• Twitter is the latest social software craze from the valley, whose appeal I barely understand. Anyway, if you want to know what the buzz is about, Thomas Han, an avid user, has a great tutorial, a review of Twitter clients for the Mac, and some tips and tricks.
• Jason Hong found a video of a nifty game for tablet PCs called Crayon Physics Deluxe.
• Jason also found a web site that “measures” the reading level of a blog. According to the site, my blog’s reading level is high school. But there is no explanation what they are measuring, and Jonathan Bailey in his blog Plagiarism Today has pointed out a sleazy ad technique they use.
• Meanwhile, Juicy Studio has a more rigorous discussion on how reading levels are measured. According to them, my Gunning Fog Index is 9.18. What does that mean? Find out.
• Danyel Fisher ran into a rant about pie charts by Coda Hale, although other viewpoints were discussed in the comments.
• Nicodemus clued me in on three spinoffs for Mystery Science Theater 3000: Riff Trax, The Film Crew, and Cinematic Titanic. Isn’t the net wonderful?
• I had no idea where “Don’t tase me bro!” came from, but I was enlightened by Dulbecco (1, 2). Now, a certain comic strip make more sense.
• Dulbecco also blogged about the delightfully wacked song “Still Alive” in the game Portal. After I heard it, I wasn’t surprised to find out that Jonathan Coulton wrote the song. He is interviewed about the song in the gaming web site Primotech.

Someone posted videos of the Thermo demo on YouTube. I highly recommend watching them; the demo is one of the most impressive I’ve seen, especially in the end-user programming area.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

Helvetica at 50 by BBC News Magazine

• SAP has 3 types of patterns
  • patterns for frequently discovered user requirements
  • patterns for composing UIs from components
  • patterns for executable UI components
• The only way to drive adoption of patterns is to build them into the tools that designers and developers use
• SAP validates their patterns through user testing
• Patterns do "freeze" UI innovation overall, but the patterns themselves will evolve over time
• There is always a tension between those who use the patterns and those who deviate from the patterns to innovate on the UI

• There is a universal inbox, called the Dashboard, that can hold anything: e-mail, calendar, documents, etc. These go into one of three categories: Now, Later, and Done. Stuff moved from Now to Later can be “tickled” so that it moves into Now at a specified time. The idea is that things go back and forth between Now and Later, picking up more information about how they get done, until they are actually Done.
• Stuff can go anywhere. An e-mail message can go directly into the calendar or a to-do list, and it also stays in your Dashboard.
• Tags are used for bottom-up organizing (so that you can find it later), while categories are used for top-down organizing (putting stuff in collections). They have somewhat different affordances, but tags can easily become categories and vice-versa.

This all sounds good, but I asked how much of this was driven by user observations. Mimi said the biggest source came from looking at people’s e-mail folders to try to figure out what their organizational schemes were. So I’m still not sure how much of Chandler’s design is driven by what people actually do versus the Chandler team guessing. I hope it’s more the former.

Chandler is particularly interesting to me because it’s trying to address many of the same issues as the IBM research project I’m in, Unified Activity Management.

The second half was an absolutely hilarious talk by Merlin Mann about modern life in general and dealing with the deluge of information. In fact, he manages a whole web site about this problem called 43 Folders. One organizational framework that he discussed in particular is called Getting Things Done (which Mimi also touched on in her talk). Instead of rehashing what Merlin said, take a look at his intro. Suffice to say that geeks seem to have gravitated to it, so I’ll have to take a look.

• Jensen is an excellent speaker. He’s clear, funny, and not afraid to poke fun at Microsoft’s previous attempts at “improving” the user interface of Office.
• UI designs are actually driven by data that is collected anonymously, and with permission, from current Office 2003 users. It may not be perfect data, but it’s a lot better than guessing.
• The new UI is most easily adopted by novice users. Power users already know Office well, so they have the most to loseWeight Exercise in the new UI. The biggest thing Jensen feels the new UI is lacking is customizability for power users.
• Office 12 is about a year away from release, but Microsoft is already talking very openly about it. They haven’t been nearly this open in the past, and other companies certainly aren’t as open today. I believe it’s from a combination of starting from a position of strength and feeling the pressure to show that they are innovative, that the next version of Office really is worth buying.

Actually, I don’t think it’s too bad, but I decided to look at a design community blog called Speak Up to see what they think. The verdict: nearly universal condemnation, with a few “let me sleep on it”s. Not unexpected — I haven’t seen a logo redesign that these people do like.

What I found more interesting is that there was also dismay over how the new logo was described in their press release. One commenter said the statements were “empty, meaningless BS that do a huge disservice to the profession of design.”