Applications
For all you paper-fetishists out there (you know who you are), this sweet app lets you make a custom “PocketMod.” It’s a single sheet of paper that you fold to make a little book with things like daily, weekly, or yearly calendars, graph paper, to-do lists, etc. Very cool!
Veer Shuttleboard is so much better than the standard “lightbox” feature on stock sites. Very nicely implemented as a broad canvas with intuitive scaling, arranging, layering, and cropping features as well as notes… and then you can share it. Well done!
GUI / Graphical User Interface is basically a diorama version of the PSD interface, with no obvious reason to exist. The nit-picker in me has to point out that the document window actually floats behind the application menu bar (to my regular chagrin). (via)
This seems obvious enough that someone must have already thought of it, but… Photoshop and Illustrator (and probably most programs) really need variables. For example, if I’m laying out a page and I’ve made 5 elements on the page the same persimmon color, it would be so very sweet to be able to change the color in one place rather than having to go select each element separately and change its color. Is that something you can do with actions?
I recently installed iPhoto 5, and wow I can’t tell you how much Apple does not get keywords. This is the third completely different interface they’ve tried for tagging photos and they are all completely lame. First came this:
Which was cumbersome and semi-useless as we’ll see in a moment. Then, in iPhoto 4, they created this multi-modal abomination:
Which was so bad that people went and modified the code to make it at least suck a little less.
Now, they’ve gone partway back to the original (using rigid tiles for each keyword):
Which would be bad enough because it won’t scale past about 20 tags, but it’s made so much worse by the fact that in order to edit the tags for a given photo you have to select the photo, then choose Get Info, then choose the Keywords tab and then check the boxes for the tags you want to add:
What’s that? You want to add a new tag? Well, of course, you simply go to the iPhoto Preferences and select the Keywords pane and use a third (!) totally distinct UI there:
Feh! Compare to, say, Flickr, where you simply click on “Add” next to the list of keywords for the current photo:
Now, I have a few gripes with the flickr tags UI, but next to iPhoto it’s the most natural, transparent mechanism in the world. But this is only interesting because it reveals a huge difference in the way that Apple and flickr’s respective designers seem to envision people using tags. The Apple model assumes several broad categories (the defaults are things like “Family” and “Vacation”) while flickr assumes actual descriptive metadata (like “red” and “insect” and “banal”). Which makes flickr’s tags useful and interesting and Apple’s not.
ps - I have more to say about tags, but I’ll save that for a later post.
It’s good to see Apple coming up on the short end of ease-of-use comparisons for a change, although as a Mac user I’m somewhat chagrined.
moockblog: nextgen flash player demo in tokyo… impressive stuff, including realtime bitmap (and video) effects (think Photoshop filters applied programmatically during Flash playback).
Thanks to Mark’s email management method, I now have 0 messages in my inbox. Woohoo!
I’m looking forward to Apple Mail’s new Smart Mailboxes feature. It’s the Collections feature from Remail I was jonesing for a while back.
Autotrace is an open source app that converts bitmaps to vectors (just like streamline, RIP). And there’s even an online version (note: your art will be saved on their server, so it ain’t private). There’s also Silhouette, and probably others (or you can just use Flash’s Trace bitmap command).
Alex points to some docs and comments about Avalon, Microsoft’s upcoming “presentation subsystem,” and how it relates to Flash. I definitely like the idea of mixing code and markup like this (tags for layout, script for behavior). I do have a couple questions, though. First, despite Windows’ near-ubiquity, will the fact that this only runs on Windows boxes limit its usefulness for web applications to controlled corporate environments? Second, will this de-democratize interface design, forcing out visual and product designers in favor of CS-educated engineers?
Alex points to some docs and comments about Avalon, Microsoft’s upcoming “presentation subsystem,” and how it relates to Flash. I definitely like the idea of mixing code and markup like this (tags for layout, script for behavior). I do have a couple questions, though. First, despite Windows’ near-ubiquity, will the fact that this only runs on Windows boxes limit its usefulness for web applications to controlled corporate environments? Second, will this de-democratize interface design, forcing out visual and product designers in favor of CS-educated engineers?
I got all excited that there really was such a thing as visual diff, but then I realized it doesn’t actually compare 2 images and tell you the differences like I wanted. It’s just color-coded regular plain-ol’ diff. And, yes, I know that what I want would probably be kinda hard.
Update: James pointed out that Photoshop’s Difference blending mode does exactly what I was talking about. Thanks!
