Maps are usually implemented as a destination instead of an inline service; Look for the data you're looking for, then get the map of where it is at the end. Some very clever people have hacked Google Maps to get around this pattern of thinking, and in so doing have made the coolest thing I've seen on the web this month, or maybe longer.

Craigslist Housing - Google Maps mash-up. I can only imagine the changes this site will have in the way people think about maps.

Comments?

Okay, aside from the larger problems of having to have passwords at all, the need for multiple passwords to prevent your global security being lowered to the scruples/security of your weakest content provider, frequency attacks, and all the rest, my biggest peeve is entirely the site owner's fault, and is so easily fixed.

The following scenario happens to me at least twice a month:

1. Go to rarely-visited site requiring registration (eg The Mercury News)
2. Enter email address (I like that more and more places are using email addresses as unique identifiers instead of usernames. This is good.)
3. Enter my most-standard password
4. Find out that the password is incorrect. Try a variation
5. Still incorrect, try another variation
6. Asked again for my email address so they can send me a password-reset link
7. Go to email, follow link to reset page
8. On this reset page, and only on this reset page I'm told what the password requirements are. In this case, at least 6 characters, at least one of which can't be a letter
9. Instantly know what my password was all along, based on these obscure restrictions

   And these steps are just icing on the SJ Merc cake:)

10. 'Change' my password to what the password was all along
11. Get presented with the site's home page, not the story I was originally trying to access
12. Find the original article link I followed in the first place
13. Click that link
14. get presented with the LOGIN SCREEN.
15. Be thankful that I have at least the chimplike IQ to remember the password I just entered
16. Read the story I spent 10 minutes acquiring access to

Leaving aside the dumbfounded wonder of why my newspaper identification account has to be so secure as to necessitate password-acceptability constraints (Oh no! Someone is reading the news while pretending to be me!!), I ask you: how hard would it be to help out the user by reminding them of the idiosyncratic password constraints of your site after they enter the wrong password the first time? ("Your password was incorrect. Remember, SJ Merc passwords are at least 6 characters, one of which may not be a letter.")

For one of the most common design patterns on the web, it's amazing this one is usually so poorly implemented and non-standardized.

Comments?

Talking with Ammy about user interfaces in general, I showed her just how off-base first impressions can be. Check out this iPod rant I wrote in 2001 right after it was announced.

The interesting part is that while I now adore the iPod (I own three) I still think these three-year-old points are valid, and that a 1 gig flash-based iPod is still the current best bet at a killer portable-music app.

Excerpt from the 2001 piece:

To me (and your mileage may vary) the more valuable iPod would be the one with 512 megs in RAM, not flash rom, but good ol' lose power and lose the data RAM. This, incidentally, would cost about $20 from the OEM as opposed to several hundred for the flash memory. (This is not the problem that it might seem, because you're talking about a device with a high-capacity fixed battery carrying redundant data. If the battery goes flat and dumps the songs, it doesn't matter because charging the battery by firewire-ing to your Mac takes an hour, while restoring all the songs will take only a fraction of that time over the same connection, and it'll happen simultaneously.)

512 megs would be enough RAM for over 8 hours of music (15 times more than my Rio). At the end of the day, when you plug your iPod into your Mac's firewire port, the computer can take a look at the music you listened to since the last sync, chuck those songs from the iPod, and randomly select more titles from the computer's iTunes library (toss 8 electronica songs, load up 8 fresh tracks, etc.).

Of course, if there's a song you listened to during the day that you'd like to keep on the player, you can always mark it with a button, to 'save until I delete' and it'll stick around. Further, you could, via the iTunes interface, choose specific songs or albums to be saved temporarily or indefinitely on the iPod. Basically, songs would be ephemeral unless specifically marked as eternal.

Think Different: Think TiVo. You get new stuff, you view (listen to) it. The next time: you have new stuff.

We'll see tomorrow...

Comments?

As I constantly iterate on the design of Fury in my head, I'm influenced here and there by things I read or anecdotal experiences I have. Today's post by Phiipp Lenssen, Context, not Navigation, is having a big impact on the virtual-Fury in my head.

Most importantly, it resonates with my awareness that the experience and motivations of the everyday reader are completely different than the google visitor, and the look and feel should reflect that.

Categories were all the rage, and are de rigeur for most blogs nowadays, but they don't scale well at all. They tend to work best when the branching factor is constant, that is when there are roughly as many items in a category as there are are categories in total. Another way of putting it is, if each post is only in one category, then your number of categories should be roughly sqrt(number of posts). This doesn't scale well when you reach 2000 posts and 45 categories, with 45 posts in each category. I actually have 91 categories, because I'm inefficient, and because many posts are in multiple categories, and, well, I am a freak.

Anyhow, the article's very thought-provoking, and I'll have to see how it impacts my twin desires to further granualize and consolidate Fury's organizational structure. I should talk more about this soon. Maybe I'll even have a demo.

Comments?

The Google redesign launched today simultaneously across all languages. When was the last time a major site did a redesign and the majority of Slashdotters liked it?

Google Web Alerts and a bunch more launched this morning as well. As it says on the homepage: What have they done for you lately?

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Searching for the perfect Photoshop experience, I've found a peripheral to lust after. Designed for power gamers, the Nostromo SpeedPad n52 offers a smattering of 14 custom-programmable keys, a scrollwheel, an 8-way gamepad, a fire button and a thumbswitch.

There's nothing in the site that gives any hint that these might be useful for anything other than hardcore gaming, but to my mind the equipment that hardcore gamers use is usually more than up to the task of more mundane applications like Photoshop and BBEdit.

Comments?

I'm about to make Amazon a whole lot of money.

As much as I like movies and CDs, the single worst part of the user experience of buying a CD or DVD, or being gifted with same, is the initial user experience: the packaging. Today I'll bypass my tirade about how CD jewel cases are the worst storage device since the mousetrap, and use the copy of Pirates of the Caribbean DVD I got from my mom, as an example.

First, the good. Amazon gets it part-way right. Unlike Costco, Target, or any number of dirtworld retailers, Amazon has done the consumer a favor and nixed the exterior cardboard packaging that serves only to make a DVD case the same height as a CD jewel case trapped within its in-store protective theft-deterrent plastic prison. (must resist CD tirade...) I would credit Amazon's customer-oriented approach here, except that clearly this is a deal Amazon hammered out with the manufacturers for their own sake. When you're selling in volume, volume counts, and the dead air and dead weight of the too-tall cardboard boxes weigh heavy on razor-thin margins.

No, my beef is with the stupid sticky plastic labels designed to prevent us from opening the DVD 'keepsake case'. "SECURITY DEVICE ENCLOSED" scream labels on three sides, adhered securely along the three edges of the case to ensure that we not only know that there is, indeed, a security device enclosed, but that we'll have to sit down and have a tete-a-tete with a tooth or nail before we can break in to the case and see it. In truth, RF-tag or no, the labels themselves are security devices because they inhibit would-be five-fingered fraudsters from easily opening cases in the store and making with the discs, sans-case.

