StupidApp

In love with a hippo

2007-07-29T01:24:00.000+03:00

I love reading and listening to Kathy Sierra, her blog and talks can teach anyone amazing stuff about user interface design and product-making in general. One important question that Kathy often asks is: What products are you passionate about?

I'm passionate about filehippo.com, it's a wonderful wonderful site, providing speedy almost-1-click downloading of all the apps one needs on a windows machine (firewall, anti-spyware, winamp, acrobat, open-office, firefox, opera, etc.)

Everything is organized in a non-nonsense interface, the Search on the top right works like a charm if you want to quickly find something, and the logo is insanely great.

Great work.

Passionate about websites? Applications? online Radio?
Write a comment and tell me about it. (I'm curious)

The forgotten art of the landing page

2007-07-21T16:59:00.000+03:00

I was reading some article on an Israeli content site and noticed an ad for a well-known israeli artschool called "Camera Obscura". I usually don't click on such flashy banner ads - but sometimes I do, wondering what the following page looks like.

It took me a few minutes to realize that I have no idea how I got the image above - it looks like some basic install of DotNetNuke (a web content management system), and it has a mini-form inside that asks the user for details such as name, email, etc.

The surprising thing is - this form appears to be real - it's not a bug - the people at Camera Obscura, or the agency that sold them the flash ad - sent all users clicking on the banner to this irrelevant looking page with the mini-mini form inside that's titled (loose translation): "Schedule a meeting / Request more information".

My bet is, only a tiny fraction of the users actually went on and entered the requested information. Most of them probably wondered what this weird pop-up page is and closed it right away.

It should be common knowledge by now, that animated flashy banner are not enough by themselves - they can be impressive and stuff, but if they direct users to a weird-looking page that has nothing to do with the look & feel of the original banner and context - they accomplish nothing.

The ad agency also abused its responsibility - it sold an online ad that achieves almost nothing - it only confuses users and leaves little or no impact.

For more on landing pages try seth godin's post on the subject.

Wii hacking

2007-07-19T00:48:00.000+03:00

I just saw this video again in a post on n.e.r.d.

It's really great to see such lovely applications of hacking - the Wii remote connected to some usb thingie I presume and into a macbookpro and used as an input device for a sound/live video app using the Mac's internal iSight camera.

Great, inspiring stuff.

I Love Adium

2007-07-11T02:15:00.000+03:00

I love Adium, I really do. such simplicity in an IM clone, and it works just perfect with all my msn buddies. Files get transferred pretty fast, they actually get transferred which is good. Buddy-icons are shown, everything just works.

It has a marvelous sound and Icon scheme, great themes out-of-the-box, absolutely lovable.

I've been meaning to write a post about that for quite some time now - I'm really passionate about using Adium. It's really IM reborn for me.

So there.

The interface of a cheeseburger

2007-07-01T02:21:00.000+03:00

A nice post on the iA blog titled The interface of a cheeseburger".

(I could write a lengthy link description, but that would spoil the fun of clicking a huge cheeseburger link image and waiting to see what opens up.)

Hikikomori: or why I'm scared of leaving my room with my PC

2007-06-19T12:06:00.000+03:00

There are some problem solving workflows that only come to mind when I encounter a problem that I haven't seen in a while. One example is the windows safemode -> change resolution -> restart in normal mode -> choose resolution again workflow that I often performed when moving a PC around between 2 different monitors.

But there's a catch, this workflow only works with windows versions before Windows 2000. If you're up-to-date, you'll have to think ahead before moving your PC between 2 different monitors.

I often move my PC at work between work rooms, and each room has some monitors already in place, but every time I do that, I suddenly remember that my relatively high resolution: (1280x1024 at 100 mhz on a 21" CRT monitor) just wont work on some new LCDs we got here.

One would expect that moving my PC between 2 monitors should be easy. Plug & Play and start working. But in fact, it's nothing but easy: It's impossible!

The old workflow of moving the PC to a new monitor, booting in Safe Mode and re-setting the screen resolution just doesn't work in Windows 2000 and up. When the user restarts back in Normal Mode, the old monitor resolution is selected again and my monitor refuses to display at 100 mhz once more - which makes the machine completly unusable!

I really tried everything I could think of to solve this problem without finding another 21" CRT just to lower my screen resolution - I even used Safe Mode to disable the display adapter device in the Device Manager, only to find out that when I start it back in Normal Mode after restart, The screen goes black again and resolution comes back to normal.

After giving up on all sorts of hacky workarounds, I ended up looking for another 21" CRT in the new work room, and finally found one only to use it for booting into Normal Mode and setting my resolution to 1024x768, making sure it's low enough for the new monitor.

