Global Nerdy » User Interface / Usability

Free Icon-a-Rama

Joey deVilla — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 17:26:36 +0000

If you’re doing some development work and need interim (or even final) icons for your user interfaces and are short on cash to hire a designer or even buy icon sets, these free — but decent — icon resources may be just what you need!

User Interface Icons

User Interface Icons is a new site created by Abdylas Tynyshov as a personal project. “The objective of this project,” he writes, “is to provide high quality, free icons to software and web application developers at zero cost!” The first set he’s posted is a collection of common application icons with a yellow-and-blue color scheme in 80-by-80, 48-by-48, 32-by-32 and 24-by-24 pixel sizes.

FamFamFam’s “Silk” Icon Set

FamFamFam has Silk, a set of 1000 16-by-16 icons that covers all sorts of application needs. I’ve found these to be quite useful on a number of projects.

Pinvoke’s “Diagona” Icon Set

Pinvoke’s Diagona icon set is similar to Famfamfam’s “Silk”, but has icons in both 10-by-10 as well as 16-by-16 sizes.

Drunkey Love Icons

Drunkey Love has a set of over 100 icons 16-by-16 icons in the “Silk” and “Diagona” vein.

BrandSpankingNew’s Teeny Grayscale Icons

If you’re developing a grayscale app — maybe something for older mobile phones, or perhaps you’re going for a “retro” look for your app — BrandSpankingNew’s set of 113 10-by-10 icons might fit the bill.

Stylegala’s “Bullet Madness”

This may be of more use for website design than application development, but when you need a graphic bullets, Stylegala’s got a good collection made by various artists called Bullet Madness.

“Sweetie” Icon Set

Sweetie is a set of “cute and clear” general application icons created by Joe North.

ASP.NET Icons

If you’re looking for icons with a Windows XP look, ASP.NET Icons has over 300 that should do the trick.

Windows Startup Screens and Sounds, from 1.0 to Vista

Joey deVilla — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 19:25:37 +0000

Here’s a YouTube video that shows all the startup screens and sounds for Windows, from version 1.0 up to the present. If they ever make a geek version of Koyanisqatsi or Baraka, they should include something like this:

Can’t see the video? Click here.

Ease of Use Doesn’t Always Mean “Fewer Buttons”

Joey deVilla — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 15:50:42 +0000

In yesterday’s posting, Monkey Knife Fight, I point to an argument made by Elliotte Rusty Harold that Java’s java.util.List is more “humane” than Ruby’s Array since it has fewer methods. He posed the question “Which of these three remotes would you rather use?”:

There is, of course, a point where having too few buttons or controls is a hindrance. Which instrument would you rather play? This beastly thing with an ancient user interface sporting 88 buttons, each of which reacts with volume proportional to the force with which you press them, and three pedals?

Or this much simpler, more “humane” interface with two controls?

Google Maps: Now Embeddable, Just Like YouTube Videos

Joey deVilla — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 20:21:57 +0000

Expect to see more maps embedded in blog entries shortly: Google Maps are now embeddable, YouTube-style. No longer do you need an API key or JavaScript know-how to add a Google Map to your blog entries and web pages — if you know how to embed a YouTube video, you also know how to embed a Google Map. Congratulations to Google on a job well done!

I decided to try it out by getting the code to embed a map showing the location of the Tucows head office, shown below:

View Larger Map

In Praise of the “Demo Button”

Joey deVilla — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 17:34:44 +0000

Synthesizer Demo Buttons

I suppose my playing the accordion is a development resulting directly from my dislike of being tied down behind keyboard stacks. That’s why, prior to my getting my first accordion, I was an aficionado of the uncoolest way to play keyboards: the keytar. I’ve rented a number and owned two. My first was the Yamaha SHS-10, pictured below:

The next keytar was the one pictured below, the Yamaha SHS-200. I’m on my second one of these:

These two keyboards were released in the late 1980’s and were among the first wave of synthesizers to come with a “demo button”. The first affordable “workstation” synths were appearing on the market around then — these were synths that had enough sounds for pop songs, from keyboards to strings and horns to guitars and drums — and many of them also had sequencers, which could record “perfomance data” (that is, the keys you pressed and also how you pressed them). Pressing the demo button would start up a built-in song that would demonstrate the sound and recording capabilities of the keyboard. In the case of the SHS-200, the demo song was an obviously Japanese jazz fusion number, while for the SHS-10, Yamaha had somehow managed to licence Last Christmas by George Michael’s old group, Wham! I recall that the Roland D-5 synth had a pretty good intro to its demo song — so good that the Happy Mondays sampled it as the intro to one of their numbers.

