Friday, September 30, 2011 at 6:09PM Of course, you need a browser that supported WebGL (like Chrome) but its worth the trouble of installing just to play with this:
You can control many characteristics of the face as well as its direction and distance (the eyes always follow your mouse). Samples below. Click on them to see larger versions.
Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 9:53PM I’ve been looking for a a good monospace font lately – and still haven’t found anything that in my opinion is an overall improvement to Consolas (although Inconsolata comes close). So it is exciting to see that Ubuntu has released Ubuntu Mono. Could this be the don’t to unseat Consolas? Only some time within my favorite IDE will tell.
You can download the entire font family from the link below:
Some samples:
Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 1:35PM The expected announcement didn’t disappoint.
Here’s the commercial:
TechCrunch has a good “hand’s-on” video also
Some highlights and thoughts:
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 10:00AM Ages ago I worked on a Microsoft project called Mako – a project whose technologies, philosophies, team members would would go on to form the Forefront Client Security product. I owned the User Experience team in Mako. So keep it in mind that I and my team of program managers, developers, and testers were entrusted with making sure end-users, IT staff, and developers would be able to complete secure a Windows deployment in an enterprise.
Someone walked into my office one day and asked me to join him in a meeting. He had mocked-up some UI to model security configuration. He was trying to create a UI that let users create something like snort rules. He wanted to show this UI to someone in Microsoft’s IT Department who was familiar with network security to get their feedback.
I only got a chance to see the UI just as I arrived at the meeting and it looked like he had taken every possible widget in windows and crammed it into one gigantic form. I no longer have a screenshot of the UI he had created but it looked similar to the one shown below:
This screenshot comes from this document I found recently: A Graphical User Interface for Writing Snort Rules by Christopher R. Evans.
And to be honest the screenshot above doesn’t even do justice to the UI that I was shown. What I was looking at was even more complicated. But at least, this gives you a sense of what I was seeing.
The meeting begins and I’m internally amused at the thought of how bad the feedback is going to be. The security expert walks in, in presented with this screenshot, and her eyes widen and she loudly proclaims.
“Don’t change anything”
To this day, her reaction has been the most positive reaction to a UI design that I have ever scene.
And then she proceeded to explain how every other time someone had shown her some UI on this topic, they had always tried to simplify it according to their perspectives of what simple meant without even trying to understanding what her real challenges were. This UI it seemed actually “got it” – respected the actual job she was doing.
Simply put: Understand the life your users/customers actually have – not your sanitized, idealized versions of them.
I was guilty of evaluating this UI only at the surface – it is really easy to criticize at that level – without asking the simple and basic questions around the end user scenarios and pains. I haven’t made that mistake since.
I don’t mean to imply that this is the best UI that could ever be done. Of course, we would like to have both something that delighted our customers and conformed to our traditional sense of beauty, consistency, and usability. If one can achieve both with a UI design, it would certainly be preferable.
Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 9:49AM Some creeptastic visual artifacts going on here, but still pretty cool. I imagine hooking this with a Kinect would make it even better.