Plug & Play is long considered dead in many areas such as Printer installation (more on that some other time), but is some ease of use, on such basic devices, really so much to ask?

Mark Corelan

2007-04-23T19:23:00.000+03:00

Mark Corelan is a graphic designer who specializes in on-screen UI design for film and television. Sadly there are no actual screenshots in his website but there's a fun show-reel to watch.

Great stuff. (I also mentioned him in shmentura.)

Interesting technology stories

2007-04-12T02:45:00.000+03:00

Low end mac is a long running mac website that features a serious of articles called Orchad. Orchad tells the stories behind many world-known technology projects and companies, mostly apple-related.

The articles are extremely well written and I can get carried a way and read a few of them instead of going back to work on my design work.

Great stuff.

I really enjoyed:
The NeXT Years
The Amiga Story
How Jean Louis Gassée Changed the Mac's Direction

G'RAFFE

2007-02-20T03:36:00.000+02:00

The people over at G'RAFFE have an insanely cool flash-based navigation on their site.
I usually really hate flash sites when it comes to online-portfolios, but the mouse hover sound effects are heart warming. :)

I especially like frieda (amazingly funny, kissy?), and this typographic clip.

Prototyprally

2007-02-18T02:41:00.000+02:00

Prototyprally is an experimental flash games blog. It mainly includes quick prototypes of flash games. Interesting stuff.

Interface experiments, EmoChat

2007-02-13T19:19:00.000+02:00

Great flash experiments over at Typorganism, I especially like the EmoType Chat which includes several animation effects according to special emotion icons use: ";) ;( ;0"...

Quick links

2007-01-29T04:09:00.000+02:00

Thing have been fairly quite here, mainly because of the heavy workload of the semester. It'll be over real soon so stay tuned for some user interface rants as usual.

In the mean time, some quick links:

Over at subtraction.com, Khoi Vinh talks about a surprisingly nice feature in Apple's address book application.

Rich Ziade, of basement.org writes about Framing Software: communicating specific workflows by actually turning features off. And it's especially interesting that someone is talking about taking features off of 37signals' applications.

Inspiring tactile interfaces

2007-01-21T08:17:00.000+02:00

Demos of tactile interfaces are always very inspiring. They often present stuff like futuristic new input methods and some creative software that goes along.

Stuff like Jeff Han's demonstration at TED or the TactaPad really makes you drool over your browser. But I think that even smaller input method innovations are inspiring as well. When I heard about 3DConnexions' devices for the first time I was really excited. I even thought about the possibilities of trying to build something similar with a 2nd trackball mouse connected to my PC.

I think my general point is that even slight innovations in existing input methods can seed the creations of new applications. Even more moderate stuff as the MacBook Pro's multitouch touch pad (1 finger for pointing the cursor, 2 fingers for scrolling) can enable, for example, 3 fingers 3d panning (in ZBrush perhaps?), etc.

Great flash sites

2007-01-08T20:59:00.000+02:00

Mathieu Badimon creates some great flash websites.

These include some vector manipulation games at the 'lab' and some great windowish interface at communicationresponsable

[via computerlove]

The horrors of functionality restrictions

2006-12-17T14:28:00.000+02:00

About a year ago, my girlfriend bought an Epson CX3500 printer. It caused many problems almost from day one: The ink would ran out too quickly, less expensive re-fill ink wouldn't work right, the expensive ink wouldn't work well as well and so forth.

One particularly annoying behavior was the printer's refusal to print grayscale / black & white documents when it's color cartridges are empty.

Each time I hear about this problem I just go nuts. It makes me want to throw the printer out to the street and buy another one. It's just completely incomprehensible to me that the developers/designers at Epson thought this can be considered as a reasonable behavior.

The printer's entire goal in life is to print documents. It's not an online ink shopping website. It's not an ink commercial. It should never refuse to print my documents unless it absolutely can't. It should have no problem printing b/w documents if it has Black ink.

I have an HP psc at home. I really disliked hp printers before but this one has just been great to me. This hp also has a similar problem, but it's less of a pain: it refuses to print anything if one of the cartridges is missing, but it will print a b/w document even if the color cartridge is empty.

Someone at Epson thought it's reasonable to ask users to buy color printer cartridges to print black and white documents. That someone is obviously wrong. Products should empower users, not restrict them.

Inspiring design films

2006-12-16T21:18:00.000+02:00

One of our teachers at typography class recommended Hillman Curtis' website. It features many inspiring interviews with top graphic designers: Milton Glaser, Paula Scher, Sagmeister, etc.

