Why are restaurant web sites so bad?
On Twitter, my friends Shani and Erie are engaged in a bit of time-honored kvetching about the legendary and general awfulness of restaurant Web sites. Who thinks it’s good idea to blast annoying music at people going to your site? Why do they so often rely on Flash, which doesn’t really add anything to the…
Thank HN: Design for Hackers
Last week, I signed a contract to publish Design for Hackers: Reverse-Engineering Beauty with John Wiley & Sons. I still have plenty of work left to get this book onto shelves – and to exist at all – but I’m extremely excited about it, and wanted to share the news with everyone, especially visitors coming
37signals' Chalk Dissected
Update 2010-11-05: I dove into the JavaScript a little and explained most of it. Sam Stephenson tweeted that Chalk is written in CoffeeScri...
Jakob Nielsen on iPad Usability: First Findings
iPad apps are much improved, but new usability problems have emerged, such as swipe ambiguity and navigation overload.
Paypal's logo designed to look like a recommendation?
Karl Seguin's Blog - A mix of coding and creative writing
Who Can Do Something About Those Blue Boxes?
Used to be you could argue that Flash, whatever its merits, delivered content to the entire audience you cared about. That’s no longer true, and Adobe’s Flash penetration is shrinking with each iPhone OS device Apple sells.
Classic Fonts That Will Last a Whole Design Career
Eric Gill, Adrian Frutiger and Max Miedinger are names we associate with the classic typefaces designers use on a daily basis. Their font creations are timeless designs that look right at home no matter what century we’re in. This collection of 25 classic fonts is a round up of the best and most popular fonts […]
1 pixel by 5 pixel font
Here’s something crazy and pointless: did you know that LCD monitors draw single pixels by mixing three individual red, green and blue subpixels ? It’s true! In fact, some devices (like mobile phones and handheld gaming devices) actually use this to anti-alias text and make borders more distinct. Microsoft even use it…
Beautiful Code
O’Reilly just published Beautiful Code. I was invited to contribute, but I just could not go along with the premise. I disagree that beauty is a guiding principle of programming. Here is how …
Tab Candy: Mozilla Labs is making Firefox tabs sweet
If you're using a modern web browser, chances are you've got a few tabs open at the same time. Most certainly, there are too many of them. Is fine because
Mensch -- A coding font
The latest MacOS release (10.6, or “Snow Leopard”) comes with a new monospace font. It’s called “Menlo” and it’s a slightly modified form of the standard Linux font (with appropriately weightly Linux name) “DejaVu Sans Serif Mono”, which is itself an updated form of Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. Apple’s modifications are…
Obsessed with putting ink on paper or What's wrong with computer music notation?
LilyPond – Music notation for everyone
Nexus One display and subpixel pattern
Progression news for Business
Xcode UI Improvements
Xcode is a fantastic development environment for developing Mac, iPhone, and iPad applications. But it has some areas for improvement. In this post, I’ll explore some improvements to how documentation and autocompletion is integrated into the development workflow and how Xcode could provide specialized interfaces for…
An illusionist explains why Apple products really are magical
Andrew Mayne is an AI keynote speaker, OpenAI's original prompt engineer, former OpenAI science communicator, OpenAI Podcast host, creative educator, and WSJ bestselling novelist.