Although these demo songs were cheesy, they were still useful in the showroom, as they gave the synth shopper a decent idea of a given keyboard’s sonic capabilities. It’s been a dog’s age since I hung around a keyboard showroom checking out the latest models, but I’m pretty sure that many synths, especially the ones aimed at hobbyists and amateur musicians, still have demo buttons.

html2wiki’s Demo Button

I found the html2wiki page by way of Reddit. It takes HTML that you type or paste in or HTML from an URL and converts it to wikitext, which you can then copy and paste into a wiki:

Click the screenshot to go to the html2wiki page.

When I thought about giving it a try, I thought “Well, I’d better go look around for some suitable HTML to try,” when I noticed the Use Sample HTML at the bottom of the form. I clicked that and a moment later, I had sample HTML as well as its conversion to wikitext.

There’s all sorts of research as well as personal experience that suggests that web users are an impatient sort. A lot of people might have navigated away and never seen html2wiki in action had it not been for that sample button. By providing that “demo button” at the bottom of the form, the creators of the page removed a small but not insignificant barrier to taking html2wiki for a test spin and provided a moment of satisfaction that users will remember.

It’s got me thinking about the software and services that I work on — are there places where a demo button would come in handy?

Google Directions Now Include a Rush Hour Estimate

Joey deVilla — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 05:00:54 +0000

It may be a small addition, but it’s a useful one. You know how Google Maps directions give you an estimate of how long your trip will take? They now include an additional estimate: how long your trip will take in traffic.

Hey, Facebook: It’s Spelled “availAble”!

Joey deVilla — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 18:09:52 +0000

One area of user interface development that could stand some improvement is spell-checking. I’m not aware of any widely-used system for spell-checking a web application’s template or resource files, but good spelling certainly helps an app look more professional.

The latest spelling mistake in an application I’ve seen comes from the “Edit App” page for Facebook developers. One of the fields on the page lets you specify the “Canvas Page URL”, the URL within apps.facebook.com where your app can be found. It uses Ajax to give you instant feedback as to whether the URL is available or not as you type — but the word “Available” is misspelled:

Jing’s Approach to Installing on the Mac

Joey deVilla — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 21:36:30 +0000

In the most recent posting on Jeff Atwood’s excellent developer blog Coding Horror, the question is posed:

Why does the Mac require the user to jump through a bunch of manual hoops to install an application? Why not use a traditional installer (a.k.a. setup.exe) that automates this manual work for you?

Rather than get into the details of the debate in the comments to that article over the ease of installing apps on the Mac the manual way, let me instead show you Jing’s answer to the question:

(I wrote about Jing in the last post.)

The Jing approach is to give you two options:

The incredibly easy way: Double-click the installer script and you’ll be shown this a dialog box that tells you that you’re about to initiate an action that will:
- Copy Jing to the Applications folder
- Eject the disk image
- Start Jing
The traditional manual way, in which you drag the app to the Applications folder. An alias to the Applications folder is provided, so you don’t have to open another Finder window.

No options dialog boxes, no EULAs, no extraneous messages for the purposes of marketing — just install and go.

I think it’s a good solution. What say you, Jeff?

Happy 15th Birthday, Thinkpad / A Slightly Saucy ThinkPad Story

Joey deVilla — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 16:36:19 +0000

According to The Register, today is the 15th birthday of the Thinkpad, the laptop originally made by IBM and now Lenovo. Aside from re-establishing IBM’s reputation as a computer hardware manufacturer and becoming an icon for businessperson on the go, the ThinkPad is also notable for popularizing the TrackPoint controller.

And Now, The Saucy ThinkPad Story

Image borrowed from Coding Horror — it’s from the Touchpad vs. Trackpoint article.

My co-worker at OpenCola, Helen Waters, told me this story.

Helen was our tech person was OpenCola (this was back in the late ’90’s), making sure that people got the machines they needed, that their software got installed and so on. One day, she had presented a woman at the office with her new company-assigned ThinkPad whose pointing device, naturally enough, was a TrackPoint.

The woman, who’d used only mice and touchpads before, had no idea how to mouse around with the TrackPoint and began tapping on it as if it were a button — first a couple of tentative taps, and then taps in rapid succession — with predictable results.

Helen stepped in and quickly demonstrated the TrackPoint principle. She reached in and with her finger, pointed the TrackPad the way it was meant to be used — like a tiny joystick.

“It figures,” said the woman, “It was obviously designed by a man.”

XBox 360’s New Controllers

Joey deVilla — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 14:40:13 +0000

It Just Feels Right

I’ve had my XBox 360 for nearly a year now (having won one in a trivia game at last October’s Ajax Experience conference), and it’s been the best experience I’ve ever had with any Microsoft product…because it doesn’t feel like a Microsoft product. Where most Microsoft “consumer” products make you feel as if they were designed by the “B-team” — the ones who didn’t make the cut for the stuff aimed at corporate customers — the XBox 360 feels right. I don’t, as Danny O’Brien puts it, “feel like I’m eating out of the trash bins outside a cubicle farm”.