Of course, Amazon's DVDs and CDs never see the inside of a store and now, well into paragraph five, we get to the point: Inventory control (err, shoplifting-prevention) is an important part of the K-mart experience, but Amazon? What kind of security are we talking about? Is there a swordbreaker or small shield in the box, to help keep me safe from the movie? What kind of security device does Amazon need to cozy in next to my DVD, so volitile that it has to be sealed inside this sanctum by a snap-case with three security labels (one with a hologram) and a skein of plastic-wrap to ensure the pristine state?

"SECURITY DEVICE ENCLOSED" rings about as false on an e-commerce customer's ears as does 'Provided by the Management for Your Protection' does on a toilet-seat cover dispener. "What Management? Protection from what? Umm. thank you?" I can almost picture a senior VP coming in to the bathroom stall after working hours to replenish the supply, smug in the knowledge of a rectally-protected workforce.

This kind of anal-retentive mindset can be recycled when trying to contemplate exactly how forcing you to remove stickers from a plastic case is actually the consumer doing their part in preventing crime as if to say, "if this sticker is missing, then the terrorists have already won."

Is there a posterior ulterior motive at work? Within the "flagship sticker"'s hologram, is there a microscopic EULA binding my soul to the merchandising and marketing goals of the movie therein and all possible forthcoming sequels?

Jeff, as your company inches toward its first profitable quarter while struggling to differentiate itself from bricks and mortar book warehouses, how 'bout if you wield your mighty influence to change the small things that everyone will thank you for. Get rid of the 'peel here to reveal next protective device' stickers.

Picture next year's gift-giving season when Timmy unwraps the DVD Star Wars 6-pack and in place of eighteen prophylactic devices standing between him and his entertainment, he sees a small sticker that says, 'No security device needed. Thanks for buying from Amazon!'

You're trying to lead the world in a marketplace of fungible products. Grab on to any differentiator you can, especially the ones that make your customers' lives easier.

Oh, and while you're at it, see what you can do about those big red FBI warnings. Really, in today's world aren't there more important ways for the FBI to instill fear in the people?

Thanks,

Kevin Fox
fury.com

Comments?

Ugh, the color is grating on me. The design, while cutting edge in 2001, is grating on me and is growing too heavy. As the site has grown into a community the functional design hasn't adapted enough to facilitate user communication.

My previous redesigns were just iterative, with little or no outside influence. The same can be said for the Fury 4.0 redesign.

Maybe it's Google's influence, but I've really got to lighten things up, throw out the framework and start over. When I do and I roll it out, I hope you all stick around.

I know you're only reading Fury for the beige.

Comments?

(I was going to write this as a note to myself, but figured I'd put it here while I digest it)

The troubling thing about pinning down the nature of ambient displays is that too many end up being displays that forcibly get your attention when they have pertinent information (like the light on the answering machine or the shaking string denoting high network activity) or they need to be polled specifically, like the 'weather mobile' or, well, a clock in general.

Really good ambient displays provide their information nondisruptively during the course of the observer's everyday tasks.

Cases in point:

A kleenex cube is a poor example of an ambient display because it gives only the binary reading of 'empty' (no tissue sticking up) or 'not empty' (tissue sticking up).

Rolls of toilet paper are good examples of ambient displays because you know how much toilet paper is left, without ever directly polling the object to find out.

The key is that most ambient displays are tightly coupled with the objects they display information about. Successful man-made displays will probably rely on representative state-changes to metaphoric representations of the relevant objects, like fluid in a cylinder indicating how full a hard drive is. The display is even more successful when the user comes across the information over the course of their user's normal activities.

That's all for now...

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Sam, I read your open memo at the Proteron site today, and it left me with questions.

I've been an avid Mac user since I got my 128K Mac in 1984. As a former helpline staffer at the Berkeley Macintosh Users Group, writer for MacWEEK Magazine, marketing assistant for Dantz Development, and software developer for Casady & Greene, I completely understand the plight of "the little guy", but in this particular example I feel that your venom is unwarranted.

Your open memo is based on the claim, reiterated on the LiteSwitch X home page, that "LiteSwitch X was the original application switcher for the Mac OS". This is both 'disappointing' and 'dishonest'. The first application switcher for the Mac OS was "Switcher" written by Andy Hertzfeld (with special thanks given to John Markoff and Bud Tribble) while under the employ of Apple Computer in 1985. Apple pioneered the technology you're claiming they pilfered, and they did it when the Mac OS was barely one year old. Over the intervening 18 years countless "little guys," Proteron among them, have come out with application switchers building on Apple's foundation. Surprisingly, very few gave any credit to Andy, John, Bud or Apple for the original innovation.

While I agree that Sherlock likely crossed the line in replicating Watson functionality, I don't feel the same sympathy for Proteron. On the aforementioned LiteSwitchX page you scream in 48-point letters (using Apple's corporate font, no less), "Dear Apple: You forgot some important features" in OS X 10.2. Beneath this accusation you simultaneously berate Apple for remembering them in OS X 10.3. I'd suggest not using the 'gloat' and 'sympathy' cards at the same time. They tend to cancel each other out.

LiteSwitch X is a very elegant product, but it has clearly borrowed more core functionality from those applications that came before it than it adds to the table. As long as LiteSwitch doesn't violate patents and look-and-feel copyrights that's fine, but it's poor form to cry foul when someone does the same to you. If, on the other hand, you feel that Apple has impinged on your intellectual property rights then I would suggest pursuing legal action against them. Writing an 'open memo to Steve' that you know will go unanswered seems to me to be little more than a 'mouse who roared' ploy for attention.

I noticed that you've recently released LiteSwitch X 2.1 with support for Panther. I wish you the utmost success with it.

Comments?

The New York Times did an impressive flash presentation of geographic variables in today's recall vote. I particularly like the distribution chart of how often a given candidate's name appears on the first page of the ballot.

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Probably my hottest passion in HCI is the concept of ambient displays. Ambient displays abound in nature. The way the spectrum of light changes a few minutes before rain starts falling, the way birds waking up at 4am let you know you've been studying too late again, your sense of balance. These are all examples of ambient displays.

In the HCI realm, the hot geek project de l'annee has been to create novel man-made ambient displays. Classic examples are the network activity dangling string and a thicket of waterfall and windchime-oriented projects. In the past few years most of these projects have been filed under the concept of 'ubiquitous computing' though I think this is a bit of a misnomer, since if an ambient display is truly ubiquitou, the 'computing' portion of it should be invisible to the user and therefore should no more have the label 'computing' than a car or DVD player should. The advancement of the field comes in the expression, not the computing.

