

Mac User Interface Design for New
Developers 10/10/2002 09:55 AM

XUL Defines New User Interface Options

XUL Defines New User Interface Options 10/28/2002 11:23 AM

GLUI User Interface Library

GLUI User Interface Library 03/26/2005 09:25 PM
GLUI webpage has moved

IBM Reflexive User Interface Builder
1.0.0

IBM Reflexive User Interface Builder
1.0.0 08/09/2004 11:49 PM
A user interface building tool for Swing and Eclipse GUIs.

User Interface System Requirements

User Interface System Requirements 05/22/2004 11:12 AM

Resolver User Layer Interface 0.25

Resolver User Layer Interface 0.25 06/09/2004 05:18 PM
RULI implements a library aimed at querying DNS SRV resource records.

History of the Graphical User Interface

History of the Graphical User Interface 11/25/2002 09:54 AM

O'Reilly Network:

O'Reilly Network: 07/30/2004 02:58 AM
O'Reilly has a page up about their new magazine called Make

make.oreilly.com
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Wave Goodbye to the Ordinary User
Interface

Wave Goodbye to the Ordinary User
Interface 05/04/2004 11:57 PM
Open the door to Andy Wilson's room, the home of a modern day wizard. No bat's toes or eel skins here. Plenty of wires, webcams, a ceiling mounted laser pointer, speakers, pieces and parts from disassembled computers, and a collection of lamps. Serious toys for a man who found his passion combining hardware and software.

Mastery, Mystery and Misery of the User
Interface

Mastery, Mystery and Misery of the User
Interface 09/01/2004 11:32 AM
Jakob serves up a classic analogy to describe the current state of UI design.

Longhorn's ''task based'' user interface

Longhorn's ''task based'' user interface 12/02/2003 01:45 AM
In this Longhorn FAQ, Paul Thurrott touts Longhorn's "task based" user interface as superior to traditional desktop user interfaces. I'm sure there are better user interfaces, but I doubt of this is it. For anyone who thinks a task based user interface is a good idea, I offer two words:

UGENE: User-interface GENeration Engine

UGENE: User-interface GENeration Engine 01/22/2004 11:07 PM
UGENE Alpha1 Released

Microsoft Research: User Interface
Prototypes

Microsoft Research: User Interface
Prototypes 09/20/2004 10:35 PM
Daniel C. Robbins is a 3D User Interface Designer working at Microsoft Research. His current projects include visual presentation of large information spaces and scenarios for intelligent environments.

Tiger Mail screenshot and user interface

Tiger Mail screenshot and user interface 03/30/2005 05:35 PM
I find the screenshot of Mail for OS X 10.4 fascinating.

The first thing I notice is that the mailboxes aren’t in a drawer anymore, which I think is a good thing.

A few other things:

1. The toolbar background appears to be some sort of gradient. As in a metal window, there is no line between the top of the window and the toolbar buttons. But it’s not metal. It looks new. (The screenshot of system preferences has the same look.)

2. The toolbar icons appear to be embedded in some kind of new button. Whether it’s a new button style or just a look for the Mail toolbar icons I can’t tell from the screenshot.

3. The mailbox list has a background color. This may or may not be customizable—you can’t tell from the screenshot. It’s a good guess that, if customizable, the color shown is the default color. This is interesting because I can’t think of any other source lists from Apple that have colored backgrounds by default.

4. The vertical splitview dividing the mailboxes from the rest of the window is not a standard splitview. (Unless it’s new in OS X 10.4.) (Actually, I’m just assuming it’s a splitview.) Note how the apparent thickness of the divider is zero. The horizontal splitview looks more like a standard splitview—though I’ve squinted at it a bit and started to wonder if that’s true.

5. I don’t see a status bar. (It could be that, like Safari, the status bar is hidden by default. Or it could be that it was added after this screenshot was taken. Or maybe there just isn’t one. I don’t know.)

So... what do you think?

(Note: remember to respect any and all non-disclosure agreements. We’re just looking at public screenshots. And these screenshots may or may not resemble the final, shipping versions.)

Giving Users Control Over the User
Interface

Giving Users Control Over the User
Interface 12/01/2002 07:55 AM
"Essentially AllTheWeb allows the user to choose different text sizes for SOME of the text on the screen using style sheets."

DiscBlaze 3.1 offers revamped user
interface, more

DiscBlaze 3.1 offers revamped user
interface, more 04/23/2004 08:05 AM
Radical Breeze has released DiscBlaze 3.1, a "major update" to its popular CD/DVD burning utility for Mac OS X...

Apple gets iTunes user interface patent

Apple gets iTunes user interface patent 05/12/2004 02:52 AM
Apple Computer Inc. has been awarded a patent by the U.S. Patent and Trademark office for the iTunes interface. It's the latest in a series of patents Apple has applied for specific to its music software technology, according to Cnet. Apple has previously been awarded patents for other parts of iTunes, including the ability to stream songs over a network to another copy of the program.

The Commercial Feasibility of a
Next-Generation User Interface

The Commercial Feasibility of a
Next-Generation User Interface 05/28/2002 12:30 PM

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O'Reilly Network Column Discusses New User Interface Possibilities Offered by XUL

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