design

The Apple Newton showed that form factor is everything. The Newton was pretty cool and ahead of its time – the first PDA. But it was the wrong size. The Palm Pilot did less (it didn’t even try to do full handwriting recognition), but it was the right size. The same form factor as Walkmans and cigarette packets and wallets and iPods, it slipped into existing shirt and jacket pockets, to be carried everywhere. Good design is about the right choices not technical wizardry. The Segway looked like magic – a two wheeled stable vehicle. But it needed gyros and computing power because its two wheels were next to each other. If its wheels were inline then it would have been a bicycle and the conservation of angular momentum alone would have kept it aloft. The bicycle is a better design for a two wheeled vehicle than a Segway. The…

Windows Live Local – Virtual Earth Technology Preview In 1994 lot of people thought VRML was cool, but it wasn’t cool compared to offline video games and it wasn’t useful compared to regular web-page search and browse. This mockup of Microsoft’s Local Live’ reminds me of VRML. As a video game, it’s crude by the standards of 1994 and as a web app it has none of the design sensibility of Google Maps. The mockup is from a multi billion dollar company whose most obvious online avenue of attack against Google is local advertising – and the end result is a maps application that allows you to choose a view that superimposes crappy vignettes of the interior of a ‘race car’ or ‘sports car’, as you ‘drive’ around maps. The product substitutes kitsch and gimmickery for ergonomics and usefulness.

I love San Francisco, but when you realize that the Castro Safeway and the Sony Metreon are landmarks, you realize that its a small city. It is the worlds best sleepy seaside town. One of the two landmarks has some architectural merit, the other is the Metreon, a failed attempt at a French style Mediatek – a multimedia library/art complex. In the end the Metreon, complete is a shopping mall, and now its being sold to a mall developer. Metreon’s shattered dreams via kottke

Jakob Nielsen says that the new UI paradigm to replace Apple’s will come from Microsoft: “Macintosh-style interaction design has reached its limits. A new paradigm, called results-oriented UI, might well be the way to empower users in the future…The next version of Microsoft Office (code-named “Office 12″) will be based on a new interaction paradigm called the results-oriented user interface” Results-oriented UI turns out to be templates. Because there are too many options in MS Office to have individual commands the idea is that the results of groups of them are displayed. It is, perhaps, a bit rich for anyone to champion Microsoft over Apple in terms of design at the moment, but design is subjective, I guess. Where Nielsen is provably wrong, however, is where he confuses User Interface with User Interaction (isn’t he supposed to be an expert in Interaction?): “rather than typing in commands and parameters, users…

Marc Canter had it absolutely right when he cautioned about the fuss over Ajax. Perhaps Ajax is a meme more than a ‘thing’, and like all good meme’s something that is spreading because the environment is ready for it. When I first used Gopher or WAIS and then downloaded Mosaic I was impressed by the architectural simplicity of Internet applications, so much so that I stopped being an architect and started working on web stuff. Here was something in computing that was seemingly a retrograde step – one window instead of many. I spent most of my day at the time in front of a twin screen CAD application that had several hundred palettes. But because that one window opened onto a world of other computers, like a unix terminal, it was so much more elegant. (My favorite new experience with UI has been finally using VI, a text editor…

Continuing on my anti-CSS rant – 3 columns, with fixed-width left and right and a fluid center column, are ofter referred to as the ‘holy grail’. The problem is that this is an obsolete solution, when people increasingly have massive screens where any fluidity breaks the design if people auto-expand windows – which they do. Mike Golding breaks the mold and argues the case very well for fixed width CSS layout: notestips.com :: The benefits of a fixed width design

Tables may suck, but CSS is no improvement. Yet web designers who have never used page layout tools for offline printing, or object based CAD software are still brainwashed by it. I just came accross this classic: BlueRobot “Many a talented web designer has struggled with CSS-based centering. Though CSS vertical centering eludes us, two techniques for horizontal centering are BlueRobot approved. Take your pick” First one: “Unfortunately, IE5/Win does not respond to this method – a shortcoming of that browser, not the technique” Fair enough, but then why recommend it (This is still one of the largest browser versions in use). Second one: #Content { position:absolute; left:50%; width:500px; margin-top:50px; margin-left:-266px; padding:15px; border:1px dashed #333; background-color:#eee; } All this to avoid ‘align=center’.

When I arrived in the US from bad teeth land one of the first things I asked my dentist for was a set of American teeth. Unfortunately I was told there was nothing that could be done. However at dinner with friends last night I was introduced to ‘Rota Points’, the best toothpick in the world. The bits in between my teeth are gone now, even if I’m still on page 27 of the Great Book of British Smiles. Intradental Cleaner

Color scheme shows a base color with alternate color schemes based upon base, complement, split complement and neighbors.

Richard Dawkins is surely one of the world’s foremost authorities on how the spread of information and ideas may have more than mere similarities with the evolution of viruses, having, amongst other things, coined the term meme in passing. Guardian Unlimited, Richard Dawkins: Apple of my eye: “Nothing in my 20 years’ intensive experience of programming and using computers had prepared me for the Mac. It wasn’t an evolutionary advance on its predecessors; it was a macromutational leap into the future. It is that future we are now living in, whether we use a Mac or a virus-compatible PC.” Dawkins once dismissed the world’s fastest growing virus of the mind, Catholicism, as being based on the mistranslation of the Hebrew word for a young girl as ‘virgin’. He has a wonderful knack for stating things that are controversial but provably true as a given – ‘a virus compatible PC’ –…

Duralex glasses are a design classic. I like drinking wine, but even in San Francisco, friends sneer at me, if I don’t order a man’s drink. I think the real problem isn’t the drink, it’s the glass. I hate wine glasses. The solution would be if wine in bars were served in sturdy Duralex tumblers. Bormioli Rocco – Products – Duralex

Speaking of AOL, I’m always amazed at how large companies don’t really have to react that fast to threats from better technologies, products or services. In fact in some cases the worst technology actually wins. Email me if you have any suggestions of examples of ‘non-design classics’ that are still around. Here’s a start: 1. PC Laptops – is it my imagination or, other than Apple, is laptop design actually going backwards? 2. Windows – the original Apple Os was more elegant. We are stuck with impossible uninstalls and no full-text search. 3. Office – I have to fork out $200 just so that I can add comments to other people’s Word files -and Powerpoint – aaargh – the greatest crime in design history, a substandard piece of shareware that pollutes the world with blue blends and horrible fonts. 4. AOL – how did a nasty dial-up service to a…