At any rate, I've been wanting to create ambient displays at home for quite a while, but time, money, or other factors always got in the way. Now that I'm settling in to a new home, the desire to create an ambient informatic environment has risen anew, and I've spent the last several days thinking about two things: What form could these displays take, and what information do I want to display?

Though I don't have a shortage of answers for either of these two questions, I often find a disconnect between the two lists. Without any 'in the world' relationship between, say, traffic to fury.com and the sound of flowing water, that relationship has to exist in my head. Therein lies the problem, because there is a deliberate cognitive step that has to happen in my head when I hear the water surge briefly to understand what that display maps to in the real world. Further, someone who hasn't explicitly been told about the relationship between flowing water and my web site traffic (or in the linked example, the dangling string and the office's overall network activity), would never make that connection. This brought me to my first realization:

All ambient displays are learned.

Whether it's the flat sunlight before an imminent downpour, or the birds chirping at 4am, these displays only become effective as the user makes the connection (causal or otherwise) between the two phenomena. In the most effective ambient displays, this connection happens unconsciously, so that not only does the subject not know how they know it's about to rain, but they don't even notice that the light outside has changed.

In the network-string example, it's likely that the information needed to correlate the string to network traffic isn't available to the user, unless they start to realize that their web-browsing gets slower at the same time as the string gets more energetic. In the website traffic and water example, there is even less data to correlate because my website traffic is a metric completely hidden from someone sitting in my living room. The data that the subconscious brain needs to create this binding simply isn't available, and so explicit knowledge is required, negating the very nature of ubiquity.

To take it a step further, I believe that the linkage between the display and the underlying data should not only be available to the subject, but it must be available in a way where it is internalized inexplicitly. In other words, just having a sign saying "this string's activity indicates network traffic" won't do, because the knowledge of the linkage, while in the world, still has to be internalized consciously, and after the first handful of interactions with the display, the user will carry the knowledge in their head, but in their conscious attention.

This creates a direct obstacle to ubiquitous assimilation of the display's information, because a short-circuit to the conscious level has been created. When the subject encounters the ambient display, they think about the display and their explicit learned linkage, eliminating the opportunity for the display to affect them of its own accord.

It's like stopping hiccups: The most successful and difficult method to succeed is to think about something else entirely, only you can't, because you keep polling yourself to see if it worked, at which point you hiccup. By trying to use an ambient display ambiently, people will often try to see 'if it's working' which means it can't. When a linkage between display and data happens in the subconscious, there isn't that conscious recurrent check to see if it's working, because the conscious mind was never given a role in the experience.

So what makes an effective ambient display? What is effectiveness? Is ambience and/or ubiquity the most important facet? Or is it the fidelity to which the changing data is realized in the subject? It must be a middle ground, where explicit data is sacrificed for the sake of 'calm'. A cellphone ring is not an ambient display, while a static painting falls on the 'overly calm' side of the spectrum: a display that might have a deep meaning, but no change over time.

I'm still doing a lot of thinking on the subject, but rather than running headstrong into waterfalls and colored balls, I'm taking a step back and approaching from a research perspective. I'm going to start keeping a log of the ambient displays I sense every day, how I interact with them, and how I learned the relationship between the display and the information behind it.

My next step will be stretching a few of these displays a bit farther from their data, and see if they still work. For example, right now it's very quiet in my apartment because it's 1am. The ambient noise level is a display telling me very roughly what time it is. If I tied this kind of relationship to my radio, so that it grew softer as the evening wore on, and grew louder in the morning, mirroring the average change in ambient background noise, it might give me a better indication of the time of day, both when I'm staying up too late blogging, and when I should be getting up to start the day. In this respect it might serve as both an ambient alarm clock and 'time to sleep' notification, without any of the abruptness of a clock-radio. The most important difference here is that this radio doesn't attempt to tell you what to do or when, it simply gives you a better sense of the world around you.

Approaching the problem from the other end, I should take a look at the pieces of data I want that aren't adequately addressed by ambient displays. Then I need to find the right way to extend that data into the real world, as opposed to creating a display and an arbitrary linkage.

These are slow steps, but hopefully the results will have a greater utility to wow-factor ratio than most of the ambient work I've done so far.

Comments?

Along with the idea of a Radio TiVo, I'm also looking at outfitting my new home with custom ambient displays. I'm planting a few auxiliary speakers around the place, to be driven by my Lombard G3 laptop, and I'm looking at easily modifiable picture displays.

Though they' won't be on the market for another quarter at least, I'll be keen to take a look at Nokia's new photo pendants.

Comments?

I got a really interesting piece of mail the other day, offering a kind of opt-out I hadn't seen before.

Though I've been in Pittsburgh for the last year, I still have my FasTrak transponder to pay my Bay Area bridge tolls, and so they still send me monthly statements, politely informing me that I haven't actually crossed any SF bridges since the last statement. This time though, they wrote to tell me about a new service that I'd be helping build, just by driving around.

511.org, run by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, is a realtime traffic information aggregator, to help drivers estimate how long a given trip will take, accounting for realtime traffic conditions.

The idea isn't new. Seattle has a similar system, that uses inductive loops built in to the highway to measure traffic speeds, and facilitates some nifty gadgets for using that information. The Bay Area currently uses a system of video cameras, along with some very slick computer vision software (nifty video) developed by my former artificial intelligence professor at Berkeley, to video a stretch of highway, count the cars that pass by, and measure their speed. Nevertheless, I'm guessing FasTrak readers are cheap, and allow for unique identification of cars, so you can put up more datapoints quickly and easily (build them into the overpasses, probably) and understand not just how fast traffic is moving at a given point, but know how fast it's moving between those points, since you know how long it takes a particular vehicle to go from point A to point B.

As I was reading this, thinking "nifty!" I noticed the static-proof bag that came along with the letter. At first I assumed it was for sending my current transponder back to trade in for a new one, better equipped to work with their system (a traditional 'opt-in' service). As I read on, understanding that I didn't have to do anything for the system to work, I thought it was for sending my transponder back if I wanted one that wouldn't work with their tracking system, and would only pay tolls (a traditional 'opt-out' system).

Despite their absolute assurance that "no personal information will be collected or stored," and that they will "never know the location of any particular vehicle or person" or "collect information on individual driving patterns" I understand that many people value their privacy too much. After all, nothing in those platitudes prevents the highway patrol from knowing that there are one or more vehicles traveling above the speed limit, and where they are, so they could then be found and identified.

Still, as much as I value the concept of privacy, I personally don't care about whether they can see how fast I'm going, and I'm trusting (as I am with TiVo) that it won't turn out badly.

So what about the anti-static bag? "If you prefer not to participate in this program, but still want the convenience of using FasTrak, place your toll tag in the enclosed Mylar bag after you have passed through the toll plaza; then it cannot be detected by the roadside readers. To function at the toll plazas, the toll tag must be removed from the Mylar bag." Thus it's an 'opt-out' system, but of a physical nature. at least when you're opting out, you know you're actually opting out, and aren't just trusting the service to respect your wishes (unless the bag's a fake, of course).

