It’s a geek’s dream week: CES and Macworld. There have been two announcements that have caught my attention. The first is Microsoft’s Windows Home Server, which will be sold by HP and other vendors. It makes it easy to share files and stream video, music, and photos to PCs and Xbox 360s at home, access …
Category Archives: Human-computer interaction
HCI blogs
I read a lot of news online, geek and otherwise, but lately I've been trying to read more about human-computer interaction online. There are certainly a lot of blogs and web sites on society and technology in general, but I'm thinking more about resources that focus on HCI and usability. Here's what I've found so …
User interface design patterns by SAP
Also last month, I went to a San Francisco Bay Area ACM meeting on component-based user interface design, which turned out to be a talk on UI design patterns. Aha! It turns out that SAP has developed an extensive collection of design patterns for their domain of business applications, and they have an extensive web …
BayCHI April meeting on search
Time to plow through my backlog of stuff to post. Last month I went to the BayCHI meeting on Beyond Search: Social and Personal Ways of Finding Information, which was about social search and recommender systems. I got a few things out of that meeting. How do you recommend to someone that they'll like obscure …
BayCHI talks on personal information management
I just came back from two intriguing talks from this month’s BayCHI meeting. The first talk was about Chandler, the open source PIM that seems to have been under development forever. Mimi Yin talked about Chandler’s design philosophy and how it’s different from typical e-mail/calendar programs (her slides are online). For example: There is a …
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More on the new Microsoft Office UI
I just got back from a BayCHI talk by Jensen Harris, the lead designer of the new Microsoft Office 12 user interface. He’s actually already blogged a lot of what he talked about, so I won’t repeat it here — take a look at his “Best Of” list on his blog for an overview. Instead, …
Microsoft Office user interface blog
I mentioned last month that Microsoft is overhauling the user interface of the next version of Office. Now member of the Office user experience team, Jensen Harris, has a blog all about Office’s UI, both its past and its future. It contains some good insight into how Office’s UI has evolved, how they are designing …
Ubicomp city
From the New York Times: A ubiquitous city is where all major information systems (residential, medical, business, governmental and the like) share data, and computers are built into the houses, streets and office buildings. New Songdo, located on a man-made island of nearly 1,500 acres off the Incheon coast about 40 miles from Seoul, is …
Web development: Ruby on Rails and Django
A constant theme in HCI and computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) is how hard it is to get a group of people to adopt and support new technology — being technically superior is not nearly enough. One good example, interestingly enough, is in the area of web application frameworks. For example, in my favorite language Python, …
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Speaking of Macs…
The two features I find most interesting about Mac OS X 10.4 (“Tiger”) are not the ones getting the biggest hoopla, Spotlight and Dashboard. I’m more intrigued by improvements aimed at programmers. Core Data helps the developer manage the data within an application. Core Data, along with Cocoa Bindings, promises to make it much easier …