Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

At OpenDNS, nice button:

It was the first thing I read on that page, and it immediately answered my question.

Having observed our 2/3-year old taking over the iPad as her computer, I’m becoming interested in UI for kids and toddlers. LukeW has some good points in this blogpost, but apart from that a quick search didn’t bring up much iPad specific UI thoughts for kids (except for this other one here).

One thing I noticed is that Amelia tends to tap things very fast, sometimes too fast for the tap to register. She also quickly learnt (from watching me) to swipe the unlock thing when starting. She likes simple games, animals making sounds, eating the apple, … She also likes watching pictures and videos of herself, and she can very quickly navigate to the photo app to a specific photo or video. She can also easily navigate the main app "homescreen”, swiping left and right to find apps.

Would love to hear more thoughts on babies/toddlers using iPads.

Strange, Chrome’s protection mechanism seems a little trigger-happy?

I love the “Show all” filter in Ikea’s search results. Instead of having to page through results, it shows you all results on one page. Scrolling is faster than clicking through multiple pages.

I figure this works as long as the complete list fits on a page (and pages can be longer than generally assumed), which is what Ikea does: when there are more results, the “Show all” button isn’t shown:

Perfect implementation.

Here’s a screenshot of some kindle software:

Reminds me of something. Oh I know! The Commodore 64!

Just keep it a reader, dudes!

After the sketches of Pacman and Twitter, also found this great blogpost, with more original sketches:

Flickr Places:

A lot more in that post.

(via) After the original sketches from Twitter, the original sketches from Pacman :)

Are you keeping your sketches?

Facebook is great and all, but fuck it, it’s a walled garden. Twitter too, mostly. The fight for an open social web is on, with a combination of geeky protocols like OExchange for sharing urls, ActivityStreams for sharing activity streams (it’s an extension on Atom), OAuth and OpenID, microformats and many more. The infrastructure is being built and adopted by smart people in large companies (Google, …). It’s time for some awesome user experiences to be built on top of that. The current user experience of these open formats is still slightly dodgy compared to the closed alternatives, but they’re getting there. The same fight is being fought on mobile, with Android versus iPhone, although that’s somewhat of a mis-characterization since the iPhone has awesome html5 support and has pushed it hard.

Exciting times.

At (Twitter) scale, it becomes hard to generate unique ID’s and sort with them, so they use something called k-sorts that aims at sorting things roughly, within a second of the time they were posted. Scale is weird, it’s like inverted quantum mechanics. You always seem to have to loosen things up a little to scale up. Even laws of nature seem to loosen up once you get away from our scale.

The original drawings of Twitter: (see also original sketches of pacman)

(my.stat.us!)

and the original drawings of Square:

From this video here.

Something like this. Doesn’t need to be complicated at first.

Geeky music font design notes, via Simon.

jPlayer (for music) looks pretty good. jQuery, HTML5 support, Flash in case browser doesn’t support it. (via Lucas)

The Onion: “Upwards of 66% of our server time is spent on serving 404s from spiders crawling invalid urls and from urls that exist out in the wild from 6-10 years ago.” That’s pretty crazy.

Pretty cool stuff: dataset cleaning up in gridworks.

Mark Pilgrim just writes in HTML now: “I self-published “Dive Into Python” in HTML, PDF, Word, and plain text. For years, there they sat, a list of downloads in different formats. Then I looked at my logs and realized that very few people ever downloaded it at all, and those that did mostly downloaded the HTML version.”

I wonder what happened to the innovation in tagging. The stuff I did with Mefeedia was somewhat innovative I think. Here are some screenshots (it’s no longer live):

We organized tags into facets (see above, this just took a few hours of organizing the top 1000 tags), and then built an inference engine (which was pretty easy to do):

It worked like this: if the tag “josh leo” (a person) is used together with the tag “new york”, we can infere that Josh has been to New York.

Which goes to show that with very little metadata you can do a lot of cool stuff.

“The real culprit, the real cause of their economic problems isn’t the Internet, it isn’t the wires that connect computers. It’s the under-$100 terabyte hard drive.”

Chilean Quake May Have Shortened Earth Days and ever-so-slightly shifted the earth’s axis :)

I don’t really have time to analyze this today, but it’s always interesting to see how companies that measure change stuff. I noticed Google’s new filters (a crucial feature) changed today, now it looks like this:

As you might expect, I like the “Everything” label, although “Everything – more” is a bit weird; how can I get more than everything? (Although I also love the “more” label).