It's like the Hokey-Pokey. Opt-in, Opt-out, Opt-in, then out. that's what it's all about!

Comments?

Like Ali, I still feel that the comment count on the OTP navbox is clunky and jarring. I'm looking for better solutions. I'm not sure how important it is to indicate the number of comments for a given post, just how new the latest one is, and if it's new to you. Basically the same functionality that's already in the timeline bar, but more explicit.

In the meantime, I'm playing with replacing salmon with a dark blue and reversed type. Fury 4.0d7 vs. Fury 4.0d8.

Considering how the OTP box would actually be used, and that it should exist on every individual entry page, I've renamed it to 'new this week' (NTW).

Oh, and in case I didn't mention, the comment popup window will go away completely. Now, lookig at comments will take you to that entry's individual page, with the comments appended to the end of the entry. Following a comments link will jump you down to those comments in that page. I don't have a quick example of that. Davezilla used to do that, but recently redesigned his site and has now gone the popup route.

Anyhow, comment away. Work continues...

Comments?

Another day, another design mock.

Changes in d7 include:

• Removal of the '3d effect' except for on the masthead.
• Joining of the top property links to the masthead
• Removal of separators in the 'on this page' (OTP) navbox
• Changing () to [] for OTP comments. (I tried omitting them, or making the color/link just the number, etc. They all looked much worse, trust me.)
• Changing the 'comments' area at the end of entries. Check the first and second entries for examples. The rest are for placement only (FPO).
• 'Track this item'? What's that mean? (grin)
• Removed the legend. More navbox changes to come.

For discussion: How does the color balance look now? granted the white/grey isn't set in stone, but I feel that without the legend, the salmon isn't so overbearing. Comments? Also: When you click on a salmon comment counter in the OTP, should it take you to the oldest comment you haven't yet read, or to the first comment? What if none of the comments are new?

Comments?

So, amazingly, after giving you guys this speech about how I wanted to conduct a transparent design process, I squirrel myself away, whipping up visual iterations, changing them, showing them to a few close friends, and making changes. that's exactly what I was trying to avoid.

Still, my current design thoughts have problems, and I guess it's artistic ego that doesn't want to let me show it while those problems are unsolved. Nevertheless, discussion might help solve those problems, so here goes.

The 'current' mock is Fury 4.0d5. Caveats:

• The parts that I focused on here were the masthead, the first entry on the page, and the 'on this page' nav box.
• The rest of the nav boxes haven't been touched yet, though they absolutely will, and several will be going away, and new ones replacing them.
• The HTML and CSS code are very messy. Don't worry about that. This is a design mock and the code will be optimized when I write it into the live system. CSS folk might notice that the 'on this page' nav box is all css, reducing a fair bit of table junk.
• I haven't personally tested this on any browsers other than Safari.
• The 'comments' summary after the first post is still a work in progress. I still need to put in links to the actual posts, see how it looks when there are 25 comments, and not just 2, have a clear link for adding a comment, etc.
• I removed the 'comment dots' from the timeline. They made the design even busier, and their usefulness is diminished by the 'on this page' box.
• The timeline bar items will actually be colored the same as the 'on this page' items, in a gradient (like topics is) instead of the 'new, 1day, 3 day, old' system. (Thoughts on this?)

Okay, now the known issues:

1. The color scheme is either too sterile or too patriotic.
2. The page seems too crowded. (This should be improved when the rest of the nav boxes are done)
3. I'm not sure that I'm happy with the presentation of the # and newness of comments in the 'on this page' box.
4. More I can't think of just now.

Okay, I again stress work in progress, but have at it anyhow.

For comparison and conversational fodder, check out a few earlier versions: 4.0d1, 4.0d2, 4.0d3, 4.0d4.

Comments?

Sorry for the slowness of posts. This time though it's completely warranted. I've been putting a lot of effort into Fury 4.0. Right now most of the obvious work has been in the visual design of the front page.

That visual design incorporates some changes in the interactive design of fury, but most of the interactive changes (and they are substantial) will be slower in coming.

I feel the flows have to be validated more, and will require more user testing, while I feel qualified to take a good solid stab at the visual redesign based on my knowledge of user habits, relative importance of various elements, and personal asthetic.

I'll probably have the first static visual design mock up late tomorrow or Thursday. Before that I expect I'll dive in to explaining one or more of the redesigned flows. FYI, I'm redesigning (or designing the initial flow) for: reading comments, posting main comments, posting IMblog comments, registering/login.

And that's just the stuff I can recall off the top of my head.

I'll say this though, after working on the VisDe for 4.0 for the last two days, it's almost icky goving back to 3.2 to actually post...

Comments?

I have a certain fondness for keyboards. Starting when I learned to touch-type on a fully manual typewriter in the 7th grade, I've migrated to all kinds of keyboards, with different looks and feels, strokes and weights.

I've always found both my writing style and general computing attitude to be greatly affected by the keyboard I'm using. In this regard (and only this regard) I secretly identify with Greg Kinnear's typewriter-afficianado character in You've Got Mail.

I've probably owned more than a dozen keyboards since I learned to type, from the clickitty IBM PC keyboards to the membrane keyboard of the Odyssey II, to the tiny keyboard of my Duo 210 to the Stowaway folding keyboard for my Palm V to my Sidekick's thumb 'keyboard', just to name a few. Okay, make that two dozen.

Atop the highest pedestal in this tactile pantheon sits my Apple Extended Keyboard II, which I got in 1989, along with my Mac SE/30. I called it a 'deck,' massive yet graceful, seeming more suited to the bridge of the Enterprise (1701-D) than on a simple 1980s desktop ("Hello computer!"). (Here's a great photo of Apple keyboards and mice through the ages. The AEK II is the big one on the top left.)

The keys had a soft stroke, and bespoke quiet power when pressed. Even stroking my hand across the full sweep of the 105 keys (I remember that there were 105 keys) gave more a sense of art than doing the same over the 88 keys of a grand piano.

Truly a thing of beauty.

Okay, back to the point, and the present day. For the last six months I've been living off my powerbook, using its decent keyboard while away from my desk, and jacking in to the orphaned keyboard and mouse that came with my now stilled G4 Quicksilver desktop. A decent combination. Well, as the avid reader knows, I sold my desktop machine last week, and the buyer opted for the keyboard and mouse as well. No problem. I'd just buy another.

For the last two weeks, since pulling the keyboard for the eBay photos, I've been using my backup Happy Hacking Keyboard, a tool which, while admirable for its efficiency, compactness, and lack of a caps-lock key, is ultimately cramped and uninspiring. Pair that with a Wacom as my primary pointing device on a desk so cluttered to not have room for it, and my writing was quite literally cramped.

