Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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Software

169 words

Matthew writes about making things obvious in user interfaces, pointing to this column on Keyboard vs. mouse usage in the process. Very interesting reading. Memorable quotes are:

[...] don’t rape the primary interface for the benefit of so-called 'power-users,' who may well end up achieving lower productivity by using the keyboard interface anyway. [...]

Guideline: words like 'kill,' 'abort,' and 'default' have powerful emotional charges connected with them and have no place in the interface. Instead, use words like 'stop,' 'cancel,' and 'standard.'

Thanks to Dave for pointing out that there is an application for converting newsfeed items to sound files of them read out. It is capable of using UnicodeChecker for converting special characters. Although personally I don't have too much use for it, it's nice to see that UnicodeChecker's AppleScript support is used and in particular is used in ways we hadn't thought of in the first place. I think that's the beauty of modular and interacting softwares: They can be combined in creative ways.

May 28, 2003, 0:14

Comments

Comment by mpt: User icon

W.r.t. bad words for UI, see also my comments on another example.

May 29, 2003, 3:43

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