Great fun.

lineto

2006-12-12T16:04:00.000+02:00

The folks at lineto sell fonts.

They have a nice site up with great navigation - based on the 3-pane file navigation of the iPod / Apple Finder.

Take a close look at grandma

2006-12-02T15:50:00.000+02:00

Richard has a great post on basement.org titled "technical ignorance is bliss" - he talks about the difficulties non-technical people often have with computers and software and how those difficulties can benefit us (developers, designers) as spectators.

Inquisitor is genius

2006-11-24T01:28:00.000+02:00

Inquisitor 3 is a great search plugin for Safari (apple's web browser). It implements Spotlight-like functionality for Safari. (just type something in the search box and get immediate highlighted results, autocompletion suggestions, etc).

This application is an immediate Bonzai. The developer just completely nailed it. It works amazingly fast, it's dead easy (since the user is only required to use the search box the same way he is already used to) and it works just great.

I just wish I could have that on Firefox on my mac, and actually, on Firefox everywhere.

The interface is the system

2006-11-15T11:47:00.000+02:00

Dan wrote an interesting post on the adaptivepath blog: "The interface is the system". Users perceive the entire system through it's interface and are unable to differentiate one from the other. They are unaware of the system's internals and details - they only see what they interact with...

Back to basics: bloatware vs. keeping things simple

2006-11-12T08:34:00.000+02:00

I remember the first time I tried to download Easy CD. I was in a distant computer with broadband far from my house and wanted to burn some mp3s I downloaded quickly. I had a cd burner but no burning software.

I quickly found out that Easy CD was a 100mb or so download, and I could not be more surprised. A CD burning application that comes in the size of an iso image? Are they insane? Why should the burning application take 100 off my hard drive? (and this was 4 years ago.)

In a recent visit to Nero & Roxio websites I found out the situation today is much worse. Nero requires 288MB of 'permanent' disk space and Roxio's Toast requires 300MB of disk space.

Roxio and Nero forgot how to keep things simple. A burning application should just be able to burn cds and dvds. It shouldn't be the 1-stop-home-media-editor. It doesn't need a wave editor, and a photo organizer.

Disco is a new (very hyped) burning application. It is what one might call a trendy-eyecandy-ish burning application. But other than being really pretty, it has one important feature - it's an insanely small, 700 KB download! It's a small, minimal, simple application that helps me get things done and doesn't take too much space.

Why is that so special nowadays?

Flatlab

2006-11-06T22:44:00.000+02:00

Flatlab is a home for some weird graphic artwork: icons, pixel graphics and my main intrest: expressive GUI mockups.

Flatlab was formely known as CubeLab in the BeOS community, where several cubelab inspired themes exist.

Old machine gone, new Macbook arrives

2006-11-06T01:17:00.000+02:00

It's hard to describe how frustrated I felt when my PC completely crashed last Wednesday. I think the PC just went nuts and became jealous because it learned about me getting a new mac laptop.

Computer crushes such as these are a nice opportunity to fire up the old BeOS partitions I have installed, or boot into the QNX live cd. They're always a joy because they boot in virtually no time and let me do stuff I need quickly.

Another crash time surprise was an old AMD K6-2 I had lying around in my room for the last 3 years or so. Since I wasn't sure what's going on with my PC, I had to remove every bit of hardware and use my old k6-2 in the meantime. It's always surprising to see a machine that I ditched for being too slow suddenly run winxp and Illustrator fairly well.

Legacy / rarely used systems can be very useful at times. It's a shame that I only boot into BeOS to save my files from various disasters, but I'm having a blast each time I do it.

Interaction Desing Inspiration

2006-10-27T11:48:00.000+02:00

Two blog links for interaction design inspiration:

1. no ideas but in things:

2. History of the Button:

Wet Floor Interfaces and user confusion

2006-10-25T11:53:00.000+02:00

Nero is a well known CD/DVD burning application. It allows users to create various CD/DVD formats fairly easily.

I've noticed an annoyance in Nero almost instantly when I started using it: It's burning dialog has the Stop button highlighted (focused) by default.

When a user clicks the Burn button in Nero, the dialog above opens and the burning process is started. But Nero makes it far too easy for the user to cancel the process by mistake.

This is what one might call a Wet Floor Interface, it invites user errors when it actually intents to create a clean one-task interface. The burning process is Nero's epicentre but it's interface makes it too easy for users to accidentally slip on the floor and break something.

User interface design is often about making the right thing easy and the wrong thing hard. Interfaces like Nero's burning dialog are not too hard, but someone should go over them with a towel and wipe the water off the floor.