The Ubiquity extension adds a natural-language command line interface to the Firefox web browser. Ubiquity’s command line interface is very similar to that of Humanized’s Enso, which is not surprising since both projects are led by Aza Raskin, now head of user experience at Mozilla Labs. Since I’d already written a set of commands that integrate the Songza internet jukebox and music search engine with Enso, I thought I’d implement my Text2Link Firefox extension as a Ubiquity command.
Continue reading ‘Text2Link Becomes Ubiquitous’
Archive for the 'User Interfaces' Category
My Text2Link Firefox extension has now been downloaded 5000 times. This is a modest milestone compared to other, more popular Firefox extensions, but a milestone nonetheless. To learn more about how Text2Link can enhance your Firefox experience, read my previous post that announced Text2Link’s public debut at Mozilla.
Adobe’s Lightroom 2 and Phase One’s Capture One 4 are applications for correcting, enhancing and managing digital photographs. Both applications surprised me because they are well designed—really well designed. These applications exemplify the kind of software that user-centred design can produce. Both Lightroom 2 and Capture One 4 were designed with photographers for photographers. And it shows.
Continue reading ‘Photography Software Raises The Usability Bar’
Although digital devices have many benefits over their analogue predecessors, their one main drawback is their lack of dials as input devices. Dials are a natural, easy to use way to select values in discrete or continuous ranges. Selecting values with a dial is easier than typing values with a keyboard or repeatedly pressing buttons that increment or decrement values. Dials give one a sense of the size of the change: turning the dial by a larger amount increases or decreases the value by a larger amount; turning the dial by a smaller amount increases or decreases the value by a smaller amount. Repeatedly pressing increment or decrement buttons just doesn’t feel the same.
Scrollable pull-down menus enable users to access long lists of options without the need to divide the list into smaller units. For example, Firefox’s Bookmarks menu has scroll buttons at the top and bottom of the menu. Moving the mouse over the top button scrolls the menu up; moving the mouse over the bottom button scrolls the menu down. When scrollable menus contain application-defined options as well as user-defined options, the application-defined options should not scroll.
Continue reading ‘Scrollable Menus Should Scroll Items Selectively’
Mozilla has released my Text2Link Firefox extension for public download. Text2Link makes it easy to open web pages and send emails to addresses when their URLs are not marked up as HTML links. Although this is a simple enhancement, it really improves the usability of Firefox, especially when interacting with Google’s image search results which don’t mark up the websites hosting the images.
Scratch is a visual programming environment for creating interactive stories, animations, games, music and art. Scratch is object-oriented and organises projects into objects called sprites. Sprites have a visual presentation called a costume, sound effects, and behaviour implemented by user-defined scripts. Sprites interact with each other on the stage, another object that has sound effects, behaviour, and a visual presentation called a background. At first glance, Scratch resembles Logo’s turtle graphics. But look deeper and one finds that Scratch’s design is deceptively clever and has the potential to change the way we write software.
Harry Beck’s iconic map of the London Underground is now seventy-five years old, which is surprising because it is as fresh today as it was when the first edition was printed in 1933. The London Underground map is one of those rare designs: functional, beautiful and difficult to improve.
Continue reading ‘Harry Beck’s London Underground Map at 75′
The user interface for printing documents and other content follows the same pattern in most current graphical user interfaces: users preview and print documents by invoking application commands. However, to monitor the status of documents in the printer queue, users must leave the application and use a separate print-queue user interface provided by the operating system. This split in what should be a unified task—printing documents and monitoring their progress—mirrors the split in the underlying implementation: applications are responsible for previewing printed documents and for sending documents to the printer; the operating system is responsible for monitoring the status of the print queue. Whenever software reflects implementation details in its user interface, usability suffers.
Continue reading ‘Rethinking the User Interface for Printing’
I’ve set up Windows XP to let me know when updates are available from Microsoft. Although I usually install all the recommended updates, I like to choose when the updates are downloaded and installed. When XP has finished installing a critical update, it informs me with a dialog that asks whether I want to Restart Now or Restart Later. I always click Restart Later—I’ve usually got everything set up as I like it and I’m usually in the middle of a task. The problem is that XP is quite keen for me to restart and displays the message again a few minutes later. I click Restart Later to dismiss the dialog again…and again…and again. Why doesn’t XP take the hint?