With my eBay money firmly in my paypal account, I've been doing a little spending. I intended to replace my keyboard with another just like it, but it turns out they don't sell the black keyboard separately, only the white model. I wasn't sure how I felt about this inversion, but I went ahead and bought it anyhow, and I don't know how much is in my head and how much in the keys, but it feels more like that vaunted Extended Keyboard II than any board I've had the pleasure of keystroking since. (108 keys. Tee-hee!)

Suddenly writing is a pleasure again. Heck, I've already written 590 words on a new keyboard (on a new keyboard)!

This is a preface to say that, like the new owner of a Strat, I'm learning my instrument, finding our shared voice, but so far she truly sounds sweet.

If you think I'm a freak now, just wait until my new mouse and speakers arrive. Hey, at least it's not an iGesture Pad. God those things look cool.

Comments?

Tomorrow I'm going through graduation ceremonies, celebrating the completion of my masters degree in Human-Computer Interaction. Nevermind that I and all my year-mates (augh, vocabulary sublimated from Valdemar books) don't actually finish our work at CMU until August; there's only one ceremony a year, for the whole school, so it's now or nunca.

This is kind of a trend. All my scholastic life I've looked forward to 'graduation'. It has such a cathartic ring to it. Yet I'm not sure that I've ever experienced 'graduation' in the true sense.

My first graduation, from elementary school, was called a 'matriculation', a big word I wasn't willing to internalize when I had already pegged the ceremony as being a 'graduation'. In Junior High School, graduating from Portola Magnet, we also were 'matriculating', but at least we got honest-to-god diplomas certifying our achievement, and we got them on stage, in front of our families.

High school, the most well recognized of all levels of 'graduation' was, I believe, actually referred to as a 'graduation', [oops. As I recall this morning, it was called a 'culmination'. No graduation there either!] but the actual ceremony of the principal calling each (of 655) graduate's name, shaking their hand, and handing them a scroll tied with a ribbon was slightly dampened by the growing pile of gumballs and other paraphernalia at Principal King's feet, as some of the less mature students wished to leave their final (only too literal) mark on the school (or the hand of the head of that institution) which they were departing. The other downer was that the scroll we received wasn't, in fact, our diploma, but instructions informing us that we needed to return our caps and gowns to the basketball gym, in exchange for our diplomas-held-hostage.

Berkeley graduations were fun. Here we had elevated from the terms 'matriculation' and 'graduation'. This was 'Commencement': the simultaneous completion and onset of our lives, representing initiation in the truest senses. Mind you, mine was premature. I still had one language requirement to fulfill, a requirement which not only did not need to be filled in Berkeley's hallowed halls, but one which we were encouraged to complete at community college, to free up space and professors for pursuits more novel and advanced than rote memorization. But I digress.

Like High School, each participant in the Berkeley ceremonies receives a small, tightly tied scroll. This time the scroll attests that the bearer participated in the commencement ceremonies for the department in question. It doesn't say they earned a degree, but it does affirm that they sat in a chair, and had their name read aloud.

The funny part is that they'll let anyone with a cap and gown in to the various Berkeley commencements. Indeed, several students were supposed to repeat, considering that there are roughly 20 ceremonies for different departments, in addition to special ceremonies for students of color, re-entry students, and other groups unaffiliated by field of study. I have friends who participated in as many as 10 ceremonies, writing their name down on 10 cards, sitting in 10 seas of graduates, and having their names read by 9 unphased professors or directors (okay, 0, but the 10th should have been unphased, considering that one of the ceremonies was the one they were expected to attend), before offering their hands to be shook on stage, and proceeding down to the inevitable champagne and strawberry reception following the ceremony.

Still, it feels really good, and it's easy to suspend my disbelief into convincing myself that this is what it's all about, on loan for one more semester; Christmas early.

In about 10 hours I'm going through my final Commencement ceremony. This time I get to wear the plaid and gold hood of a master, and I have family from nearly 3,000 miles away to cheer me on. This time really does feel like a commencement, a tipping point, a point of inflection on the integral of my life. While actual completion is still 12 weeks away, I'm rapidly narrowing in on what my future holds beyond August, and should have it resolved by the end of the week. It's as though the train tracks that I've been laying just in front of the engine of my life are finally connecting with the main line, and I can continue on without counting on just-in-time education, planning, employment, or anything else.

I'm clearly rambling, but what I'm trying to say is that it's funny (that I'm graduating prematurely once more), and that it's good (that life's map is being drawn well, and by my own hand).

I should go, because in five hours I have to pick my mom up from the airport, where she's flying in on the redeye from Los Angeles, and then drive back to campus to start the festivities. I'll make sure plenty of pictures are taken, including some by me.

On a tangental note, I've interviewed with twenty-eight people in the last three weeks, and the single most common question asked of me was "why did you go back to school and get your Masters?" I came back for answers, for training, and an internal affirmation that the skills I learned in the real world aren't a facade of confidence, trendy design ideas, and design-by-ego. While here I've built a foundation of UI and HCI understanding that I can build on for the rest of my life. I have a much clearer idea of my own abilities, and of the things I want to do with them.

Anyhow, I should sleep and quit it with the St. Crispin's Day deal. Tomorrow I get to graduate, rain or shine, and it's going to feel very, very good.

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Ever wonder what it's like to have prosopagnosia? How would you adapt to not being able to recognize faces as easily as the human mind usually does? Taking a look around the web, wondering about this, I came across a great page written by a long-term prospagnosiac, comparing rocks to faces to help the rest of us understand how it can be difficult to recognize the faces of people you see rarely, or every day.

Interesting to consider that an inability to recognize faces is more easily diagnosed, but agnosias come in all forms and severities, and what might be obvious to you might be obscure to others in ways that have nothing to do with logic, intelligence or insight, and everything to do with the higher-order precognitive recognition systems of the brain.

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The common clipboard is arguably one of the most important concepts to give rise to the non-modal computer (that can run several applications at once). Copy in one app, paste in another. It's great, and it's essential.

Oddly, it looks like Apple's trying to replicate this design pattern in the 'search' widget that has become common in the iApps (iTunes, Mail, Safari, etc.).

Experiment: Open Safari, navigate to a page, and use command-f to find a phrase in that page. Now switch to OS X's Mail program and enter a phrase into Mail's 'search' box, then go back to your Safari window and hit command-g ("Find Again"). Amazingly, Safari thinks that you don't actually want to 'find again' but you want to find an instance of the word you just 'searched' for in Mail!

I can see the designer's argument for why this could be a good idea: The most recently entered item into a lexical-specification widget must be the mote that the user is concentrating on at that moment, so naturally we're helping them if we assume that they want to find that same phrase in a web page.

There are two problems with this, in my opinion, neither of which are devastating alone, but combine badly.

