“lists”

As I mentioned a week ago, I am just starting to feel my way around McKinsey’s Quarterly but it’s been impressive so far. I recently finished reading the three complimentary articles I was granted upon registering (which is free) and they were all remarkable.

2 days ago I had a major breakthrough in Domburi’s interface. I had been racking my brain for several days for a simple, elegant way to provide all the new functionality I had dreamt for it, but the standards I’d set made the task daunting:

Simple and easy to understand

Instructive Interaction: Making Innovative Interfaces Self-Teaching, by Larry L. Constantine and Lucy A. D. Lockwood was very useful in crystallizing my ideas on the subject.

Building (or at least not interfering) upon earlier knowledge

We’ve been using (web) GUIs for decades now, patterns have emerged. To waste them a silly thing would be. Right-click contextual menu, buttons, selection methods, drag & drop, and general link behavior (from one-click-activation to middle clicking on a link to open it in a new tab) are useful patterns we learn early and should be respected.

Consistency

I wanted to have the same interface for thumbnails and full-size images, just like Imagery works now (with almost the same toolbar for both cases).

Minimally intrusive (as in hidden)

I’m obsessive with claiming the precious few screen real state I’m able to and profoundly detest what Edward Tufte once called “administrative debris.” The goal is to see at a glance as many images (and nothing more!) as it is usefully possible. Even onhover interfaces must be extremely discreet, not only for conceptual clarity, but because rendering times can make for a jarring experience.

Visual

On the other hand, even if keyboard shortcuts and other tricks & gimmicks are more efficient, I believe it’s crucial for users to be able to get a visual overview of their options.

Modeless

Modes^WP can be useful and uncannily efficient—I love Vim—but they take a huge cognitive load to understand and use, and many, many hours of practice for them to become second-nature. They’re prone to frustrating mode errors^WP too.

Textual

Text is always a good thing, text and icons can sometimes be an improvement, but icons alone I usually find confusing and useful only for the most trivial of cases. The big problem with text of course is all the space it demands.

I dabbled for a while with tool palettes like those of Adobe Photoshop but in the end sweared off modes of any kind, even graphic ones.

I tried expanding the weird text-toolbar I currently use in Imagery but it proved too constraining.

Jensen Haris’s Office User Interface Blog sent me reeling into the possibilities of ribbons and contextual tabs (GUI innovations in upcoming Office 2007), but though interesting and definitely appropriate sometimes, they can be brutal overkill for such a simple application as Domburi.

In the end, it was clear to me that what was needed was a contextual menu of some sort and a way to activate it graphically (since I wasn’t willing to break the right-click, and other keyboard/mouse combos reeked of inelegance).

I finally found my solution in a little known interface innovation from Flickr (who introduced it only recently in a May 16, 2006 redesign).

They call it a “person menu” but it’s not the menu itself what interests me, it’s the way it’s activated: you hover over someone’s (otherwise undefiled!) buddy image and this obvious sidebutton appears; you click on it and your options to manipulate the image are presented.

This is a natural evolution of the pulldown button (), of course, but it allows for a revolutionary array of possibilities. I’ve been playing with the idea for 2 days now and am ready to nominate the onhover sidebutton as one of this decade’s contributions to our shared GUI alphabet: a visual, yet non intrusive, way to activate a context-menu. I’m using it everywhere in Domburi now (the idiom is evolving some impressive refinements!) and it has simplified things further than I thought possible. In the prophetic words of Jeff Han: “the interface just disappears.”

Exciting times!

An epithet is a term used to characterize a person or a thing—a meaningful nickname if you will—and I’ve been obsessed with them (through my obsession with self-definition) for a long time. Examples abound, from the simple Dougie Houser, MD, to Warrren Buffet, the sage of Omaha:

