Category: general

I’ve been sick so, here comes another link post. Find the comments if you feel so inclined. Google, Redesigned The Verge has an interesting retrospective on how Google has been gradually redesigning its interfaces since Larry Page took over as CEO. This has been happening almost organically, and if I hadn’t bothered to stop and… Read More

Here comes one of those link posts, comprised of topics that are interesting to me, but not enough to write more than a few words. Facebook launches Graph Search Wired has the full story of how Graph Search came to be. I bemoaned Facebook’s lost search opportunity years ago, and apparently, I wasn’t alone, given… Read More

Last week at CES, details of Firefox OS, Mozilla’s all-web, mobile OS, began to emerge, and wow has it come a long way since that early build of B2G that I fumbled with on the GSM Nexus S Rich (@rmanalan) sent me last year. I’ve had great hopes for Firefox OS, since it is built… Read More

Editor’s note: Here’s another post from Mark Vilrokx (@mvilrokx), detailing some hacking he did to help his daughter, who has Dyslexia, read web pages. This is an awesome idea, and I love hacking for good. I’m not alone, e.g. Marco Arment has added OpenDyslexic to Instapaper. We need more of this. Anyway, read on for Mark’s story… Read More

I’ve been using a Nexus 4 for a month now as my primary phone, so I figured I’d drop some thoughts. Read on if you like, if not I won’t be offended. Why? Since I jumped to Android from iOS in 2010, I’ve carried the original HTC EVO 4G and the Wimax Nexus S. I’ve… Read More

Over the years, I’ve put a fair amount of thought into the ways that game mechanics can improve software usability. I’m not alone, since now there’s, a name for this process, gamification. The biggest problem designers face when attempting to create engagement through game mechanics is “doing it right,” and since each system is different,… Read More

Hope you all enjoyed the holidays and closing out 2012. Continuing something I started doing last year, here are some topics I’ll be following with interest in 2013. You may notice some are repeats of last year, but that’s not to say any have dropped off my radar. I just felt like repeating them for… Read More

I joined Evernote back in 2008, but despite recommendations from several smart people, Paul (@ppedrazzi), Rich (@rmanalan), Matt (@topperge) and most recently Jeremy, I never gave it a go. Until today, when I got the crazy idea that Evernote would be a great place to store and search the 5,698 Google Reader shared items I… Read More

This time of year, bloggers are guaranteed fodder, posting predictions for the upcoming year and analyzing the past year’s predictions. I gave up on that last year and have no plans to do it again. I’m just not smart or industrious enough. Another reason not to, Popular Mechanics has upped the ante by providing 110… Read More

Years ago, I remember a chat Paul (@ppedrazzi), Rich (@rmanalan), Anthony (@anthonyslai) and I had about smartphone cases. I was reminded of that discussion recently on a trip to HQ. For some reason, there was a box full of freebie covers for various devices in the office, and I took this opportunity to quiz my… Read More

I rarely use iTunes anymore, but after OS X offered up the iTunes 11 update, I figured I take it for a quick spin, given all the coverage I’d read about the drastic redesign. After a few minutes, I noticed something was missing, Cover Flow. As an unabashed design nerd wannabe, this made me a… Read More

Editor’s note: Here’s another post from Mark Vilrokx (@mvilrokx) derived from his work on the Voice project. Let’s follow Mark as he tampers with Siri and find the comments here or on his original post. A few months ago, just after Siri was released on the world I got the uncontrollable urge to see what Siri could do for me.… Read More

I would have added this to my Friday aggregate post, but I didn’t see it until just now. The ever-helpful Fat Bloke has a post on Growing your VirtualBox Virtual Disk that I highly recommend you Pocket, bookmark or whatever you use to keep useful links handy for later use. I actually went through this… Read More

Seems like Friday has become my day to clean up all the open browser tabs I accumulate during the week, add some context and content and, ideally, get your thoughts. Here we go. Mobile OS and the Back Feature The Back button originated in the browser, and it has migrated over to native apps in… Read More

Friend of the ‘Lab Bex Huff (@bex) is running an interesting experiment. He’s soliciting ideas for the deep dive he and Bezzotech will be giving at Collaborate 2013, which is April 7-11 in Denver. This session will be on Sunday of the show, hosted by the IOUG’s WebCenter Special Interest Group. I like this idea because… Read More

Editor’s note: The following post comes from Mark Vilrokx (@mvilrokx), one of my colleagues in Apps UX. Mark has been working on the Voice project that Ultan (@ultan) mentioned in his recap of the OUAB meeting last week, and as part of his work on Voice, Mark has done some serious hacking that I wanted… Read More

I’m positively giddy playing around with the face unlock feature on my new Nexus 4. This was announced for ICS a long time ago, but it never made it to my Nexus S, not sure why. Thanks to Apple, there’s a lot of talk about delighting users, and I’m a very jaded user. So, I’m… Read More

Been a while, but frankly, I haven’t had much to say lately. So, I rolled a few updates into a single post. Enjoy. Urbanized Over the weekend, I watched “Urbanized,” the final installment in Gary Hutswit’s design trilogy. If you read here, you’ll recall that I thoroughly enjoyed the first two parts, “Objectified” about industrial… Read More

It’s Friday, so why not share some video? Doesn’t really make sense to me either, but sometimes the words just won’t flow. Moving on, here are a couple interesting talks, one official TED, the other a TEDx, i.e. independently-produced. These two speakers are so different, it’s actually quite amazing that their ideas and messages actually… Read More

Yesterday, I kicked off a personal lark of mine, i.e. running Fuse, the internal codename we use for the new face of Fusion Apps, on various devices. The first edition was a couple of Google devices, a Chromebook and a Google TV. Today’s edition is a couple of Android devices, the venerable Motorola Xoom and… Read More