First: It acts as if 'search' and 'find' are the same thing when they're not. To 'search' on the web, in a list of emails, or in an iTunes playlist actually means to filter based on a substring match. 'Find' on the other hand means to bring to the forefront the specific substring in the context of the data source currently being looked at, be it an individual email, word document, or web page.

Within the context of a specific application, bridging these together doesn't present a problem. It's usually a two-stage approach: First you search for relevant items, then you find within each item for the relevant data. Google uses this approach with the automatic highlighting of search criteria when displaying cached copies of pages returned from a search. Safari does it too, taking the text entered into the 'google search' field and placing it into the 'find' dialog, whether it's visible or not (and, perhaps arrogantly, whether you had previously been 'finding' for something else).

Within an application, soft-integrating search and find (or perhaps more appropriately, "filter and highlight") can be helpful, though it can still create unexpected results.

The second problem is the fact that different applications usually represent different cognitive tasks in the user's mind, so a search for one criteria in one application is irrelevant to the finding task in another application. Even worse, it can be a direct inhibitor, for example a few minutes ago when I was 'finding' IP numbers listed in a web page, then manually looking up the name next to the IP, filtering that name in Mail, then going back to find the next instance of the IP, only to find that Safari took me to the next instance of the person's name. This kind of self-perpetuating failure means I have to manually type or re-paste the 'find' criteria each time.

I don't know if this is an intentional design decision on Apple's part or an accidental sharing of the namespace for a widget class, though the former seems more likely, since shared namespaces across applications in a unix environment seems pretty darned unlikely considering find and search aren't OS X 'services'. Either way, I'll have to take a look later and see if the behavior exists in iTunes and other apps that use the find/search widget.

Oh, and on a different Safari-bug note, it appears that if you hit the 'find previous' button in the find dialog box, it does exactly the same thing as 'find next'. I guess that's why it's beta. :-)

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I was going to write this specifically about iTunes, but I think it applies to most mp3 players. If any mp3 players have this functionality, I'd love to hear about it, regardless of platform.

A predefined playlist is just that, a queue of songs whose composition and order has been set up manually. Set on random shuffle, the order is mixed, but the contents of the list remains the same. That's all fine, but it's not how Iusually work.

A lot of the time I use music as my background, but to let it fade in to the background, I need one of a smaller subset of songs, almost like you need certain conditions to fall asleep, but once there can tolerate a lot more.

What I want is to be able to insert two songs or five into the playlist queue, even if it's on random. I want to be able to say "play this song now, then that one, then go on to your normally scheduled randomness."

I can do this already with a single song by finding the song, playing it, then unfiltering so that everything is visible, but first, that limits me to a one song push to the queue, and second, that song has to be in the same playlist that it will be going back to after that song.

I want a 'current song queue' box where I can drag a few songs in, order them around, and then at the end of my little list, drag in a playlist's icon, so as to say "and when you're done, keep playing from this playlist.'

With this system, more advanced functionality could be to specify "Play three songs from ths playlist, then 2 from that, then al of this playlist on random shuffle, before emptying out into a random play of the entire library." All this would be possible with a little interface work.

What would be even better would be a system that gets rid of playlists altogether but relys on markov chaining to create song queues that meld well fro one song to the next, gravitating towards one or another style of song. This is similar to something my group created in our 'home MP3 player' assignment this semester, but I'll talk more about that once I put the work we did online.

In other news my graduation present is coming few weeks early. Let's just say I need to find some more mp3s to fill the rest of the 30 gigs. ;-) (Thanks Dad!)

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Do you ever click the 'get mail' button a couple times, just to make sure you got all the email, and there's not another, overlooked letter, maybe sitting in the bottom of the virtual mailbag?

In user testing, time and time again reserchers will see a user try to do something with a new interface, and if the system doesn't react, they'll click again, and click harder again until they can't click any harder. Then they give up and try another tactic.

I wonder how interfaces could be designed to use these behaviors. First, we'd need a pressure-sensitive mouse button, then we'd need to reinvent interactive metaphors to better map to the way we work as people.

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Trust the government to spearhead waterfall design at the expense of usability. They're trying to make governmental data easier for ordinary citizens to find, but their 'three clicks or less' mantra leaves a lot to be desired.

"Three clicks or less" sounds great in meetings and when pitching to corporate schmoes, but it has absolutely nothing to do with usability, beyond ensuring that the final product will have been crippled by a false constraint at the outset.

The joining of several databases into a few unified search databases is laudable, but search has so much to do with how search requests are understood by the system, how different results are given levels of significance, and how those levels are indicated to the user, that the most unified search engine can end up being the worst, unless these factorsare taken into account.

Case in point: Go to 4 out of 5 consumer electroncs sites and search for a product name or part number and you'll receive 23 press releases that mention the product name, and you have to drag through two or three pages of search results before actually getting to the product page. This is a particularly lamentable example because it's clear that users desire product pages over press releases, and they could easily be grouped first, or the result set could even be gathered into piles from different categories so the user can say 'ooh, press releases!' and dive into that subset of the results.

Hopefully, government info is just as structured and easily clustered. They also have the benefit of being able to enforce metadata inclusion, to allow better sorting and grouping of result sets based on meta tags.

Of course, my grousing is based on the PR-speak coming from the project, and I'm assuming that the design will follow the propaganda they're spouting to the press. I just hope the actual designers don't accept the 'three click' mandate as the backbone of design, because just because you can get anywhere in three clicks, if each of those clicks are from a palette of a hundred or a thousand, then usability was gone before click one.

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So throughout the cruise, Karen was journalling in her Little Red Book. I intended on writing up entries each evening and posting them when able, but with my lack of a power supply, I was forced to journal on paper, and I'm just not as good at that as I used to be. I'm used to thinking just slow enough to type. Thinking slowly enough to write longhand is just too hard. Maybe I should parctice.

Anyhow, the point is that Karen's Little Red Book (with beautiful Chinese designs in gold all over it, making me feel a touch guilty each time I'd look at it that it wasn't being used for its intended purpose) existed as her blog for the week of the cruise. Now she's making good on that designation by transcribing it, day by day, giving a more thorough accounting of our cruise than I ever could. I'm enjoying reading it, reliving each day as I go.

Anyhow, the short of it is that those of you who feel shortchanged by the recent dearth of Fresh Fury Fun should head over to Karen's and read the daily accounting of our Mexican cruise. That, along with the photos I posted yesterday, should paint a pretty good picture of the trip.

As for me, tomorrow me and five of my classmates will be representing Carnegie Mellon in this year's CHI Interactionary competition. I've said ridiculously little about it so far, and had better blog by morning, so you'll feel some of the anxiety that I feel at the prospect of competing in the industry's only timed Computer-Human Interaction team competition in front of most of the leaders of the industry, judged by Jared Spool, Terry Winograd, and other notables.

Ack!