• Claude Piron^WP, famous Esperantist and psychotherapist, calls himself ”plifelicxigisto” (literally, more-happy-maker), because most of the people that come to him don’t do it because of a particular ailment but because they want to enjoy life more.
• Piron also famously described Esperanto as ”la bona lingvo” (“the good language”).
• Margaret Thatcher is “the Iron Lady”.
• Guadalajara^WP prouds itself as “The Pearl of The West.”
• Among the X-Men, mutant Forge^WP, whose special power is technological brilliance (that is, a superhuman ability to understand, conceive, and build machines), is often referred as “Maker” (and that has got to be the coolest, most heretical epithet ever).
• William Gibson^WP is invariably introduced as “the coiner of the term ‘cyberspace’”.
• William Shakespeare is “the Bard (of Avon)”.
• Steven Johnson describes himself numerically as “a father of three boys, husband of one wife, and author of five books.”
• Lord Voldemort^WP is best known as “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named”.
• Benito Juarez^WP is the ”Benemérito de las Américas” (“the meritious one of the Americas”).
• Juan Gabriel^WP is fittingly called “El divo de México” (“Mexico’s male diva”).
• In role-playing games epithets according to your level and race are common; I remember Erasmo, who usually used Yang, an assassin, as his main character, really fancied his early-level epithet: “Yang, the man.”
• Adolfo calls himself (amusingly) an “infoplebeian.”
• Carl Friedrich Gauss^WP is “the prince of mathematicians.”
• Madonna^WP has long been known as “the material girl.”
• Shiva is usually “the destroyer”, but he is given thousands of names^WP in Hindu scriptures.
• Satan is “the prince of darkness”, or, in Michael Bakunin’s famous description in God and the State, “the eternal rebel, the first freethinker, the emancipator of worlds.”
• Jaime Sabines wondered, upon being called “a great poet”, if he could even be considered, simply, but truly, “a poet”—only to conclude he’s actually just “a pedestrian.”

I could go on forever.

But on a more pedestrian note (or not) what epithets do you fancy for yourself?

Without any pretense of deserving any of them, I personally like webcraftsman, formist^ELZR, and whimsicist^ELZR (which I stole shamelessly from someone I can’t remember now!). Other favorites, preceded with the same warning as before, include singularitarian, amateur, (techno-)libertarian, anarchocapitalsit, dynamist, reader, freethinker, and designer—this last one with or without any qualification, but I’m particularly fond of interface designer and analytic designer. Symbolist would also be a nice (undeserved) compliment and so would hacker. As of this moment, perhaps my favorite epithet of all is conceptual designer—a huge post on the subject upcoming.

For my webfront and brand-to-be, , I came up with the sloganesque epithet of “avantgarde webcraft” and I quite like it.

But really, I’m all ears, what labels look good on you? (And you don’t have to write them here, just think about it, between you and you.)

George Orwell’s Why I Write. Genius.

Manuel Lima’s Visual Complexity is a massive—350 works—showcase of cognitive art and a beautiful tour de force.

Pay for Performance—Death and Taxes—USA Air—Figurative system of human knowledge—Flickr User Model—Map of Scientific Paradigms—Time Graphs: Sunsets by time (also check Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner)—Visual Correlation for Situational Awareness (read the paper, it’s worth it)—Mark Lombardi’s Narrative Structure, and Inside cobot’s head rank among my favorites, what about you?

Tufte’s Museum of Cognitive Art^ELZR is in the offing, I can smell it. La coyuntura es propicia.

Ironically, I must confess I sometimes preferred to reload the project’s homepage and quickly hit stop. The mosaic is beautiful and impressive, but also overwhelming. The thumbnails’ plain titles were more useful for the exploratory browsing I needed to digest the hugeness of it all.

vs.

As I said on a previous post, I believe Spanish, my mother tongue, has a low status on the web. And as I laid there pondering the subjectivity of my assessment, I remembered Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi^WP’s fascinating account of how (and why) he became a scientist (it appears in John Brockman’s excellent Curious Minds^AM, a compilation of similar tales by top-notch scientists and a sure recommendation to anyone).

The particular anecdote that came to mind was when he and a friend quarrelled over whose neigborhood was the more communist (the matter was relevant because he was living in Italy and the country was then in political turmoil). Their brilliant analytic idea to try to settle the question was to count out the circulation of the left- and right-leaning newspapers in each of their neighborhoods’s newsstands. This of course sent them into all sorts of interesting statistical considerations, but it put them on the path of finding the subtle answers to their question, and it was certainly better than “the hocus-pocus most adults rely on to bolster their arguments”.

So I want to try to do something similar with my question—what is the linguistic vitality in the web of 14 languages?—and this post will be the beginning of my investigation. For reasons of practicality and personal bias, the 14 languages I’m going to settle to are: English^WP, German^WP, French^WP, Polish^WP, Japanese^WP, Dutch^WP, Italian^WP, Swedish^WP, Portuguese^WP, Spanish^WP, Farsi^WP, Chinese^WP, Esperanto^WP, and Hindi^WP.

