Hello.
On this website, I post random thoughts, links and pictures that I want to remember. I run another website on the history and meaning of graphical user interfaces. I’m @louije on Twitter.
10/5/2010
16:44

Jakob Nielsen – iPad Usability: First Findings From User Testing:

For more than a decade, when we ask users for their first impression of (desktop) websites, the most frequently-used word has been “busy.” In contract, the first impression of many iPad apps is “beautiful.” The change to a more soothing user experience is certainly welcome, especially for a device that may turn out to be more of a leisure computer than a business computer. Still, beauty shouldn’t come at the cost of being able to actually use the apps to derive real benefits from their features and content.

On the prevalent design style of 1st gen apps—lack of standardisation, save in the mistakes made by designers:

The first crop of iPad user apps revived memories of Web designs from 1993, when Mosaic first introduced the image map that made it possible for any part of any picture to become a UI element. As a result, graphic designers went wild: anything they could draw could be a UI, whether it made sense or not. It’s the same with iPad apps: anything you can show and touch can be a UI on this device. There are no standards and no expectations.

Content and interface merge, and this is both good and bad:

The iPad etched-screen aesthetic does look good. No visual distractions or nerdy buttons. The penalty for this beauty is the re-emergence of a usability problem we haven’t seen since the mid-1990s: Users don’t know where they can click.

9/5/2010
11:52
« Microsoft’s products from the last decade have felt like elaborate rides. Much of the operation of the OS is done via a large collection of wizards, with users (not customers) clicking Next, Next, Next so Microsoft can do whatever it wants or tells you that it needs to do. (Watch how non-geeks use their Windows computers. It’s sad.) It’s really Microsoft’s computer, not yours — you’re just the consumer along for the ride. Excuse me, the experience. »

Reblogged from Marco.org

20/4/2010
11:34
8/4/2010
9:52
« And let’s not confuse shyness with modesty or humility. Charles Darwin, who was very interested in shyness, correctly diagnosed it as a form of “self-attention” — a preoccupation with self. How do I fit in here? What do they think of me? It’s not always virtuous to sit on one’s personality and refuse to share it. (…) Nonetheless, there is much to celebrate in shyness. It has cunning, to begin with. Entering a room, it situates itself immediately in a hierarchy of social unease — this person is less shy than me, that person more so — and goes to work. And as a psychic state it is almost pure information: Talking to a very shy person, you feel yourself to be inside his or her electrical field, close-up in a way that the un-shy man, jawing on obliviously about his trip to Six Flags, would never permit. As for one’s own shyness, the shyness within, it is something to be endlessly tested and negotiated with. Should you attempt to hurdle it, and enter the situation full-bloodedly? Or is now the moment to heed its counsels and fall back? There’s an element of the existential in shyness. At the very least, if you’re shy, you’re never bored. »
— James Parker — Shyness
7/4/2010
19:44

J’ai préparé un cours à la main, sur du papier. (J’avais un nouveau crayon à essayer.) Maintenant, je suis hanté à l’idée de ne pas avoir de sauvegarde de ces trois feuilles, devenues plus précieuses que tout ce qui sort de mon clavier. J’étais moins trouillard auparavant.

12:19
« One deficit an electronic reader has over printed media, and this is only a factor if you’ve been in the air as much as we have lately, is that there are portions of the flight where you can’t read. Your “book,” as it were, now belongs in the same criminal class of devices which includes laptops and missile transponders. The other deficit, I suppose, is that when the device runs out of power your “book” ceases to exist. It retains the gaudy and absurd physicality so common with objects, but all the purpose has leaked out. The unbook you have left becomes a lady of impenetrable chastity. »
6/4/2010
16:43
25/3/2010
18:47
«  “If I die.” This was the first time that he had said that with reference to NOW. He wrote it. I knew and felt that for the first time he was looking at this.  »
Letters of Note: The most beautiful death – Aldous Huxley’s wife, Laura
21/3/2010
12:12

Reblogged from LKM's stuff

What is my cat’s voice?

20/3/2010
22:41

Meet Plume.

I’m still unsure about her choice of font; she does seem quite literate though. What do you think?

Baskerville Hot Cat

IMPACTED CHOCKED KITTY

16:46
« What we need now, I feel, is not another essay repeating No Silver Bullet for the 18,000th time. We need something that is more objective (based on measurable truth and falseness rather than just lists of anecdotes about successful projects and failed projects). We need something that reflects the best new ideas about what authorship means in 2010, not just electronic forms of 18th-century pamphlets. We need to stop rewriting the same things again and again (fail fast! NDAs are worthless! Execution matters, not ideas! Use the right tools for the job!). Instead we should start filling in the long tail of knowledge. »
13/3/2010
13:00

Reblogged from nostrich

9/3/2010
15:25
8/3/2010
10:11
Cute.

Seen on www.rupavahini.lk, via internetarchaeology
(date unknown)

Cute.

Seen on www.rupavahini.lk, via internetarchaeology

(date unknown)

Reblogged from Internet Archaeology Blog

7/3/2010
17:33
« Dans le cadre des questionnements actuels sur la manière dont les individus se créent des « bulles » d’espaces privés dans l’espace public (le téléphone portable en est un exemple) le voile intégral en est l’expression ultime de sorte qu’il s’apparente davantage à une sorte de « lieu portatif » qu’à un vêtement, une manière de recréer un espace privé dans l’espace public. »