(According to Scoble, one of the reasons the XBox is a good gaming console is that their headquarters were purposely located miles away from the Microsoft campus.)

The XBox 360 now occupies a nice middle ground between the inexpensive casual/party-game oriented Wii and the overly expensive grind-away-for-hours PlayStation 3, and the two new controllers suggest that the XBox folks know this and are pressing this advantage.

For the Hardcore: The Chatpad

The Chatpad marries the standard XBox 360 controller to a QWERTY thumb keyboard, which I assume will be used for in-game communications and IMing among the more hardcore XBox Live set. They’ve been talking about this for some time, and there’s been demand for this sort of thing, so this isn’t a surprise.

What I find more interesting is the other controller…

The “Big Button” Controller

The upcoming Scene It? game will be bundled with four of these controllers, which have the standard A/B/X/Y buttons and a different-coloured giant button for each one so you can tell them apart. Unlike the standard or Chatpad XBox controllers, whose design seems to be for the more serious gamer playing alone or as a twosome, these controllers’ design suggest that they’re for ther casual gamer in a more social setting. It’s apparent that the XBox team is learning lessons from the Wii.

When I first saw these controllers, I thought of two things:

First, I thought that this would be a perfect opportunity to resurrect the game You Don’t Know Jack, one of the most fun computer games I’ve ever played. The game is simple enough for them to turn it into something you could download from XBox Live, and I think it would be a hit. I’m not the only one; check out the comments to this Engadget story on the Big Button controller.
I was also reminded of Microsoft’s trackball for kids, the Easyball:

Jakob Nielsen Doesn’t Drink at “Coyote Ugly”

Joey deVilla — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 05:18:25 +0000

An unsuspecting customer drinking Jakob Nielsen’s kool-aid.

After reading Jakob Nielsen’s rather self-satisfied and smug Write Articles, Not Blog Postings and Robert Scoble’s counterpoint, I have these three things to say:

While Nielsen has a number of good ideas on making things usable, when it comes to communicating and reaching out to people, Scoble is the guy to emulate. As with some other UI guys I know, I suspect that Nielsen’s perspective on human factors come from his perspective as an interested outsider.
Reading Nielsen’s post, I was reminded of a description of user interface specialists that George once wrote: “little dictators — SimCity-sized tyrants — intent on foisting their New Orthodoxy on everyone.”
Finally, I leave you with the best version of an observation that Joel Spolsky has written a couple of times:

Usability is not everything. If usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other.

That “Lightswitch” Entry Reminds Me of an Old Story…

Joey deVilla — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 14:57:27 +0000

The article The Lightswitch That Might Explain a Lot About Java (which has received way more comments and stimulated more debate that I would’ve ever predicted) reminded me of a story that used to get forwarded back and forth among techie types. I thought I’d post it here…

The Engineer, the Computer Scientist and the Toaster

Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. “What do you think this is?”

One advisor, an engineer, answered first. “It is a toaster,” he said.

The king asked, “How would you design an embedded computer for it?”

The engineer replied, “Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantizes its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I’ll show you a working prototype.”

The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, “Toasters don’t just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don’t look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years.”

“With this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods. Specialize this class into subclasses: grains, pork, and poultry. The specialization process should be repeated with grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes, and waffles; pork divided into sausage, links, and bacon; and poultry divided into scrambled eggs, hard- boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, and various omelet classes.”

“The ham and cheese omelet class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy, and poultry classes. Thus, we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without multiple inheritance. At run time, the program must create the proper object and send a message to the object that says, ‘Cook yourself.’ The semantics of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than to scrambled eggs.”

“Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered some derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance. Of course, users don’t want the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent processing is required, too.”

“We must not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility, and the darkness knob is confusing. Users won’t buy the product unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface. When the breakfast cooker is plugged in, users should see a cowboy boot on the screen. Users click on it, and the message ‘Booting UNIX v.8.3′ appears on the screen. (UNIX 8.3 should be out by the time the product gets to the market.) Users can pull down a menu and click on the foods they want to cook.”

“Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. An Intel 80386 with 8MB of memory, a 30MB hard disk, and a VGA monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multitasking, object oriented language that supports multiple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will be a snap. (Imagine the difficulty we would have had if we had foolishly allowed a hardware-first design strategy to lock us into a four-bit microcontroller!).”

The king wisely had the computer scientist beheaded, and they all lived happily ever after.