There was a time when I marvelled at there being such thing as mathematicians —people who got paid to think on form! Later, I wondered what an abstract, intangible, specialized thing webdesign was. Then came, in quick succession, the surprise of a friend who wants to specialize in pricing; Donald Norman and Steve Krug, who got me thinking on usability; information design prodigy and gourmet Edward Tufte; Steven Johnson’s assessment and critique of interface design; Peter Norville’s information architecture; Norville again, this time introducing me to findability; and now… now I’ve just been introduced to what could come to be called name theory by Marc Stiegler and his Introduction to Petname Systems paper.

A week ago I learned two friends are coming from the US this July 21: that means empty cases. Two happy days later and hundreds of dollars less: 38 books on shipping parcels from Amazon. Book shopping is a pleasure in and of itself (I’m rarely this happy!), and hereforward’s my list (which is quite an intimate thing to share—it’s the perfect psychological text, if you know how to read it).

It’s one of those moments when my head spins, twirls, swirls, and whirls. I’ve been seriously reading JS, CSS, and UI, since yesterday but it was just a couple of hours that it all came together. Let’s begin this Bushean trail with Ashley Pond V’s mindblowing, free web-book Developing Featherweight Web Services with Javascript. Then hop on to Sergio Pereira’s excellent Developer Notes for prototype.js. (Prototype.js, if you must know, is the JS framework.) Glen Murphy (recent googler) has a lot of interesting JS projects up his sleeve (say, this clock), and if you want clarity in this muddleheaded webworld, read everything you can find from Douglas Crockford (recent Yahoo)—all he’s written on JS is gobble-up-worthy, specially recommended are Prototypal Inheritance in JavaScript (it’s so short and yet it will change completely how you write JS) and Private Members in JavaScript (a wonderfully clear and short overview of JS object-orientedness). Did you know about JSON (Javascript Object Notation)? One last word on JS coding (and learning), please don’t do it without an HTML Real-Time Editor, a Javascript Shell, and a Javascript Development Environment—just don’t.

Yahoo! has a pretty nice UI blog going on (a couple of days ago, for instance, they did a nice post on the Patterns Behind the Yahoo! Home Page Beta) and they recently released an awesome Pattern Library (Yahoo! is becoming pretty cool lately… at least for developers). UI patterns seem to be all the rage these days and deservedly so. Jenifer Tidwell recent O’reilly, Designing Interfaces, looks set to become a classic (and some very worthwhile excerpts are available online). Out in the wild web, there’s even a pattern of how to build patterns, an interesting conversation on patterns here (intro, 1, 2, 3, 4), and Nine Tips for Designing Rich Internet Applications to which I wholeheartedly agree.

Doesn’t it just floor you how smart and fast things are becoming?

OK, back to work.

to blackbox could be to reify thru interface. To suggest or implement a conceptualization thru interface. A basic strategy for synthetizing reality, it stems from an active rewriting of the famous duck test: “If I make this look like a duck, and quack like a duck, I may as well be able to conceptualize it as a duck”. The conscious, deliberate, “I make” part is crucial; to blackbox is not just to simply conceptualize, is to wilfully conceptualize something by painting an interface on it.

(Contrived) Usage Examples:

1. “In modern programming, we blackbox our way out of complexity thru functions, objects, aspects, macros, and the like.”
2. “Money is our society’s blackboxing of wealth, that is, of ‘what people want.’ We ought to remember it when trying to ‘make’ money.”
3. “With the magic of silicone, you too can blackbox yourself a pair of massive pointy hooters!”
4. “At this point, perhaps a better title for this essay is probably ‘An easy way to blackbox your own file-extension.”
5. “The Kuratowski definition of an ordered pair as {{a},{a,b}} is pure blackboxing.”
6. “In defining the class PlanePoint, from the stored attributes xPos and yPos you can (and probably should) blackbox Distance from them thru the distance formula.”
7. “Let’s wrap these almost-expired candies with this cute cellopane bag and this lace bow, and blackbox them into a ‘Super Saving Kit’.”
8. “I’m dying for someone to blackbox reputation, population, authority—the whole memetic shebang—thru some kind of social software.”
9. “Don’t you find it amazing how blackboxing lanes and pedestrian crossings on the street thru mere painting can be so useful?”
10. “Let’s blackbox operating systems away thru browsers!”

The word comes, of course, from the technical meaning of blackbox: “a device or system or object when it is viewed primarily in terms of its input and output characteristics.”