When you open it, it looks like this:

And the search tools look like this:

Let’s see how this iteration fares. I don’t think they’ve nailed it yet. The greyed-out icons in particular don’t feel right, and having 2 separate “more” actions doesn’t feel right either.

For reference, here is my previous analysis of the filters (and their big redesign) when they launched.

Hey, it turns out that every Buzz gets a permalink, just like a tweet. Nice. With an SEO-optimized URL too ;)

Here’s an easy way to post from Google Buzz to Twitter and Facebook. They should really build this in, but until they do, here are the steps.

First, find your Google profile. In Google Buzz, you can click here to get there:

Once you’re on your Google profile page, which in my case is http://www.google.com/profiles/petervandijck (because I set it up to have a friendly URL, but it could also contain a bunch of numbers), you need to look in the code to find an RSS feed of your Google Buzz posts. This is a little geeky, but easy enough, the Google docs explain where to find this feed (they should really make it easier to find!). In your browser, look for “View Source”. In Firefox, view source in the menus looks like this:

In the source, you can find the RSS feed that publishes your posts in Google buzz. It looks like this http://buzz.googleapis.com/feeds/113278766329192120580/public/posted (that’s my feed), and here’s a screenshot of where to find it:

OK. Now you have a public RSS feed with content (from your Google Buzz). From now on it’s easy – there are many ways to get RSS feeds published into Twitter or Facebook. One great way that you can use for both services is Twitterfeed, just go sign up and point your feed to Twitter and Facebook. And you’re done, your posts will now (with a short delay of half an hour or so) be crossposted to Facebook and Twitter.

Google should really make this easier though.

Lightweight advocacy. Interesting.

Google has, on the edit profile page, a wonderfully simple UI convention I don’t remember seeing before.

Click on a textbox, and you can start typing. From the moment you start typing, it will add another textbox below it, so you can keep adding items. It doesn’t do that when you put the focus on the textbox though, only once you start typing in it. Wonderfully unobtrusive and effective. A jQuery plugin that does this (getting the details right) would be lovely.

Another example of the more-even more pattern:

I noticed the “more – even more” pattern again today, on the BBC this time:

Awesome, although I like Google’s wording better – less words :)

Photo sharing innovation has slowed down again. Flickr is still good, but isn’t innovating aggressively, and it’s starting to show its age. Picassa kinda sucks. iPhoto is very nice but doesn’t have a strong online component. Facebook has a great photo app but it’s still Facebook - too closed. I think the space might be opening up again, let’s hope someone has a good go at it.

“You’ll be able to connect your choice of storage devices directly to the Box using USB” - awesome. That’s exactly what I’ve been wanting.

Via Anne Galloway: “Control is not discipline. You do not confine people with a highway. But by making highways, you multiply the means of control. I am not saying this is the only aim of highways, but people can travel infinitely and ‘freely’ without being confined while being perfectly controlled. That is our future.”

Awesome quote, it made me think. So so-called “freedom” can be used to impose control. Made me think of travelguides.

Heavy stuff, that bible!

Tastespotting is pretty awesome.

The second issue of the Journal of Information Architecture is out :) (via Lou on FB, which I can’t link to, which is one of the reasons that makes me think that whole FB thing is gonna blow over, just another walled garden, which is why I keep blogging, which is why this is here, although it gets crossposted I believe.)

Don Norman: “I’ve come to a disconcerting conclusion: design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs.“

I don’t think that’s so disconcerting, although it goes against much of the common UX babble.

I wonder why they felt they had to add that?

When a feature is confusing enough to warrant you having to add rather heavy explanatory UI, you might wanna rethink it.

Lou is thinking about a combined index for his books, I think that’s an awesome idea.

Mail used to be like email! “By the late 19th century, there were between six and twelve mail deliveries per day in London, permitting correspondents to exchange multiple letters within a single day.“ Six to twelve times a day checking your mail, sound familiar?

Fascinating: “The approach taken at Facebook is to set a cookie on user update requests that will redirect all subsequent requests from that user to the West coast master for some configurable time period to ensure that read operations do not return inconsistent results.“

Google realtime results are pretty interesting. Just goes to show how fast Google moves. I’m very curious to see how this evolves over time, I don’t think they have the UI and relevance stuff totally correct just yet.

The same way that I am a fan of the “everything else” label, I am becoming a fan of the “more – even more” label as its being pioneered (as far as I can tell) by Google:

As the Nielsman says: progressive disclosure is awesome!