Sublunar
The part of the universe below the moon (as opposed to the heavens). This distinction was destroyed by Newton, making the word obsolete.
Crummy XUL Calculator
My first outing with XUL — download, open w/ Firefox, & calculate away.
Just getting familiar with the layout and some elements and DOM and stuff. It just evaluates the contents of the text box with JS, so typing in parentheses and stuff is legal.
Grr, the link is broken cuz the File feather is screwed up. Don’t have time to open up FTP and fix it now. The right url is here.
05:55 AM | 0 CommentsMy grandfather worked at a stodgy IBM plant for many years before moving on because of the PC revolution. What did he do there? Turns out it was interface design and testing, the exact thing I’ve been getting into lately. Whaddaya know?
10:20 AM | 0 Comments
Mockup of a new Firefox history interface proposal from Alex Faaborg, in Basing the Design of History on the User’s Memory. That’s what I’m talking about!!
03:10 AM | 0 CommentsThe inline browsers in all of these Twitter iPhone apps are a kludge: the only reason for them is that once you’re done browsing, it’s faster to go back to reading your tweets if you’re in an inline browser view (just press the “close” button and it slides away) than if you’re in Safari (exit to the home screen and open Twitterific up again). But sometimes one has to access some functionality that’s in Mobile Safari but not in the inline browser (adding a bookmark, mailing the link, etc), so they include “open in Safari” buttons. How kludgy!
If the iPhone had a system-wide back button like it should and Android does, users would get the best of both worlds: links would open in Safari and the user would have all of its functionality, but the back button would make going back to your Twitter app just as easy as pressing the close button in the inline browser.
04:54 AM | 0 CommentsMozilla Labs Snowl
So I installed this the other day, and I was kinda disappointed — I really like the concept, but right now it’s really not much more than an RSS reader that organizes items (messages) by person and not by feed. Organizing items by person is a good idea, but it doesn’t work because Snowl isn’t smart enough to know that, for example, twitter.com/11hawkinst and Spiderman’s Web are the same person. Combine Snowl with the Google Social Graph API (or make Snowl crawl for XFN and FOAF itself) and you’d have something.
04:25 AM | 0 CommentsIn this Aza echoes a lot of the points made by Jono de Carlo (also works @ Mozilla Labs) in These Things I Believe. It’s also very cool that he acknowledges the importance of using hard scientific facts about humans when designing things for humans.
04:06 AM | 0 CommentsHard Rock Memorabilia
Awesome stuff, awesome interface. (MS Silverlight 2 w/ Photosynth technology)
10:30 AM | 0 CommentsUpon the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand, all other ground is sinking sand.
— Hymn from the church my family sometimes goes to.
Chrome’s Omnibox is a smart design because, like its new tab screen, it predicts what you want to do. When you focus the location bar, you want to go somewhere. That somewhere is either a specific URL or a search, so it does both.
11:28 PM | 0 CommentsMetacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia
Cory Doctorow makes some good points here. I like his ontology of everything and alternate description of a bald spot.
11:17 PM | 0 CommentsAmbient Information in the Browser
Great post from Aza Raskin about using the browser’s knowledge of your browsing habits to automatically help you. He’s right, though, that while automatic help has great potential for helping, if done wrong it also has great potential for making people angry. (Gives Microsoft’s “Clippy” as an example — “looks like you’re trying to write a letter, Dave”)
10:58 PM | 0 CommentsScience is the sword in the stone that humanity finally pulled
— E.O. Wilson in Consilience
11:03 AM | 0 CommentsI believe its important to understand how the brain works so that computer interfaces (and physical objects) can be designed for the people using them
I like the fresh interface ideas, especially the context saved with history and how it departs from the traditional toolbar + viewport layout to a fluid space.
10:48 AM | 0 CommentsConsciousness is like the Sky
I can remember a drawing of mine from when I was little: there’s a landscape at the bottom, white in the middle, and a band of blue across the top. It wasn’t a bad guess about how things were — air is obviously transparent, and the sky is obviously blue, so there must be a boundary where the transparent air stops and the dome of blue sky begins.
But, of course, there isn’t: it’s the same air all the way up, and the color somehow emerges from a prism-like interaction between the sun’s light and the air molecules which I will admit I don’t understand.
Most people think of consciousness as they think of the sky: there must be a border where the physical neurons and chemicals stop and the ethereal soul/mind/consciousness begins. But, when you get down to the neurological research, it’s clear that there’s no blue dome — consciousness emerges from plain old neurons just like the sky’s color emerges from plain old air molecules.
No one really understands quite how yet, and if most parents can’t explain why the sky is blue to inquisitive kids, they certainly won’t be able to handle the complexity of whatever answer we find to the consciousness question (not to mention that it flies in the face of the dominant (religious) worldviews).
07:24 AM | 0 Comments
Ubiquity
I think it’s cool because it combines these 5 good ideas:
- text-based interface — simple things should be simple, and just like the command line, Ubiquity keeps it that way.
- intelligent autocomplete — one problem with the text-based interfaces is that people don’t want to type a lot. The command line solved this by shortening all the commands to 2-letter things like ‘ls’ and ‘cd’ and ‘svn’; Ubiquity solves it with intelligent autocomplete á la the Awesomebar.
- DOM-aware JS snippets — like bookmarklets, Ubiquity verbs can access and even modify the DOM, including the selection. This awareness of context is essential.
- JSON Web APIs — lots of apps offer web APIs in JSON nowadays, primarily for utilization by their own AJAX web interfaces. Now it’s as easy to take advantage of these (Ubiquity comes with JQuery built in) as it is to write shell scripts to do stuff on your local computer.
- Social Sharing — Ubiquity defines a protocol for linking to a file full of Ubiquity verbs in the
<head>of a page. This allows them to be discovered, installed and updated easily, which leads to people sharing their commands and using and remixing others’ commands. The command editor also has a “share” button, which makes a Github gist out of the editor’s contents. Firefox can detect that a gist is a Ubiquity command and offers to subscribe to it. Very neat.