Apple’s MagicMouse – Most usable mouse ever

MagicMouse is a very well designed device. I got it on the first day they were available and spent about 10 days using it. The mouse is great. Very responsive and  precise. Still runs on the original batteries with about 40% charge left which means it will go for about about 3 weeks.

The gestures work great. Very usable . Especially swiping back though web pages. Scroll with momentum works and feels exactly as one in iPhone, which is very intuitive and beats Logitec’s Hyper-fast scrolling feature.

Apple's MagicMouse

There are only 2 things that bother me so far and they are really minor. First is that the thumb is positioned over 2 movable parts which creates a strange feeling that took me few days to get used to. The other thing is that if your hands are wet the fingers won’t “swipe” over the mouse plastic making gestures almost impossible.

So if you live in a hot place with high humidity without air conditioning MagicMouse not may be a mouse of choice for you. In any other case – highly recommended.

OpenOffice Mouse – 7 buttons for each finger

After debut of Apple’s Magic Mouse - a super well and smartly designed piece of hardware,  OpenOffice Mouse produces mixed feeling. The bulky and very impressive design that places 7 buttons under each finger might require extensive training to use. (Piano players will have a definite advantage using it). Thumb button makes it look like a toy form Master Mind.There is differently coloured version of on OO website but it doesn’t really help.

Design In Use – Rozetkus 3D

Here is a good example of what design should do for us; making our everyday life a bit easier. Art Lebedev – a Russian design studio that came up with the   Optimus Keyboard (1257.14€) a few years ago is back with a useful concept that does solve a real problem in hand.

Rozetkus 3D looks like any other socket but with a push of the button above, it pops out giving you access to additional sockets. Smartly done concept and seems to be simple in production.

Art Lebedev's Rozetkus 3D socket concept

Quiet Read by Bambooapps

Quiet Read is a small app that’s beautiful in it’s simplicity and usability. A good example of design providing solution to a problem. I think it is going to be quite popular for several reasons. It does one thing and does it well. It’s got well designed UI that doesn’t draw unnecessary attention and blends well in your desktop environment. And it is free.

Quiet Read

Prescient Digital

Elia has a masterful way of translating technical and branding requirements into creative, attractive and eye catching website designs. Elia has delivered great results time and time again.

Vista and Windows 7 GUI mystery

When I first saw Vista my initial reaction was “what the heck?!”. It wasn’t incompatibility, performance, nor stability that caught my attention. What amazed me at that time was the Vista GUI, which now seems that it will transfer over to Windows 7. So what is so special about it? To tell you the truth I can’t see much logic behind it.

Windows 7 Desktop Screenshot

Windows 7 semi-transparent windows frames

Wallpaper is the most obvious way to personalize the human-computer interaction experience. All OS vendors provide an easy way to customize it. We use personal photos, stock photography or even rotate set of images. Desktop (wallpaper  for Windows users) is traditionally given to a user to make  the computer interaction experience more “personal”. As a result the OS GUI designers have no way to predicting  the wallpaper color or image palette.

Fancy background colors can be very distracting. A logical move for a designer would be to isolate a user from potentially distracting desktop environment so that they can focus on task on hand.  MS decides not to do that and  introduces transparent windows instead. On top of that they blur content underneath the window (making it very clear how hard it is to use a computer if you can’t find your glasses). Note that about a year ago Apple tried to introduce a transparent tiny bar on top of the screen and had to back down from making this feature optional due to user complains.

Transparent windows immediately create another problem: blind window titles. Making them dark doesn’t make them readable on a dark background and white wouldn’t work on bright wallpaper. Many designers would say, “Hey! Something is wrong here. Let’s backup.”
Instead Microsoft habitually chooses to apply a “patch” which introduces a white glow around letters which doesn’t fix anything

Incidentally, the need for patches is a sign of weak design structure and of logic flaws in the original design. Not only the GUI design but any design in general (not to be confused with ”art”). Good design tends to achieve the maximum with the minimum. Any design is a structure or set of rules based on a certain logic — physical or abstract. For example we can look at a chair as a set of physical rules. If your design requires you to introduce a 5th leg and then in turn 2 small legs to support that 5th then you may want to start from the beginning and rethink the original concept. GUI design is no exception. OK, back to Windows issues.

