September 2006
Enablr is #6 on Yahoo's The 9
Our web-to-realworld-services company Enablr.com got a mention on Yahoo’s The 9 videocast, specifically Stenographr, our online-form-to-snailmail service for the terminally lazy. Go check it out! (And yes, we’ll have a Transcribr transcript up soon at the Enablr blog.)
September 28, 2006 in King Marketing
Your next user interface: Big and flat?
I never thought I’d be saying this, but I miss Windows 3.0. I don’t miss its bugginess - I miss its flatness.
Longtime Mac users miss the “snappiness” of pre-Platinum Mac OS releases, too, though not their crashiness. Back in those days, a lot of the UI was hardcoded in the Mac ROM, which accounted for a lot of the system’s illusion of speed and responsiveness - the “feel” of the Mac that made so many users die-hard fans.
Today, most desktop UIs feature pseudo-photorealistic interfaces that pretend that there is a light source, shadows, highlights. There are buttons that look pushable, bevelled edges on windows apparently carved of brushed metal or shiny plastic. Does all that help the user, or does it get in the way?
It’s an important question to answer; with Vista and Leopard all but here, the paradigms of Aqua and Aero — a desktop world of drop shadows, tabs, Spaces, translucency effects, animations, cube transitions, 3D window stacks and other gewgaws — are now the “establishment” view of how you are supposed to interact and view information on a PC.
Of course, the wheels never stop turning. Just as small-W windows replaced blinking cursors and green-screen text interfaces, single-purpose web applications offer radical simplicity. And even on the desktop, the utility of the multiple-window, multiple-palette application may be close to an end. With interfaces often taking over the whole screen, are we moving away from the idea of “windows,” altogether?
More after the jump.
Continue reading “Your next user interface: Big and flat?”
September 20, 2006 in Web Standards & Usability | ✍ 2
technology roundup
Grab bag in lieu of posting - fear not, I’ll be back soon.
- One of my predictions came true - the iPod Games Store. Now something for the Mac, please.
- iTunes 7 got a darker, more sober makeover with a “black glass” highlighting that matches what we’ve seen in Front Row and iTV. I guess this is the new “Apple consumer media” look.
- What’s that USB port on the iTV for? iDVR, I hope.
- Note to Microsoft’s J. Allard: Brown? Really? I didn’t know that those UPS bar code scanner pads were so hip with da youts that they want that look in their imitation iPods.
- Alexander Probst, writing at Roger Black’s new group blog, has pronounced that Zinio-style e-magazines are the future of the Web. He is, of course, writing from the year 1994. And ow, white serif type on a red background? Are you guys trying to kill my retinas? (Attribution corrected - thanks, Rob Hunter)
- News to me: those Videotron digital cable decoders have shrunk from 1U-rack-server size to a weensy thing about the size of a box of chocolates. So how come there’s still never anything good on? Doesn’t Moore’s Law apply to television programs as well?
- Wired: Reason 3 and MOTU Digital Performer 5. Tired: Logic Express 7. Expired: My demo license of Live 5.2. Cute kid, great interface, it coulda been a contender, but it’s still more of a live looping performance tool and not entirely DAW-like yet.
developing…