Cross domain policy files: “The purpose of this technote is to highlight new security restrictions in Flash Player 7 that can: cause a warning dialog to appear when playing Flash Player 6 and older format .swf files; cause data loading to fail in Flash Player 7 format .swf files.” There’s a bit more on Flash 7 security on MM DevNet.
And this seems to be causing some trouble with web-services. Oops!
Oh, another new feature in the next version of Flash: CSS support.
So, Macromedia has finally split Flash in two. Lots of new features, etc… among the more notable are timeline-alternative authoring metaphors (forms and slides), the addition of Dreamweaver-esque behaviors, and (finally!) an option to turn off antialiasing for individual bits of text. Now to go door-to-door forcing everyone to upgrade their plugin!
ps - Oh, and ActionScript 2.0. Strict typing - eek!
A friend just sent me an email with a link using TinyURL.com. This is a brilliant little utility, where you can substitute a short URL for those ridiculous mapquest (or whatever) URLs that always break in email.
Macromedia FlashPaper is basically a PDF substitute, using Flash and therefore able to display within a web page. Some fairly serious limitations, though: “FlashPaper documents can only be viewed in a web page, so you can’t email FlashPaper documents directly to others. The text in FlashPaper documents cannot be searched or selected by website visitors.” Still, I really like the combination of being able to view the document within a web page and being able to print it from there, all without having to launch a helper app.
Macromedia FlashPaper is basically a PDF substitute, using Flash and therefore able to display within a web page. Some fairly serious limitations, though: “FlashPaper documents can only be viewed in a web page, so you can’t email FlashPaper documents directly to others. The text in FlashPaper documents cannot be searched or selected by website visitors.” Still, I really like the combination of being able to view the document within a web page and being able to print it from there, all without having to launch a helper app.
Anyone who uses Illustrator to make application schematics should do themselves a favor and check out Gabe’s UI Library. He’s done an amazing job and has been kind enough to put his work out there (he only asks that you credit him if you are going to publish your documents).
From MIT, Haystack “is a tool designed to let every individual manage all of their information in the way that makes the most sense to them.” On a cursory glance, some of what they’re doing looks interesting, although I generally mistrust the “one app for everything” approach. I think Apple is on a better track with individual UIs for specific data types, but obviously there needs to be some glue between them. So, I don’t see a single UI handling both photos and email messages, but I should be able to search both of them, to link them, and so on. Anyhow, seems well worth a look. (via alex)
Colin Moock pointed to this killer use of Stage.onResize in Flash MX: Welcome to NTT DATA, and also linked to a quick overview of how to use the event to chip away at that damn fixed box Flash has traditionally been confined to (well, it’s still in a box, but the box is no longer fixed).
Alex posted his usual cogent take on Macromedia Central. Now, of course, the issue with something like this is getting enough “real people” to take the time to figure it out. But it seems plausible to me, and as Alex points out, there are a bazillion Flash developers out there (although, as with Winamp skins, there are a much smaller number of good ones).
Free Ruler for Mac OS X is a lovely little bit o’ freeware.
Chandler is Mitch Kapor’s upcoming open source PIM. And whatever the end result, I say thank heavens people are starting to push on the email/calendar envelope. These (especially email) are by far the most used apps in most people’s day and are severely overloaded. For me, email handles communication, scheduling, note-taking, documentation, file storage, and probably some other things I’m not thinking of. And it needs to be better. So, you go, Mitch!
Wired News: Study Refutes E-Mail Myth (“If you’re feeling inundated by e-mail at work and think the annoyance must be universal, you’re wrong.”)
This may well be true (I happen to know the Research Director there (hi Susannah!) and definitely trust their research), but it sure doesn’t make me feel any better to know that not only am I overwhelmed by email but I can’t even take comfort in the assumption that everyone is.
So, Steven Johnson mentions Tinderbox and like a slave I have to go and try it again. I downloaded it once before on Victor’s recommendation. My reaction in both cases has been: eek! It feels so complex and scary. Lots of options to choose, relationships to set, metadata to input. I can tell that it could be an amazing tool for the right person’s left-brain. But my sense is that by trying to do perhaps too much it fails to do the one little thing I’d like which is make it easy to enter and recall individual (or small clusters of) ideas. In that sense, it feels a bit like the Visio of note-taking software.
