Spot on zinger by Gruber:

I.e. if you think people using iPhone OS devices are an important segment of your intended audience, you can no longer build a Flash-dependent web site. (And if you don’t think people using iPhone OS devices are an important segment of your intended audience, you’re probably wrong.)

To keep your bookmarks and RSS feed favicons looking shiny, I changed the onpaws.com favicon again. I was getting tired of the crusty current one which I made on a whim one day:

Passable at 64×64, but it always looked crummy at the more commonly seen 16×16:

After becoming intimately reacquainted with the various ways to disable Photoshop’s on by default selections and fill anti aliasing, I started with a 16×16 canvas this time, using the pencil tool and as per usual keeping the background transparent. This was a candidate:

But I’m happy with this new one for now- it retains the motif of circle + ‘p’ descender from onpaws -> op.

What do you think?

Today the spotlight slides onto the history of early user interface design.

A certain Steve Jobs some time ago mentioned the history of fonts on the Mac at the Stanford Commencement 2005 speech. Rumors of Jobs’ insatiable egoism notwithstanding, he laid claim to the existence of font technology on all computers. Of course, he didn’t actually design the appearance of the fonts so much as facilitate their implementation on the Mac. The initial design work was left to Susan Kare.

Susan Kare certainly has carved out her place in the annals of user interface design. Fortunate enough to design the well-made icons for the original Macintosh, she probably contritubed more than anyone could truly foresee to the popularity of computers today. Icons were a daring metaphor in a 1980s world of “serious” text and terminals, but the risk was well worth the reward. Ask any computer user today how legitimate icon-based interfaces are and you’ll always get the same affirmation. Everyone simply likes pretty things, and even more so when they help them get things done in an intuitive way.

Kare’s font credits include Monaco and the nostalgic original iPod font (originally “Elefont“, now known as the demised Chicago) Command Key flower. Kare even worked for Microsoft too on early versions of Windows.

P.S. Mac still has a few cool quirks with its typography engine (checked up to 10.4.2). Try opening up TextEdit, switching to the Zapfino font, and typing…”Zapfino” of all things. Cool.

All users are subjected to the interface designer’s choices in a very real way. If there is something that flies in the face of convention, users tend to live with it, blame themselves, or if you use a Mac, subject your blog audience to nitpicking rants.

I love experimenting with new software and seeing how developers/designers choose to implement the user side of a given feature. Apple’s well designed button layout in Safari, with the integrated progress bar-on-address-bar is pretty slick:

Furthermore, they combined the stop/reload buttons due to their boolean, opposing nature.

This particular design, incidentally, was shamelessly ripped off by Firefox, although the combined Stop/Reload button is available as a 3rd party extension.

Seeing the UI travesty that is the IE7 beta, however, yet again implies that Microsoft employees don’t actually use the software they write. Needless paradigm changes and missing features adorn their new browser. Of course, this is a beta, but for something Microsoft knew would be scrutinized with a fine toothed comb, they sure like subjecting testers to very poor usablility.

EDIT: I forgot to discuss the needless paradigm changes: if you click the rightmost tabling, it will create a new tab. Whoever thought that was a good idea…sigh. Adobe does something cool: if you double click the background of their MDI interface it brings up an open dialog. Why not make [double]clicking on whitespace create a new tab ala Firefox?

The year is 2005. The web has become commonplace, and people are ready for more dynamic content in their browsing experience. The ensuing battle of AJAX and Flash is fought tooth and nail. Macromedia Macrodobe claims 98% penetration of the Flash client on web-enabled computers, and even if that sounds decidedly optimistic AJAX likely has a level near that. The competition only becomes greater and greater for Web 2.0 apps, and everyone has the potential to benefit.

So. Check out this cool Flash revamped version of popular Earth mapping software du jour (currently Google Maps and MSN Earth). Decide for yourself who’s going to win the upcoming battle. I’d normally say Flash, but it’s had more than a few years headstart and hasn’t receieved nearly the attention from “serious” coders that AJAX has displayed of late. Possibly it’s only hype, or maybe it’s because there exists no Linux version of the Flash builder…or, possibly, ActionScript sucks a little too much. I still wistfully remember wasting 3 hours in a row debugging array code because the ActionScript interpreter wouldn’t display an error message. It stumped 3 labbies.

