Usability
Vista and Windows 7 GUI mystery
When I first saw Vista my initial reaction was “what the heck?!”. It wasn’t incompatibility, performance, nor stability that caught my attention. What amazed me at that time was the Vista GUI, which now seems that it will transfer over to Windows 7. So what is so special about it? To tell you the truth I…
Aggressive Online Advertisement
Floating windows are the most annoying kind of internet advertisement according to the Russian internet statistic agency. Floating windows bother 78% of internet users Banners bother 7.6% Video ads bother 3.6% Only 3.4% of users actually order something using advertisement links.
Touch screen tactile feedback and user satisfaction survey
A survey recently conducted (France, Germany and the UK) showed 38% were planning to get a touchscreen on their next mobile phone while only 47% of people who already owned a touchscreen said they would get another one. In other words, less than half of touchscreen owners thought they’d stick with the technology on their…
Useful text editing shortcuts (Mac OS X)
I came across a few useful text editing shortcuts for Mac OS X @ www.ss64.com – a site dedicated to all kinds of applications/os syntax… Editing Text (email, TextEdit, Pages, etc) ⌥ ← Move one word left ⌥ → Move one word right ⌘ ← Beginning of line ⌘ → End of line Scroll one…
Mouse for $1200
Intelligent Design has came up with a handcrafted Bluetooth laser mouse. “Grade 1 titanium, high quality plastic resin, a neodymium scroll wheel and impressive design for those who demand perfection at their fingerprints”, and are and willing to pay for it. The price tag is $1200. Well, perfection has never been cheap. I guess the…
Gmail Tasks Usable Feature - Outliner
Gmail Tasks has one very useful feature. It is an outliner that lets you organize tasks into discrete sections that are related in a tree structure or hierarchy. As much as I love OS X Mail and iCal, the ability to quickly break any task into sub-tasks makes a big difference in usability.
iTunes 8 and mysterious absence of song rating keyboard shortcut
I love iTunes. Have been using it since version 1 (or 2 – can’t remember) but certainly for a long time. At the beginning I hesitated to switch to it completely – my pal for a long time was Panic’s Audion. iTunes won. Since then it’s been my jukebox of choice. It keeps getting better…
Adobe Creative Suite 4 (CS4) Usability
I have to say I’m very satisfied with Adobe’s presentation of the new CS4. Here are a few main reasons from a usability standpoint: Adobe focused on workflow and user experience. They kept most of great Macromedia GUI innovations and greatly developed some of them further. FireWorks has become a full member of CS family. PDF workflow is greatly improved…