Toolbar icons: think, then draw

What I always loved is when software developers used random icons in order to fill toolbar icons’ space.The latest and one of the obvious samples of such behavior is TranslateIt!: OS X dictionary tool.Here’s a fragment of their GUI in Russian:

Try to guess mnemonics of their buttons (L2R):

• Left/right – that’s obvious
• Purse? Books? Journal? Nope… Dictionaries.
• Morse code? Justify? Huh. Just notes.
• System busy? Wait? Time left? History… how cute!
• I know this! it’s RSS! No? WTF? It’s just “say”…

Now, when we live in the world of Google, Iconfinder, Flickr and dozens of icon and image finding services we still have to deal with developers being unable to spend 2 minutes (sic!) per icon just to find a good metaphor.

I’m voting by my own dictionary purse by not buying semi-usable applications and recommend you doing the same.

P.S.: nope, that’s not the only programs’ UI fault, but beating the falling one isn’t fair, right? 🙂

I can’t stant it no more

I admit it, I simply cannot use Vista laptop for more-less serious tasks and I’ve completely given up using it for GUI design.

I never though I’d want to have XP installed on it that much… Sorry, Microsoft, but Vista is a fucking slow and buggy piece of crap and I can’t imagine any good use for it.

Proposed update to Growl notification system

There’re several things in Growl notification display behavior that I think might be improved.

First of all, it’s a new “close” button implemented in version 1.1. It only appears when you hover a notification and lets you close the message you see no need to react on. Not even mentioning a degraded look of notifications (tastes differ) the button has a serious disadvantage as it requires quite precise positioning that eliminates the advantage. So what? Easily: just recall the Fitt’s law and let one click a larger area like the whole message… By assigning the right click to this action you let the thing be done without extra complexities. Is “right-click to close” an obvious action? No. Just like any idiom it has to be learned, but once learned it may become very handy. Arguments for are that some applications like QIP (Windows) or Google Notifier (OS X) already use the same approach successfully and both have very large user bases.

The second thing is the way Growl displays notification pool. Right now the mechanism is quite primitive, so when there’re just too many messages they may take all the screen space available thus interrupting you from work. Having a dedicated area for displays might improve situation a lot. I.e. let’s say messages can only take a single row with a maximum height of 50% of screen height. Now you may be sure that no matter what happens messages would not cover your workspace if you have it outside a suggested area. Besides, now we know that if notifications come from top-right they bottommost message is always the latest one.

Once again, this approach is already adopted by other applications.

The third improvement would work great with the second one. As we have limited our screen space, let’s make notifications use space more effectively. Now, when one of displayed messages disappear, the “hole” is covered by shifting other notifications, thus making sure the order remains intact and no message would “accidently” get into the hole. As a picture is worth a million words, here’s (270 Kb) a Keynote demo of suggested behavior and QuickTime (2 Mb) version of it for those who doesn’t have the latest iWork. The idea is also not new and is used in applications like Google Talk.

GUI prototyping for OS X: makeing life easier

Just for ones who are interested I provide a link to my OS X GUI design stencil I use for my own prototypes. It’s currently work in progress and still retain large portions of WireframeShapesAngles it’s based on (make sure to check the original, it’s pretty useful by itself). Future versions should have more controls, dialogs and other ready to use stuff, but if you’d liked to finish the work, feel free to do so.

So, here’s a link. Download and enjoy, it’s less than 100Kb anyway 😀

Test entry from journler

Is Journler really that good for blogging? It is, if you see this message…

GUI prototyping in Mac OS X

While working on a mac (which is currently my primary platform) I do still have to deal with interface creation stuff. Unlike Windows, OS X doesn’t have Visio, so I had to look for a different tool.
This tool exists and is called OmniGraffle.
Even though the GUI mock-up creation process is still the same “drag form, drop it, drag a button, place it on the form“ there’re some key differences from Visio. First of all, OmniGraffle has a pitiful default GUI creation stencil. Unlike one from Visio package (which is also far from perfection) this one merely represents Aqua-like look and is not suitable for any serious work. In other words, you’ll have to create a stencil set yourself or just start adopting an existing one to your needs. Wireframe Shapes is a good starting point, although it misses some controls and existing ones may require tweaking. You’ll have to do your set sooner or later, anyway, so don’t take this as disadvantage 🙂
Layers is another interesting feature I always missed in Visio. Even though it’s not a daily tool and not required for simple mockup, one may save you lots of time on complex shapes or fine-tuning your designs when combining vector and bitmap images.
Grid, guides and smart-guides are features that leave Visio far behind. Yes, Visio has a decent grid and guides, but aligning objects with their help is an unpleasant experience. With the help of smart guides you no longer have to work in zoom mode to make sure your controls are evenly distributed on the form and it really saves you a lot of time! Another time saver is “eternal canvas“: when you place objects outside your canvas, OmniGraffle creates a new page for it, so you would unlikely face difficulties while working with large images or multipage drafts.
Shape tools are primitive. Creating new primitives with Visio is a more pleasant experience, IMHO as OmniGraffle tools are overcomplicated while not allowing you to create basic shapes fast. Table editor is freaky. It has a non-standard interface which may hardly be called elegant, although you may get used to it one day.
Overall, the app is very good for wireframing and non-interactive prototyping. If only a tool set gets “fixed“ or default stencil set would be enhanced, it may become an ideal UI designer’s tool. Right now it’s just good, but good enough to recommend it over Visio.

