December 2009
15 posts
1 tag
1 tag
Pie are Squared
I was inspired this week by my daughter’s creativity. My wife was planning on baking some pies to give as gifts to a few friends and was buying aluminum pie pans. Felicity saw some Christmas tree-shaped cake pans and suggesting making the pies in them. My wife’s immediate reaction was, “No, pies have to be round.” But, she checked herself and thought, “Well, I guess that could work.” She ended up...
4 tags
Page Rage
I’m still coming to grips with my switch from Illustrator to Freehand. The transition is fraught with frustrations. I’m finding a lot of issues with their implementation of “art boards”, or what I consider to be an attempt to introduce Freehand’s multiple page capability.
The rulers aren’t page based. In Freehand, the window rulers would orient on the currently selected page. Thus, your...
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Sold on the Fold
The first time I traveled out of the country, aside from walking across the border into Canada, was a business trip to Scotland. One of my colleagues had a power adapter for his laptop, and I couldn’t believe the size of the standard UK plug. It seemed completely impractical to me, and ugly to boot. Royal College of Art graduate student Min-Kyu Choi has designed a plug that folds into a slim, 10mm...
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Short
I’ve made several longer posts this week, so today’s will be a short one, which is fitting for the subject.
Why is it that the sinks in so many public restrooms have spigots that are too short? The problem is caused by a combination of how far back the faucet is set on the sink and the length of the spigot. The result is that you repeatedly bump your hands against the back of the sink while...
3 tags
The future will not be found in the past
Don Norman’s recent essay, Technology First, Needs Last, has prompted much discussion in the design community.
I’ve come to a disconcerting conclusion: design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs.
He provides a very good argument in support of this provocative statement. I’m certainly not...
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Tales from the Field: Notes
I’ve worked on a lot of applications for doing work in the field, be that an oil refinery, an aircraft hanger, an auto dealership, or a mine field. One capability that most customers want is note taking. This sounds like a simple, even blasé request, but it’s really quite interesting how many differences there are in the details of the various implementations.
Some clients see notes as valuable...
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Time Out
I was trying to book my hotel for Interaction 10 today. Since I’m covering my own travel expenses this year, I’m not going to be able to stay in the hotel that the conference has picked. Even with the conference rate, it is still several hundred dollars more expensive than several other hotels in the area. I was using Orbitz to find the best rates and comparing it against hotels’ own websites....
3 tags
Activation
My wife and I just upgraded our original iPhones to the new 3GS. We both ended up having to call AT&T’s customer service to get them activated. My wife missed the Quick Start Guide included in the shipping box, so she didn’t realize that you had to activate the phone either online or by calling a number. I, however, followed the instructions, and it still didn’t work.
Step 1 says to leave the...
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Hull Visit
I’ve mentioned before that one of the things I like best about my job is that I’m often learning about new domains. I spent the past two days at the Norfolk Naval Base. Tuesday found me aboard the Dwight D. Eisenhower, an aircraft carrier. That is one big boat. I had the opportunity to tour the flight deck and the tower, but spent most of the day in the bowels of the ship. I can’t discuss the...
5 tags
In the Details: Arrowheads
Illustrator’s mechanism by which arrowheads can be added to lines is a juvenile attempt at user interface design that does not belong in a professional design application.
What should be a standard attribute of a path is hidden in an obscure location. I had to search the help files to find out how to use them. When a path is selected, you must go to the Appearance palette and select the Stroke....
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Summit 09
The U.S. National Design Policy Initiative (NDPI) held its second summit in Washington D.C. this past Tuesday. There were around 30 people in attendance from professional design organizations, education, and government including:
AIGA, the professional association for design Interaction Design Association (IxDA) American Architectural Foundation (AAF) American Institute of Architects (AIA)...
6 tags
Practical Lessons from Games: Quick Action Bars
Computer games feature beautiful artwork that immerses the player in a world. As such, graphical user interface components are usually kept to a minimum. However, games can be very complex with any number of actions that can be performed. The UI must provide some mechanism of selecting actions, and inventory items. Many games, from first-person shooters and MMORPGs to RTSs and adventure games,...
4 tags
Almost
As I’ve written in the past, one of the features that made Freehand such a valuable tool for me was its support for multiple pages. Illustrator CS4, four years after the demise of Freehand, is almost as useful. Its implementation of “artboards” is very similar to Freehand’s pages. They can be arranged in the workspace. They can be added and deleted. They can be sized to common paper dimensions,...
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Composition
Eric Raymond’s Rule of Composition has nothing to do with the layout of GUI screens. The rule states that programs should be be designed to be connected with other programs. It, in large part, discusses the use of simple text streams for communication and the importance of a well-defined API. The point that I want to focus on, however, is this:
To make programs composable, make them independent. A...