Apple is well known for steadily advancing UI design and opting for user friendliness over technical details. That reason alone is largely why I was once absolutely, unerringly pro-Mac to the bitter end. But there’s only so much I can take of the conveniently abstracted Apple Candylandâ„¢, and when Apple is too scared to scare users, the relationship is just awkward:

Honestly, whats wrong with a little more detail? 41MB for … a rotation fix? My left foot. I still love you Apple, but sometimes…

Aimfight.com was posted at Slashdot today. The site is a simple incarnation of social networking visualization, and represents another emergence of this untapped field. Compared to the extensive amounts of web research, social networking isn’t nearly as explored, likely because the two markets are thoroughly different.
In the world of Internet-life, email represents real mail, where friends’ messages and junk mail both arrive in your inbox. The web is harder to model, but suffice it to say that Amazon and eBay are like physical stores, just with exceedingly large stockrooms. Chatting, therefore, is most similar to a telephone conversation. It’s between two people, and you can’t just call anyone without knowing their screenname/phone number first.

This inherent privacy is largely the reason social networking is still so unexplored. It’s a tough sell to ask people for their buddy list for “research,” just like its hard to get a copy of someone’s address book – for “research” or not. Imagine a future where Amazon customer representatives send you IMs like telemarketers. Spam has no place in the chat room’s hallowed walls!

It’s just so endearingly cool when software from the open source side of the fence gets really cool like this.

When I returned from the Grand Canyon I setup the trip website gallery for everyone who wanted to contribute (the stuff nerds love to do). Having used Gallerybefore, I simply installed it again knowing it would work well for our needs. Later I found out about Coppermine, an even more feature-packed web gallery, designed for integration with phpBB or other forum software. I briefly considered moving the Gallery install over to Coppermine, but even though the install went great decided to KISS for my users.

Wow. I just installed Gallery 2 beta 3 on a whim, and it’s just day and night between Gallery 1 and 2. It’s DOS vs. Mac OS X, the differences are just that profound. They’ve moved over to a MySQL architecture instead of flat-files, and have improved the coding internals for more abstraction/extensibility. But since I’m an interface junkie, I appreciated the installer/administration/UI changes the most. Instead of navigating between ugly tabbed pages that smack of coder “design”, you get a very slick graphical, intuitive experience. Instead of throwing around various PHP technicalities and demanding server/Apache know-how from Joe Hapless, the installer finally takes care of everything it possibly can ala WordPress. Whereas Gallery 1 returns you to the “installer” pages when you want to change settings, 2 has a handy sidebar-driven interface that is much clearer.

My hat is off to you, Gallery 2 guys, excellent work on another polished LAMP offering.

So I’ve been working at my summer job. Similar to most reasonable people, I like telemarketing about as much as Marmite (that is to say, not very much at all). However, I do get to work on their website code, which is currently absolutely abysmal. Things like the same stylesheet declared twice or unused inline styles in every page is quite sloppy, so it’s been satisfying cleaning things out. The only irritating aspect of the job is the awful fonts and dated layout which I’m supposed to live with. I’m not allowed to change the page layout because it’s “been approved” by the high ups. Blech.

Of course this means I’m replacing all the yucky table code with CSS. Don’t tell anyone, they won’t notice I’ve been coding the layout because it will look exactly the same, but now pass W3 validation. I hope I can fudge that layout rule at least a little bit though, the navigation bar I made for the top is about 100x nicer than that awful splotchy Goosebumps font.

P.S. If you ever come across an opportunity to use a PCI video card with an already-installed AGP card, save yourself three hours of Googling and hand wringing. Set the PCI card to be the “Primary” in the BIOS and everything will just work. Kind of like a Mac.
[nerd quotient: fulfilled]

In another excellent entry to his collection of Mac OS X commentary, John Siracusa today posted a review of Mac OS X Tiger 10.4. The most interesting part of the article was the description of the UI subsystem, Quartz.

I really appreciate a lot of things about Mac OS X. Well thought out enhancements to usability (Expose, working drag and drop, a hierarchical menu bar) have been among my favorites. However, Quartz has been a most egregious of offenders, so much so as to keep me from even using my old PowerBook for nearly a year. As someone who uses a computer every day, interface responsiveness is about as critical as it gets. OS X, unfortunately, has the slowest (most resource hungry) GUI of any operating system I’ve ever used. Even OS 9 was faster. Just try resizing a window and watch your CPU peg at 100%.

Siracusa nicely details (with pretty flowcharts) why OS X has suffered from what I’ll dub a molasses complex since Aqua was at Day 1. Regardless of how fast the actual hardware inside is, just using any G4 Mac felt slow [IMO]. The bandwidth of the data paths between hardware required to render things to screen (CPU, RAM, GPU) was being eaten faster than a fat kid at a candy store.

Fortunately, things have changed for the better. I have yet to use Tiger on the requisite hardware, but if the block diagrams Siracusa shows correspond to real-world UI speed gains, I’ll happily be back in the Apple camp once more.

That is, if Apple would nicely explain to me why my <1 year old iBook G4 can’t even support this and most of the other whiz-bang features Tiger brings to the table.