The Lightswitch That Might Explain a Lot About Java

Joey deVilla — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 16:55:22 +0000

John Maeda at The Laws of Simplicity has an interesting photo of a lightswitch at Sun Labs:

Click the photo to see the original.

He writes:

I gave a talk at Sun Labs where I encountered a special light switch in one of their conference rooms. At first I thought it was some kind of silly “engineer” joke. But the light switch functions as stated for real. Does it win the award for the most confusing light switch? I bet there are other ones out there that are equally complex to use.

The lightswitch design philosophy at Sun is quite clearly reflected in Java.

The World Needs More Dialog Boxes Like This

Joey deVilla — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 03:35:55 +0000

Here’s a dialog box from Aegisub, an application for subtitling video:

Screen capture courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

For the benefit of RSS readers and search engines, here’s the text of the dialog box:

You have chosen to use the “Comic Sans” font. As a programmer and a typesetter, I must urge you to reconsider. Comic Sans is the most abused font in the history of computing, so please avoid using it unless it’s REALLY suitable. Thanks.

I’m really glad that such a dialog box exists!

If you’d like to join the cause to rid the world of that horrible font, I suggest that you visit the Ban Comic Sans site.

SarcasticGamer.com’s Amusing Parody of Microsoft’s “Surface” Ads

Joey deVilla — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 15:50:45 +0000

I’m surprised this didn’t happen sooner, but someone — SarcasticGamer.com, the folks behind the How to Kill Your Brand video — has finally created a parody of Microsoft’s “you should be in awe, or at least think we still have some ‘game’ left” ads for Surface, their vision of “big-ass table” computing:

Microsoft Surface, Sun Starfire and Apple Knowledge Navigator Videos

Joey deVilla — Wed, 30 May 2007 18:33:23 +0000

Yesterday, I wrote about how the “cyberwar” in Estonia seemed rather different from the way William Gibson depicted cyberattacks in his “Sprawl series” novels, most notably Neuromancer. I thought that as long as I was comparing speculations of what future tech would be like against how the future actually turned out, I should tie it in with the hot news of the moment, Microsoft Surface.

Microsoft Surface’s Promo Videos

In case you haven’t seen the promo videos for Surface yet, I’ve posted them below. Here’s the first one: Microsoft Surface – The Magic:

Thos one’s called: Microsoft Surface – The Power:

And finally, Microsoft Surface – The Possibilities:

Sun’s Starfire Concept Video (1992)

I mentioned Sun’s Starfire project in my post about Surface, but thought it deserved a front-and-centre mention. Starfire wasn’t a project to develop an actual platform, but to develop concepts that would eventually find their way into future platforms when the technology made it possible and show them in a video. The video is available online in MPEG-4 format, but you’d better have a good connection: it’s 270 megs in size:

Click the image above to view the Starfire video.

Apple’s Knowledge Navigator Video (1987)

If the Starfire video gives you a sense of deja vu, it’s probably because you’ve seen Apple’s Knowledge Navigator concept video, shown below:

If the Starfire and Knowledge Navigator videos bear similarities to each other, they should; Apple UI guru Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini helped create both.

Next…

I’m going to post some notes on some of the concepts in the Starfire video that appear to have come to fruition with Surface as well as my notes on what they thought 2004 would be like back in 1992.

Microsoft’s Midnight Surprise, Revealed: Microsoft Surface

Joey deVilla — Wed, 30 May 2007 05:21:09 +0000

Microsoft’s Midnight Surprise? It’s Microsoft Surface, a large-area screen-and-multi-touch-surface computer. Here are some places to get started:

It’s pretty nifty technology, the sort of which we’d been waiting for since Bruce Tognazzini showed the world (okay, maybe not the world, but a couple of really interested people at Sun and whoever bought Tog on Software Design) his “Starfire Project” concept back in 1992, in which he showed a theoretical multi-touch surface computer hooked to a global network in the far-off year of 2004.

That’s all I’m writing for now; this Global Nerd’s gotta go beddy-bye.

Dialog Box of the Week

Joey deVilla — Fri, 25 May 2007 19:24:13 +0000

Worse Than Failure asks: in the dialog box below, which button do you click to reset to the factory default settings, and which one to you click to cancel the reset operation?

Even this redesign featuring CB radio slang (I watched Convoy and many episodes of BJ and the Bear as a kid) makes more sense:

Funny Linksys Dialog Box

Joey deVilla — Thu, 10 May 2007 20:23:37 +0000

Many people, myself included, have a Linksys WRT54GS quietly performing yeoman service in their homes, offices and home offices. I’ve never had any trouble upgrading its firmware, but other people have, and they’ve been greeted with this All Your Base-esque message:

Here’s a close-up:

[Images courtesy of my friend, Miss Fipi Lele.]