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I'm in Ft. Lauderdale now for the CHI2003 conference. I'm in all kinds of tizzies, mostly school and work related. Karen and I took 438 pictures during our time in LA and on the cruise, and I have about 48 really good ones that I'll be posting soon.

I took the redeye last night from LAX to land in Charlotte, NC this morning, where I met some of my fellow CMU folk and we flew the rest of the way to Florida.

right now I'm realizing that Ihve' had a chai and some dried mango and that's it for the last 20 hours, so I'm going to go find some yummy food and destress a little before tacking the mountain of homework I have to get through.

Oh, and great news on the job seeking fronts as well. Interviews abound, and possibilities coalesce...

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Irate Scottsman has an interesting entry on inconsistencies in UI controls amongst Apple's own iApplications.

Personally, ever since Apple started with the iApps, I've been questioning the conflict of interest between Apple's setting UI guidelines, and then breaking them in their own applications in order to make those applications feel more appealing than third-party options.

The 'chrome' UI window theme used by iTunes, iPhoto, Safari and others is the clearest example of this. It lends the applications a sense of utility and refinement above that of applications that actually follow Apple's published UI guidelines.

It goes further than that though. Back when we were implementing webcams into the mac version of Yahoo Messenger, and I was creating the interface for the webcam broadcaster, I sought to follow the play/pause/ffw designs that Apple had established. Seeing the similarity in the webcam broadcaster's utility with that of quicktime, it made sense to leverage off the media controls OS X users were already familiar with.

Quicktime Controls

I got in touch with the UI evangelist at Apple and asked where I could get the approved 'bead' graphics for the play/pause/stop buttons, and I was told that not only were those graphics unavailable for third-party use, but that they are specific to Apple, and that other applications with interfaces requiring play, pause and stop buttons should not seek to emulate these controls.

What? Beaded buttons are one of the primary differentiating visual characteristics of OS X, and Apple goes through great pains to make sure they're used pervasively in third-party applications. Yet somehow media buttons fall outside the fold.

My first thought was that Apple's software revenue is tightly focused on digital media applications, but if that were the case, I would think that they'd put more effort in keeping their interface controls consistent across their own cutting-edge apps. Instead, each iApp tweaks the standard, either slightly, by beveling it down into a chrome window (iTunes), swapping the order of the 'rewind' and 'full rewinid' controls (iMovie 2), or eventually abandoning the bead style completely, as iMovie 3 has done:

iTunes Controls

iMovie 2 Controls

iMovie 3 Controls

Sadly, it seems that Apple's UI guidelines are created by waterfall design. They create cool new applications, then update the guidelines to accommodate. Thus, the application designer with the keys to the Apple UI palace can innovate all they want, then declare it the standard upon release. Third-party apps rush to follow suit, but by the time they do they seem outdated and boring, and Apple's taken the next step.

It reminds me of the Microsoft light bulb joke: "How many Microsoft engineers does it take to screw in a light bulb?" "None: They just adopt darkness as the new standard, then charge customers for the right to unscrew their own light bulbs for compliance."

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So I've finally emerged from this tunnel of work I've been confined by for the last week. I've designed and field-tested two iterations of a photocopier interface, an iteration of an online banking site, created a six-page feature proposal for a meeting with General Motors this afternoon, written two essays on the previous week's readings, and designed a (imbo) kickass dice game for game design and put it through more than eight iterations.

For next week I need to put my copier through another three iterations, my bank site through another one (both using high-fidelity prototypes), run my nearly-perfect game through another three iterations, and call dice wholesalers to discuss volume pricing to determine the final in-store target price for my game to assess the viability of self-financing a small run to seed to local game stores, and possibly find a distributor.

Oh, and my sidekick but the dust yesterday evening, with the 'LCD screen of mayhem' but apparently coughed that dust up in the night because it's working fine again now.

So now I have a similar workload to last week, only I have a full week to do it, and not the two days I gave myself last week (except for the game which took up most of my cycles). There was Buffy and it was Good. My new TiVo is on its way and will probably arrive today (oh yeah, sorry to the folks who are lusting for my old TiVo. This one's going to Mom. (Hey Mom, you've got Tivo!)

My Dad's birthday party is this Saturday and I'll be there in spirit.

It snows pretty much every day but I'm still waiting for that big snow that will make snowmen and sledding the inevitable order of the day.

Our guest speaker at last night's seminar at one point asked, "who else is sick of the cold?" and I was surprised that as most of the hands made for the sky, mine was not among them.

And in the midst of all this, I plan to start production code for Fury 4.0 tomorrow. I've got a lot of changes I'll be rolling in to one release, so expect that to take up a lot of my (ahem) extra time for the next couple weeks.

Hey, how you doin'?

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I had the oddest dream last night: Me and two of my friends in the HCI Masters program went back in time three hundred years to talk to their equivalent of an interaction designer. I lost most of it, but I remember thinking "Ooh! Let's tell him about affordances!"

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Another in a long series of displays of why I get so little sleep, here's my latest class assignment, this time from my Interface and Interaction Design course.

The assignment: Take a widget (defined as a single interactive element, like a lightswitch, a pull-top can, or what have you), and redesign it, demonstrating the affordances and benefits of your new design.

Since the professor said the assignment would be graded as much on final production value as for the design of the widget itself, I went a little photoshop crazy.

If you're truly interested, I have a lot more specification detail than made it into the poster, but the poster still gives a good idea.

I chose car exterior door locks.

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Well, maybe not. But I could.

Combine a close lightning strike every few seconds with an apartment with ungrounded outlets (despite being 3-pronged), and the reasonable thing to do is turn off and unplug the computer, and so I have.

Let me just mention how cool my hiptop (err, 'sidekick') is, that I can, with no modification, browse to my weblog's composition page, and hammer (well, thumb) out a blog post, despite not having a computer turned on anywhere around.

There will be a hiptop review and, after spending a week or two with it, I'll be able to go into so much greater detail than I could have with 15 minutes in a conference room.

I love it, and there are a lot of areas that need improvement, almost all software, thankfully. The biggest testament for the hiptop interface may merely be that it isn't a pain to use it to compose a post of this length!

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Heya, how many of you use RSS feeds? If you do, please leave a comment here, and maybe a little bit on how you use them. I'm thinking about making an RSS feed for Fury, but I'd like a little more perspective on how people use them.

For those who don't know what RSS feeds are, or don't use them, you'll probably want to check the comments. They're really cool, and I bet a bunch of your fellow readers swear by them.

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When an astronaut is in space, their time is worth $400/minute.

That's why NASA spends more per user for usability research than any other company in the world...

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If you've ever accidentally confused the 'forward' and 'reply' buttons, you'll know just how embarassing it can be.

This reminds me of the time (about 8 years ago) when I shyly asked a girl I liked in the office to lunch, and accidentally sent it to the whole company.

