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October 30, 2004

GUI Design Patterns

Was Googling on "design patterns" and ran across Marijn van Welie's GUI Design Patterns and Jenifer Tidwell's UI Patterns and Techniques. Very cool extrapolations of the design patterns concept. The patterns paradigm originated in architecture (as in buildings, not software), so it only makes sense that this comes full circle and ends up applied to interface design. Also check out Dey Alexander's resources page for lots more.

The lesser-known Visualization Patterns site sports screenshots taken from infoviz research papers. Think of it as a lo-fi preview of what the more polished sites above will be listing in 10 years.

Speaking of patterns, I picked up Holub on Patterns and man is that a great read. Dense with practical advice, with a tone similar to The Pragmatic Programmer. Highly recommended.

Posted by Devon at 01:15 AM | Comments (0)

October 09, 2004

Fun with Site Statistics

Most popular incoming search query: "Hanning Filter". 13th most popular query: "Hate Designer's Republic". This month, 2 people found their way to my incomplete but illustrated attempt to describe the Hanning filter's role in perfect rasterization. And so far only one individual stumbled over to my corner of the web fueled by righteous indignation toward a famous design firm.

I read somewhere that Google headquarters has a ticker over the reception desk listing the most recent queries. Well it'd be a hell of a lot of fun to flip a switch on the ticker and filter for the craziest and angriest Google queries. Kind of like the Amazon.com Knee-Jerk Contrarian Game.

At least now I can brag that my readership encompasses mathematically-inclined researchers as well as angry designers.

Early new year's resolution for 2005: achieve #1 PageRank for "Hate Designer's Republic".

Posted by Devon at 10:46 PM | Comments (0)

October 01, 2004

Dear God Where Does the Time Go?

Been extremely busy finishing up the mega-milestone at work and moving into a cute bungalow in the heart of Capitol Hill.

I've been meaning to talk about the Mozilla Amazon Browser. It's the first working XUL application I've seen, and it loads in the browser just like an HTML page. If you're viewing this page in Mozilla or Firefox, click here to run it right now. No installation, no plugins--it just works. I kept assuming XUL apps were fragile platform-specific things, but apparently they're pretty flexible. Another assumption that's being shattered is that Javascript isn't good for anything. First ActionScript, then OS X Tiger's Dashboard Widgets, and now XUL have dispelled this myth. Couple of mind-blowing concepts here:

(1) It runs in the browser without modification
(2) It's got "real" controls just like a native client app: splitters, menus, color pickers, treeviews
(3) "View Source" works--you can leach XUL just like you used to leach HTML back in the good old days. Shirky explains why this is important

I haven't dug too deeply into all the XUL stuff, but this is pretty compelling. Given the resurgence of Javascript-fortified frontends for webmail, I can imagine this will become ubiquitous in the future. For more info on XUL development, check out Remote Application Development with Mozilla over at the O'Reilly website.

[Update]: Just stumbled across the XUL FileManager. It's a lo-fi version of the Windows Explorer, complete with image preview and text editor applets. No installation is required--the applets run automatically, and it's live--the text editor really modifies the remote file.

Posted by Devon at 09:03 PM | Comments (0)