Trent Mick: ui

04 June 2009

pleasant things work better

I watched Don Norman's TED Talk "3 ways good design makes you happy" last night:

This part of his talk really stuck out for me (transcription errors mine):

I really had the feeling that pleasant things work better and that never made any sense to me, until I finally figured it out. Look:

I'm gonna put a plank on the ground. So imagine I have a plank about 2' wide and 30' long. And I'm going to walk on it. See I can walk on it without looking, and go back and forth, and I can jump up and down. No problem. Now I'm going to put the plank 300' feet in the air... and I'm not going to go near it, thank you. Intense fear paralyzes you. It actually affects the way your brain works.

...

If you're happy, things work better because you're more creative. You get a little problem, you say "Ah, I'll figure it out. No big deal."


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4 comments

30 May 2006

Firefox and Thunderbird featurelets I want

I use Firefox and Thunderbird. (For the latter I recently switched from using mutt -- the last luddite at work to finally switch to one of them new fangled GUI things for email.) Here are a couple fixes/featurelets that I want in them.

  • I set Firefox to open new URLs in a new tab. This is the behaviour I want most of the time. However, there is the odd time that I want to lock a particular browser window. I.e., I'd like subsequent decisions on where to open a new URL to ignore this window. For example, while editing this blog posting in my browser, I would like new URLs (ones I'm hunting for to link from this post) to open in another browser window. Ditto when I'm working on my calendar in the browser. Or in gmail. What if Firefox had a "pin" button (as provided in some Linux window managers)? That would be handy.
  • Say you previously sent this email: 
        To: friend@example.com
    From: me@example.com
    Subject: Here are some pics from my weekend
    And, of course, you forgot to attach the pics. So you reply to your own email. In mutt and gmail when you reply to that email you get: 
        To: friend@example.com
    From: me@example.com
    Subject: Re: Here are some pics from my weekend
    In Thunderbird, when you "Reply All" you get these headers: 
        To: me@example.com
    Cc: friend@example.com
    Subject: Re: Here are some pics from my weekend
    That is just wrong. Even worse is when you just hit "Reply": 
        To: me@example.com
    Subject: Re: Here are some pics from my weekend
    I guess your friend just won't see how your weekend went. [Update: I couldn't find a bug for this so I added this one.] [Update 2: ... and quickly closed: "fixed for 2.0". Cool.]

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0 comments

23 February 2006

thirtyboxes.py -- a Python 30boxes.com API

30boxes.com is a nice web calendaring service, maligned somewhat by Joel Spolsky. I've been using Trumba for a while, but have now switched to 30boxes. So far I am pretty happy with the change. The "One Box" (any name for it would have been cheesy) is a great answer to the tedium of adding events quickly.

30boxes.com has started adding a web API as promised (it is read-only right now). I've cobbled together a Python binding to this API. I hope some folks find it useful. Please let me know if you love it, hate it, have problems with it, whatever.

$ python
>>> import thirtyboxes
>>> thirtyboxes.events_TagSearch("work")
'<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<rsp stat="ok">
<eventlist>
...'

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0 comments

04 May 2005

beautiful tutorials

Wow, are these ever beautifully written tutorials:

by Scott Stevenson

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0 comments

25 March 2005

goodbye ugly

A week or two ago I noticed that the theme I was using with my WordPress blog (the default one in WP 1.5, based on Kubrik) was pretty broken when viewed in IE6. I thought that David's blog was also using the default WP 1.5 theme, but his didn't seem as broken.

In any case, I wanted to fix that and also make the other bits of my website (such as it is) relatively not unpleasant to look at. I've finally done that. Tada. :) The general styling borrows somewhat from mozilla.org (which is one of the cleaner sites around, IMO) and, of course, my WP theme is heavily based on the default Kubrik.

I've also setup my site build system so that I can write a simple little markdown file, prefixed with a little XML metadate snippet, to get relatively good looking HTML page. For example: source and result.

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0 comments

10 March 2005

I want a Dave's Quick Search Deskbar equivalent for my Mac

The greatest thing on my Windows dev box at work is Dave's Quick Search Deskbar. This is probably the number one reason why I feel I am more productive on Windows than on my OS X box at home. I want something like this for my Mac. iSeek is close, but not quite there.

The brilliance of DQSD is (1) the use of simple short keyword conventions to indicate what type of search you want and (2) the level of control (effectively JavaScript) that you have in defining new searches.

  1. Using short keyword conventions to denote the type of search is so much faster than fumbling through a menu list of search types such as you see with iSeek, with the search textboxes in Safari and Firefox, etc.
    • By default, of course, you get a Google search of your term.
    • Add an exclamation point and you get a Google "I'm feeling lucky" search. The ability to open, say, python.org in your browser by typing '<Windows+S>python!<Enter>' is invaluable. (<Windows+S> is the hotkey to jump to the DQSD textbox.)
    • Type 'amaz Unicode' to look for Unicode books on Amazon
    • 'wiki foo' to lookup something in Wikipedia
  2. An an indicator of the level of control that I want for custom searches I'll describe the custom "ko" search that I've defined to work with the bug database for Komodo, an product that I work on.

Does anybody know of a Mac OS X app that can do this?

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1 comments
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