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So the latest version of Yahoo! Messenger for Windows went into public beta today, containing a lot of the work that I did in the months prior to leaving the company.

A lot of things didn't make this version, (which means that 6.0 is going to be really, really cool whenever it gets made) but 5.5 has several nice new features, such as Super Webcam (with a 15 frame-per-second 'Turbo Mode,' advancing the current 0.75fps mode), more (and improved) smileys, and a new IMVironment selector, in addition to smaller enhancements in usability and look and feel.

The faster webcam deal is really pretty cool (if you're on a DSL or faster connection), as it really runs the webcam into a meaningful expressive tool...

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This proof of concept device is exactly the kind of direction I've been hoping that personal electronics would take: shifting from the consumption of media (tapes, CDs, books, etc.) to the creation of it (cameras, small writing devices, microphones).

In a nutshell, this device is constantly recording the sound around you, via a microphone at your waist and one in your ear and, upon recognizing a preprogrammed keyword or phrase, like "nice to meet you" or "I'll have to remember that", will store a predetermined portion of that buffer for you, for further retrieval.

They give the 'cocktail party' example of remembering the names of people you met (which I think would only be useful if there was also an integrated camera) but I could see countless uses in a classroom environement or social environment; anywhere you might hear something you want to remember, but weren't prepared for.

With the proper software, this could also be a very useful tool for people with ADD, giving them the ability to, with a simple voice or button-driven command, get a playback of the last 30 seconds of conversation, if their mind wandered. In fact, for some ADD people, the ability to run a constant, lower volume stream of the conversation, delayed 5-30 seconds from 'realtime' could help them keep their mind in the conversation, even as it wanders, with the first pass being a 'screening pass' and the second enabling them to turn their focus on the conversation.

The device also has a clock and GPS, so with each saved annotation would be the time and exact place where the conversation took place.

There aren't any commercial production plans yet, but this kind of technology could easily be added to existing consumer devices, such as cellphones or HD MP3 players, given the proper firmware and some hardware tweaks.

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I've been doing a lot of thinking over the last three months on the format of a blog. The design patterns of this type of site, and those that set it apart from a macrom site, or a static informational site.

Of course blogs are more timely, and are therefore stickier (mmm... sticky blogs...) but does this advantage come at a price?

They typical blog has a front page and date-indexed archives section. Some more sophisticated blogs also have categories, so you can find posts loosely related to the one you're reading, or look for things on a particular topic.

Having had both of these 'windows into the past' for a while, I don't think they're sufficient. I still look at some static sites and miss in my own site the qualities of relevance that they have.

There are two kinds of posts (okay, there are as many kinds of posts as there are posts, but for the sake of this post, I can make my point by dividing posts in general thusly): Those which have meaning within the running commentary of posts, or otherwise are relevant specifically to the time when they're posted, and those which, insights, information, commentary or otherwise, are items that would make it onto a static site, if that was what you kept. This second type of post is the kind of thing you wish people coming to your site for the first time could see when they're trying to get a foodhold understanding of who you are, rahter than forcing them to dig through sedimentary banality, or lurk long enough until they think they know you.

So this post isn't saying much more than that my current focus of blog framework study is looking at the more effective kinds of information presentation on static sites, personal or otherwise, that have a fair amount of data, yet easily allow people to self-select the kind of information they want. I hope to identify ways of building this kind of framework dynamically, and incorporate it into the blogging system, so that when I write what I think is a profound, timeless, or otherwise worthy piece, along with filing it dutifully away in the date archives and a few topic pages, it'll also find a home in the pantheonic 'static site'.

Clearly I'm thinking far too much about this for someone with a backlog of posts and only twelve days remaining before the Big Drive, but then there's always spare cycles to burn, walking down the stairs, showering, sleeping...

Hey, happy Monday, y'all!

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Frantically busy in my last two days at Yahoo, but if there's one thing I know about me, it's that if I don't document an idea, I'll forget it, even one as recurring as this one. So:

Copy, Cut, and Paste are great, but three times today and usually at least once a day, I wished there was a Switch command. This command (by keystroke (Cmd-Shift-V) or edit menu) would replace the current selection with the clipboard contents, exactly as paste does, but would also replace the clipboard contents with the otherwise-vaporized current selection.

Another way to look at this is "pick up selection and put down what I was holding before."

Think about this feature today, and see how many times you'd have wanted to use it...

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The most visited web page on the planet gets a facelift.

Check out the public beta!

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Pet peeve of the day: When my (or any) computer says something along the lines of, "The user 'kfox' does not exist."

This bugs me because the computer grants existence to the object by by making it the subject of the sentence, then denying that there is any such thing. More accurate would be to say, "The user 'kfox' cannot be found" or "'kfox' is not a valid user on this system."

Of course, these don't address the larger problem, which is that I am the user 'kfox' and whether I have an account is the issue, not whether or not I exist. I don't think my computer is qualified to tell me that, even if I did name it Descartes.

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So A friend of mine at Yahoo has a friend at Danger, Inc. and she's arranged for me to go there this afternoon and play with a Danger Hiptop!

The Hiptop (Hip-top) is the next potential 'ideal merging of phone and PDA.' Built from the ground up around wireless data transfer and phone capabilities, it doesn't have to work around an established handheld form factor, or hardware that has wireless connectivity grafted on a grandfathered OS.

I'm really excited to see what this can do in person, since a few minutes with a Handspring Treo was enough to burst that bubble.

Originally slated for a January launch, Danger and T-Mobile (rebranded and expanded Voicestream) are (last I heard) doing final beta testing and are planning on a launch in late June or in July.

I'll probably know a lot more in a few hours, but I have no idea how closed-lipped they are, so I don't know how much I'll be able to share. Hopefully it won't matter and they'll release the product in the next few weeks.

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For all you OS X users out there: When you have magnification turned on in the dock and you mouse over the dock items, do you perceive the items as getting closer to you while the others stay father away, or that they get bigger, while the others stay small?

Just curious.

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My odd point at work today is when I was discussing an interaction flow with a coworker, and I said to her in all seriousness, "Well, this is how a porn site would do it..."

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CNN's running a story on the Segway, now that Atlanta has received its first Segway shipment. In the article, they link to a Time.com flash animation detailing the anatomy of a Segway.

The diagram shows where the batteries, gyroscopes, daughterboards, and so forth ar all stored away, and also shows us where they hide the user interface:

Rollover text: "The User Interface tells you the machine is on, what mode it's in, and how much battery life is left."

Who would have thought the whole user interface fit into a readout on the handlebars? Looks like someone at Time needs to learn the difference between a status readout and a user interface...

(yes, I'm feeling snarky today. I just want to drive one...)

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I wonder what would happen if, as a design exercise, a designer were asked to take an existing site and create the 'next generation' of that site. Flat photoshop mocks a flow chart and a sitemap.

Now take those docs to another designer, tell them this design has been around for over a year and is stal