I’m looking for some more beta testers for a font preview/management utility I’m working on. I’ve been frustrated by not having a good visual way to browse my font library, so I wrote my own. It’s called Jackdaw. If you have a sizable font collection, choose (or just ogle) fonts on a regular basis, are willing and able to send bug reports/crash logs/suggestions, and are running OS X 10.8 or 10. Read more…

Farhad Manjoo writing in Slate about Google Wave: The trouble is, everything you type into Wave is transmitted live, in real time — every keystroke was getting sent to Zach just as I hit it. This made me too self-conscious to get my thoughts across. … Maybe I should just delete what I’d written and say, “Twitter works because it’s simple.” But I couldn’t do that, because Zach was watching me. Read more…

The Pessimistic Form The set of commands available in a toolbar (even via customization) is restricted to those that are either: (a) painfully obvious (New, Save, etc.), or (b) useless to you (Save As EBCDIC, Post To CompuServe, Bilinear Zeta-Regression, etc.) The Optimistic Form Combine this with the well-known principle that, while everyone uses only a subset of an application’s features, everyone uses a different subset. Conclusion: To be useful, a toolbar’s customization UI should allow every single command in the application. Read more…

I had lost this historical document for a long time, but finally found it the other day on an old backup CD. It’s the original 1997 sketch I made of a chat user interface based on speech balloons.

Read more…