Expose 2: improving tab switching logic

While working in Mac OS X I got used to Expose feature for rapid window switching. I love it a lot, except for one thing: it simply cannot help if you use tabbed applications. OK, you may switch to the app window and then click a tab you need, but why not saving clicks while being able to review all tabs’ content during switching? Shiira tries to solve the problem by implementing a kind of Expose for its own windows which partly solves the problem.

My suggestion is wider: why not change the Expose itself?
(I know, Apple would doubtly ever do this, but we have Expose-like features in Linux Fusion)

As you may see on the picture, in Expose mode each tabbed app is represented by a tab grid, so you may switch to a certain tab (not just the app!) in a single click. When the numberof tabs is not too large, this feature should work without any problems.

This way we eliminate confusion when user cannot see a page he knows has just been opened in Expose mode just because it hides by the main application’s window.

Related document (PDF, 50 Kb)

Icon search engine

One more offspring of Web 2.0 era: Iconfinder icon search engine.

It lets developers and designers find free icons with certain metaphors. Pretty useful stuff if you don’t mind an idiotic logo. I’m not sure how legally clear the icons it founds are (although many are claimed to be released under GPL or CC), but for me it’s an interesting metaphor evaluation tool.

Hall of shame: Apple Safari

There’s one interesting thing about Safari that I used to ignore (likely because I rarely use Safari at all) before. As some local developers have pointed out, Safari does not create clear tab-content relations (like Firefox does) because of using inverted tabs:

As you may see, the tabs are simply upside down, which might look OK from aesthetically, but is definitely not a good design solution.

Prototyping with Visio

When creating non-interactive GUI prototypes in Windows, you don’t have many choices. Surely, you may try playing with one of numerous specialized tools, but none of them is mature enough to be useful even for basic design mock-ups.

Actually, sooner or later you come to Visio. It doesn’t provide you with pixel-perfect results like ones you may get with Photoshop (or any other bitmap image editor), but it has nearly no completers when it comes to fast iterative GUI design.
The easiest way to start is using build-in Software stencil library. At first, it looks amazing as you have dozens of controls you may easily put on a form and create basic forms in minutes:

It’s even better that these forms look exactly like ones in Windows XP and that only increases the “wow factor”. Actually, if all you need to do is making some basic layouts for simple XP applications you may stop reading here and go experimenting yourself.

The devil hides in details, so sooner or later you start understanding that a build-in software stencil is not that much good as some things are simply missing. Just it would help you a little on designing a web 2.0 site UI or prototyping a GUI with complex controls (like Ribbon). In order to complete this task you may need to skip all the nice looking Luna stuff and start working on wireframe prototyping level.

On this stage you may just use a Rectangle tool or use any third-party stencil set. However, the more you work, the more you feel a need for your own “constructor”, which covers your current tasks. Using an existing set as a starting point might be a good idea, but you’ll have to re-create missing elements anyway.

Creating a custom control set has other advantages. For example, your own controls may have different sizes, shapes and better fit target application’s look and feel. Such flexibility is usually unavailable when build-in Software stencil set, but comes at a price…

One of major problems with Visio as a GUI prototyping tool is its inability to align elements properly. So you’re either increasing overall mess with lots of guides (which are usually required for every single form) or end up playing with semi-useless Align shapes control in 200+ percent zoom mode or testing your luck with nearly as inaccurate keyboard align (forget of smart guides or alignment logic…)

That’s it, about 50% of all time you work in Visio you waste on fighting with layout. Thus, in order to create prototypes which with “fake screen” level of details (i.e. with all proper aligns, font sizes) it might be a good idea to use bitmap image editor or pagination software, but for intermediate designs Visio is still a worthy solution.