31–34 of 34 posts
An interesting concept, for programmers it would be great, if they supported something along the lines of 1996s "Software Visualization in the Large", by Thomas Ball and Stephen Eick [1]. I did something like that (i.e., marrying the visualization with a file management metaphor) quite a while back in Eclipse, but never got around to maintain it. Too bad, because I kind of liked it. (And it was different from AspectB…
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Ha! Must be a browser thing; I actually measured it with xScope.
It depends on the width of your window. This is a quite common bug that only shows up when the browser window is too narrow. Since their website is incredibly wide (it doesn’t even fit on my 1440px wide screen) it probably shows up for quite a lot of users. My browser window is usually 700px or so wide which is why I encounter that particular bug all the time – especially on otherwise quite nicely designed websites.…
A design that would look good on your layout would look terrible on another user's widescreen; a design that would look good on a widescreen will look awkward, at best, on your setup.
It doesn't help that so many people are still clinging to CSS as the primary answer for this, since it is completely ill-equipped to deal with this problem.
The interaction modes look very shiny but in the same way "Minority Report" looks shiny. As to the name, I'll wait until Aza chimes in one way or the other but prima facie it feels pretty weird.
Agreed. I believe the concept was taken out of Raskin's book "The Humane Interface" (great read, but it's been a while since I took it all in). After using it for a bit I have to say it's a nice experiment, but in no way useful for the day to day. Something about how you interact with it all just doesn't feel right. I might be able to say more after I used it for a bit, but I just don't want to. The UI doesn't invite…
That is also "a nice experiment, but in no way useful for the day to day."
Additionally, Jef's involvement in the development of the Macintosh's user interface has been vastly overstated... mostly by himself. Evidence for this can be seen in reading his own essays which predate his 1981 "history of the Macintosh" (in the older essays, it's clear that his vision has little to do with the Macintosh at all), and online repositories of Apple stories like folklore.org where many people report that Jef had the habit of laying claim to everyone else's ideas.
Example: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=The_Father_of_The...
The end result is basically this: everything Raskin worked on except the Mac is weird and experimental, and not practical or enjoyable.
His reputation definitely has the Halo Effect going on, but sadly, if you pay close attention, it's clear that the emperor may not be naked but he is certainly not fully clothed.
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Agreed. I believe the concept was taken out of Raskin's book "The Humane Interface" (great read, but it's been a while since I took it all in). After using it for a bit I have to say it's a nice experiment, but in no way useful for the day to day. Something about how you interact with it all just doesn't feel right. I might be able to say more after I used it for a bit, but I just don't want to. The UI doesn't invite…
"The Humane Interface" is a fascinating book, but if you read it again and pay close attention to Jef's interaction design ideas, you'll realize they're all extremely "out there" and, in the end, pretty unusable. Case in point: the Canon Cat. That is also "a nice experiment, but in no way useful for the day to day." Additionally, Jef's involvement in the development of the Macintosh's user interface has been vastly o…
Considering Raskin's ideas about user interaction as "out there" is a matter of perspective. Touch screen interfaces that are now common today were once considered "out there". His love affair with the Canon Cat wasn't just a personal obsession. He made (what I considered to be) a group of well reasoned arguments about why it was so good based on the concepts it brought into reality. Off the top of my head I can recall automatic file saving (with no consideration to the file system) being one such argument. This feature will be shipping in the next release of OS X (Lion). If Raskin's ideas in the Humane Interface were "out there", then I take that phrase to be synonymous with "avant garde".
The zoom UI he talks about in another chapter (and what the OS X app Raskin has attempted to implement) seems like a strong candidate for a general data exploration and discovery UI. What he put forth in the book was conceptual, and no one has yet made a commercially or critically appealing implementation. That doesn't mean it won't happen. It just mean it hasn't happened.