Windows7 GUI Transparent frames. Transparent on blur on transparent over blur

Not only is the user presented with information he or she doesn’t require but this information is also unusable. Why is it required for a user to see the text underneath a blue colored window to the point of unreadability? If my wallpaper is colorful enough my windows will inherit the colors and will look different, which violates the very core of consistency for similar elements.

Window Titles

The absence of windows titles is an equally strange decision. Window titles oddly position inside the main frames, which makes them potentially invisible if several windows are open. Try to understand what is the third window on the above image (the one above the clock).

Windows titles

Other Issues

Another issue worth mentioning is the window footer icon. I’m not sure why they need this icon there in the first place, but it is strange to have the footer height dictated by the icon size.

Windows7 Finder Window Footer

Active/inactive rules set in windows clearly don’t apply to widgets. They are in the background but  behave as active windows, with strong shadows and no faded colors.

Summarizing, it looks like Microsoft’s patching practice will also be applied to the GUI of upcoming Windows 7. It also quite apparent that many visual effects have nothing to do with optimizing user experience and just follow the “rich” GUI trend.

To be continued…. (probably)

Aggressive Online Advertisement

Floating windows are most annoying kind of internet advertisement according to Russian internet statistic agency.

• Floating windows bother 78% of internet users
• Banners bother 7.6%
• Video ads bother 3.6%

Only 3.4% of users actually order something using advertisement links.

Website Link colour

Surveys shows that average users still prefers blue text links over other colours even if they are consistent across the site. This probably doesn’t apply to web apps such as intranet sites, gmail, etc., that users use on daily basis.

Touch screen tactile feedback and user satisfaction survey

A survey recently conducted (France, Germany and the UK) showed 38% were planning to get a touchscreen on their next mobile phone while only 47% of people who already owned a touchscreen said they would get another one. In other words, less than half of touchscreen owners thought they’d stick with the technology on their next purchase. Apple has a high customer satisfaction rate and since iPhone is the only available device, iPhone users don’t really have a choice.

As a designer I can’t help but love the idea of one surface that becomes what one needs it to be at the moment. I’m not moving back to a physical keyboard. At least on my phone.
I don’t play many games on my iPhone and when I do tactile feedback is not something I miss.

The possibility of tactile feedback was mentioned in the original iPhone patent application and last year Apple filled “Keystroke tactility arrangement on a smooth touch surface” patent. It describes various tactile feedback on a smooth surface keyboard such as:

• Braille-like dot pairs or bars at key centers
• Articulating frame that protrudes at key edges during typing
• Articulating frame that deforms surface cover at key edges during typing
• Rigid frame under key edges with compressible key centers

We may see it implemented in rumoured Apple Tablet Mac that supposedly should surface in next few months. So it looks like touchscreen is going to become smarter and more “user-friendly”.

Useful text editing shortcuts (Mac OS X)

I came across few useful text editing shortcuts for Mac OS X @ www.ss64.com – a site dedicated to all kinds of applications/os syntax…

Editing Text (email, TextEdit, Pages, etc)

  ⌥ ←       Move one word left
  ⌥ →       Move one word right
  ⌘ ←       Beginning of line
  ⌘ →       End of line

          Scroll one page up (cursor retains position)

          Scroll one page down (cursor retains position)
  ⌥

        Move one page up  (reposition cursor)
  ⌥ 

        Move one page down
  ⌘ ↑ or

  Scroll to beginning of document
  ⌘ ↓ or

  Scroll to end of document

  Add shift key ⇧ to the above to also SELECT the text.

  ⌥ ⌫       Delete word
  ⌥ Del     Delete next word

  ⌥ Scrollbar           Jump to exact scrollbar location
  ⌥ Scrollbar arrows    Scroll page at a time (page up/down)
  ⌥ Volume up/down      Open Sound preferences
  ⌥ Brightness up/down  Open Display preferences