Last night I attended a meeting of the Interaction Design Association, specifically it was a mini conference on Prototyping. This is a free organization that started as a mailing list, but has since spread throughout the world with many local chapters. So far, I like it very much. I presented…
The nice part of being born on May 22 is that it often lands on Memorial Day weekend. Memorial Day weekend usually has pleasant weather and lots of activities to choose from. On Saturday, we lounged around the house all day and watched TV and napped. Oh, what a wonderful…
Always try to use verbs for your affirmative and negative actions. Imagine the button is a normal person (not an engineer) saying exactly what they want to do. Example: [Cancel My Subscription] [No, Keep it]. Make it crystal clear what the buttons mean. Never use OK and Cancel. OK isn’t…
I found the radio I lost. One might say it is a waste of money to buy the new radio and ear buds when I found the old ones, but I feel quite the opposite. Buying an inferior solution made me value the old solution even more. It made me…
I was at Ethan’s (9) elementary school open house. He was showing me all of his sculptures, paintings, poems, stories and other materials. He made this one piece of artwork using colored tracing paper. Of course, there were 20 pieces like this next to it, but Ethan’s stopped me in…
My parent’s used to call it “Shpilkas“. It basically means “ants in the pants”. I feel like that about my blog. I constantly want to change things like the theme or the plugins. A few days ago, I changed the anti-spam plugin back to WP-SPam from Mollem. I am not…
I recently lost a little $15 radio I had. It wasn’t fancy, but it was small and got the three stations I listen to. Since losing it, I tried to replace it and have struggled to find something decent. My first try was the iPod Radio adapter. It’s way too…
Usually, I use IconExperience icons. They rarely let me down. Often, I will need to combine and manipulate them slightly, but their base set makes this very easy. 2500 icons in 5 different sizes with shadows and without in a neatly organized set of transparent PNG files. However, for…
When you visit a page that has some HTTP and some HTTPS elements on it, you sometimes get a warning (especially in Internet Explorer). Even though most people don’t care, Microsoft feels compelled to tell you about this problem when it happens. Firefox, Chrome, Safari…they don’t bug you with this…
Writing this post in Safari 4 beta on Windows 7 RC1. Some good and some bad news on the UX. Speed: This is probably the fastest browser I have seen so far. Specifically, I am talking about JavaScript, but it’s also very fast with page loading. I am pretty impressed.…
I did some research and decided to try the Windows 7 feature called ReadyBoost. Basically, you put in a USB or SD card and the system puts the swap file on it, thus speeding up the system. I have seen mixed reviews of the effectiveness of this technique. I found…
I saw this cute wordpress plugin to encourage people to upgrade IE6. I installed it and it seems to work nicely. Recently, I have been thinking about IE6 because we are developing a Salesforce.com application and they officially support IE6. Therefore, we need to support it in that environment as…
From Ethan to Mom: She makes me food and puts me in a better mood. She whistles to songs I like and encourages me to ride my bike. You’re the best and always will be, I love you and you love me. I would still love you if you were…
Windows 7 has the capability to point the desktop wallpaper at a folder and it will change the background like a slide show. You can set it to change frequently up to once every ten seconds. This sounded nice to me, so I gave it a try. Clearly, no one…