233 posts from 2006
Yo, I’ll be back in Minneapolis for a week next month. I haven’t finalized the details yet, but it looks like the dates will be from Sunday, September 10 - Sunday, September 17. I am coming back for a Microsoft recruiting event at the U of MN. Hit...
Back in Winter 2004/2005, I spent an entire month cleaning up an RC file that defined over 100 dialogs used in Visual Studio. I scoured our codebase to determine whether the dialog was still in use, removed it if it wasn’t, ensured that the UI met...
Almost on a whim earlier tonight, I decided to rebuild my personal website from scratch. I backed up all of my content from Movable Type, installed a brand-new, spiffy copy of MT 3.31 onto my site’s root and a new database, and let ‘er rip. A few ...
Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror has a great writeup today on Fitts’s Law, which can help you conceptualize the amount of time needed to interact with a user interface (which doesn’t need to be the user interface of a computer; it applies just about e...
(yeah ok, I haven’t quite figured out what innovation means to me yet. I’m still thinking about it.) Jensen Harris had an interesting post on his blog yesterday about what it took in Office 2003 to maintain the color schemes presented on Windows ...
In some circles, it’s taken as a basic truth that certain companies have more innovativeness in their pinkies than other companies can muster among all of their 70,000 employees. I am firmly of the belief that this narrow perspective is flawed, at...
Jan Miksovsky, formerly of Microsoft, and presently of Cozi (a stealthy Seattle startup), is a huge believer in the power of task-oriented user interfaces. Five years ago, Jan published Microsoft’s official Inductive User Interface Guidelines on M...
For those of you browsing the site directly, you may notice that things look a little…strange today. I’m playing around with the templates and trying to convert the site over to a three-column layout. There are a few things not behaving like they ...
Pop quiz: what was the correct size of an OK button back in Mac OS 8? If you answered “I have no idea,” you would be in the same boat I was only a few minutes ago. It turns out that the correct size for your OK and Cancel buttons on Mac OS 8 was 5...
Apple’s yearly bring-out-the-faithful shindig, WWDC, kicked off this morning with Steve Jobs’s keynote. I read through the coverage at engadget, and I must say that I am distinctly underwhelmed. Sure, the dual-proc Mac Pro is a lusty piece of hard...
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