Design

Thinking in DFS vs BFS

Monday, May 14th, 2007

The concepts of depth-first search (DFS) and breadth-first search (BFS) are usually used to describe an algorithm for visiting nodes in a graph or a tree structure. The key difference is whether you visit all of the nodes nearest to you first, then begin radiating outward from there, or whether you continue as deep as […]

Seadragon and Zooming Interfaces

Friday, May 11th, 2007

Jeff Atwood has written a blog entry about Zoomable interfaces, including an image of Microsoft’s Seadragon product as an example. The other examples in his post are mostly concerned with the ability to zoom in and out for finer grained control or higher-level operations.

I think Seadragon is the most intriguing example, and has the potential […]

Sony Understands Packaging

Thursday, May 3rd, 2007

I recently ordered another pair of the Sony MDR-V6 Headphones for listening to music at work, since I was pleased with the quality of the first pair I bought to use at home.
As I was unpacking the headphones, I noticed that Sony has taken a lot of care to make the packaging of the headphones […]

Graphics Editing

Thursday, May 3rd, 2007

Jeff Atwood made a post today about the importance of a developer having the skills and tools to do basic image and graphics manipulation.
I highly agree, and I cringe every time I see a 2MB attachment on a mailing list because the taker of the screenshot was not aware that even Paint can save as […]

Shelfari Virtual Bookshelf

Thursday, March 1st, 2007

In the vein of more dynamic blog widgets, here’s one from a site called Shelfari, which lets you build a virtual bookshelf of books you have. It also contains some social networking stuff like adding friends and viewing their bookshelves.

This plugin requires Adobe Flash 9.
var shelf = new ShelfariShelf(”shelfH.swf”, “310″, “220″);shelf.useExpressInstall(”http://sws.shelfari.com/expressinstall.swf”);shelf.addVariable(”UserName”, “jacobc”);shelf.addVariable(”ShelfType”, “user”);shelf.addVariable(”verE”, “js1.1″);shelf.addVariable(”BookSize”, “large”);shelf.addVariable(”Alpha”, […]

Blog Archives

Wednesday, January 31st, 2007

Why is it that blog software always organizes entries by month? Is this really a useful way to find posts in an archive? Often I find myself browsing through the archives of a blog I’ve stumbled upon, such as User Centered, a blog about usability. However, this blog, like so many others, offers the […]

User Interface Design for Devices

Monday, March 1st, 2004

While some appliances and devices have grown easier to use over the years, some have gone the opposite direction and become more confusing. It is not, it seems, through any lack of trying on the part of the manufacturers, however. It seems that some manufacturers have simply become detached from their customer base, or […]

Samsung E-715 and T-Mobile

Friday, January 2nd, 2004

T-Mobile and the Samsung E-715 have a bit of a way to go when it comes to ease of use, intuitive interfaces, and feature usability. Here’s a small list of things that I simply can’t believe a modern pair of companies would fail to fix:

When talking on the phone (or […]

What to Tell Your Users

Friday, July 25th, 2003

Computer error messages are the source of much frustration and bitterness toward computers and computer software. One thing that the computer programming education industry often fails to teach is the principle of designing error messages.
From the code I have seen on my NoPaste site, it seems that most novice programmers […]