I was talking today with Alex about the whole iTunes/iPhoto organization model and the rather obvious point came up that this kind of metadata-based interface to files is only as good as the metadata you have. The reason iTunes is (I think) way more successful than iPhoto is that a lot of the metadata can be automatically-generated via calls to the CD Database (e.g. song, album, artist, genre, year), and as Andrew pointed out, there’s room for so much more. Not so with personal photos, which require the user to enter meaningful metadata for this type of interface to work (which is presumably why iPhoto surfaces tagging tools more prominently than does iTunes). As I pointed out to Alex, email is more like mp3s than photos.
I think I’m more aggressive than my spam filter in deleting emails. Maybe someone needs to write up a set of tips for writing email subjects that don’t look like spam subjects.
XWT — The XML Windowing Toolkit, which was inspired by XUL, Flash, and Unix.
I am very much liking OmniGraffle, especially once I downloaded the 2.0 version which includes Jesse’s visual vocabulary. They even managed to include the Adobe-standard spacebar hand command. The only thing I’m missing is command-spacebar for zooming (which leads me to another rant that I’ll maybe save for another day about standard UI widgets in drawing tools…)
DENIM 1.0 released… getting there, although I’d say it’s still probably more like version 0.89 than 1.0, but it remains the only real attempt I know of an integrated web prototyping tool (i.e. one that handles site organization, page schematics, and storyboarding in a single document), and for that it gets big points in my book.
To Speed Up Internet Traffic, Consider the Ant… well said! And to make it usable, consider Giant Ant!
Here’s what pushed me to switch to Greymatter. The thing with Greymatter is that, like many Content Management Systems (CMS), it breaks my newly-coined aphorism of CMS design:
“You shouldn’t be able to tell what CMS was used merely by looking at a site.”
Funny I never saw this acia article on Software for Information Architects before.
Someone recently posted on CHIWeb about a “new” Dreamweaver Wireframing Extension (I
assume via taylor).
Seems useful to me for sketching a “wireframe/prototype” hybrid, where you can do interaction design and testing at a low-fi level. I’m sure I’ll stick with Illustrator for most of my wireframing needs, but the HTML integration is a definite advantage to Dreamweaver.
I’ve long wanted Macromedia to build a site-prototyping tool from Flash, and lo and behold, someone else did, too, and here’s his master’s thesis, “a prototype for a flash driven Information Architecture visualization tool.”
Unfortunately, the idea I’m interested in is not so much the org-charty site map stuff, but the wireframe part, which he hasn’t implemented in the prototype. I guess I don’t see what’s better about an interactive sitemap. On the other hand, a sitemap which links interactively to detailed wireframes seems useful to me, and should be doable in Flash.
What I really want, though, is an archive of site visualization documents, although Peter, who linked to the above prototype, pointed out to me the intellectual property barriers to such an archive. Sigh.
Now you can make bar-napkin sketches without the bar or napkin: DENIM. I actually really liked this idea when I first saw it, but I didn’t have a Wacom (and you can’t very well draw with a touchpad). I think low-fidelity prototyping can be very powerful and is much-neglected in favor of quick html prototypes (which are often done way too early, in my experience). This sort of sketching can help keep you from getting locked down in implementation details when you should be thinking about higher-level structure and interaction… I guess I’ll have to suck it up and go get a new input device. [most recently via xblog]
While I was supposed to be “focusing my energy” at the end of yoga class this morning I was instead thinking about the ILOVEYOU virus (which as aaron pointed out would have been way cooler if it was called IKISSYOU). I was thinking about how all the mac users who smugly pointed out that the virus didn’t affect them were totally missing the point.. They weren’t affected because they don’t make up enough of the market to have been targeted. Which got me thinking about how computer viruses are similar to natural pests where if you plant the same crop year after year you end up much more vulnerable than if you rotate your crops. Not that I’m advocating switching your email client all the time, but it does argue in favor of heterogeneity.. It’s funny to be making an argument against standardization.
OK, so I complained a lot while Macromedia was developing Dreamweaver Exchange because I really wanted them to cut the whole download/install step out and have it all run within Dreamweaver. But they’ve done an excellent, excellent job with it.
Well, DeepLeap launched (which I only know because I spend too much time reading weblogs). I’m running it now and I can definitely see the usefulness of abstracting out frequent web-related tasks like printing or bookmarking, but I’m not sure how they’re going to get me to remember it’s there or check back to see if they’ve added or improved functionality.
Ooooh, taylor pointed to VizBang, which is working on a browser/editor for IAML (Information Architecture Markup Language). I slightly mistrust the VRML-ness of all this, but I am absolutely excited to see people starting to develop better tools for what I do than Visio.
Email overload: How people interact with all that g**damned email. Also mentioned by peter in this context: History-Enriched Digital Objects.