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Apr
19
Stephen Anderson talks about creating seductive interactions and how to create passionate users. Highly recommended.
Mar
17
Jan
18
Change one button and earn another $300 million in revenue? Here’s how to do it.
An eye-opener and great business argument that shows the real value of usability.
Nov
7
Via digg.
Aug
30
You only need 40 digits of pi to calculate the number of atoms in a circle the size of the entire universe:
Why? Consider this:
- Atoms are about 10-11 meters across
- The universe is about 90 billion light years (1027 meters) wide
Dividing it out, it takes about 1037 atoms to span the universe. So, around 40 digits of pi would be enough for an exact count of atoms needed to surround the universe. Were you planning on building something larger than the universe and precise to an atomic level? (If so, where would you put it?)
And that’s just 40 digits of precision; 80 digits covers us in case there’s a mini-universe inside each of our atoms, and 120 digits in case there’s another mini-universe inside of that one.
Aug
17
Watch this hugely impressive video of a new video enhancement technique.
Link to paper.
Jul
30
Joel, from Joel on Software, has written a book on user interface design for programmers. It’s available online, for free. Go read it.
(more…)
Jul
17
Jonathan DiCarlo (from Mozilla Labs) about developers, users, and user interfaces:
5. Are users dumb?
User interface design is not about dumbing things down for the poor stupid user.
We software developers, understanding the software as we do, find it easy to look down upon those who lack our understanding.
This is wrong.
Users aren’t dumb. They just have better things to do with their lives than memorizing the internal data model of our screwy software.
When software is hard to use, don’t make excuses for it. Improve it.
When a user makes a mistake, don’t blame the user. Ask how the software misled them. Then fix it.
The user’s time is more valuable than ours. Respect it.
Good UI design is humble.
Jun
24
I’m starting a company in a few weeks, and found this blog post about a failed startup quite interesting. I hope I can avoid his mistakes.
Jun
23
PicLens is quite possibly the most shiny Firefox add-on I’ve ever seen. Oh, and it’s quite cool too 
May
23
I really like this new & open source webmail project called AtMail:
May
18
How to crack a password? Bruce Scheier, of Wired Magazine, has some inside info on how to do it.
“According to Eric Thompson of AccessData, a typical password consists of a root plus an appendage. A root isn’t necessarily a dictionary word, but it’s something pronounceable. An appendage is either a suffix (90 percent of the time) or a prefix (10 percent of the time).
So the first attack PRTK performs is to test a dictionary of about 1,000 common passwords, things like “letmein,” “password1,” “123456″ and so on. Then it tests them each with about 100 common suffix appendages: “1,” “4u,” “69,” “abc,” “!” and so on. Believe it or not, it recovers about 24 percent of all passwords with these 100,000 combinations.“
But wait, there’s more.
Mar
18
Funny Chinese signs such as these can apparently be partly attributed to errors in translation software. Hilarious pics included.
