Author: Christopher Fahey
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Superbrowser!
A recent post at Splasho.com took on the following experimental challenge: Yesterday I decided to undertake an experiment. My favourite browser, Firefox, allows its users to add extensions. Currently 1102 extensions are available at Mozilla update. I decided to install 100 of the most popular extensions at the same time, trying to avoid those that…
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South Xy South West 2006
This is my face. I’ll be at SXSW in Austin Texas starting this Friday afternoon. If you’ll be there, look for me: I’m the guy with this photo (right) on his badge. I had such a great time last year, my first year attending the conference, that as a result I’m bringing two of my…
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It’s graphpaper.com version 2.0!
I’ve just made the new design live. You’re lookin’ at it. There’s still a lot to do technically, but here it is. If you’re reading this, it would be really great and helpful if you could leave a comment about what you’re seeing in your particular browser configuration. Or if you have any critiques on…
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Unfamiliar Workspace = Greater Productivity?
Can working in an unfamiliar environment, away from all of your everyday tools and resources, actually help you work more efficiently? I’m starting to think it does. Instead of working late or using the Behavior VPN, lately I’ve been packing all of my working files onto a company “floater” laptop and bringing the whole computer…
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Categorizing Design Styles
If you can stomach the idea of reducing Web design creativity to a itemized list of compartmentalized styles and techniques, there are a number of sites cropping up lately that attempt to survey contemporary web design “styles” and to sort them into a neat and useful little categories. First up: Patrick McNeil’s Design Meltdown. It’s…
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Old mental models never die…
Log in! (photo from the Computer History Museum) In usability testing with consumers (i.e., non-computer experts), I have noticed that a huge number of people use the expression “log on” to simply mean “go to a web site”. They’ll say that they’ve “logged into Google”, suggesting that they’ve entered a user name and password, when…
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I just dont get this whole bo.okmar.king thing.
What ARE these things?? Zeldman’s gang over at Happy Cog have just designed and launched the brand new ma.gnolia, a new social bookmarking tool. Ma.gnolia seems to be something like del.icio.us, of course (as if you can’t tell already by the product’s na.me). And there are other sites, too, like Outfoxed and Stumbleupon, which also…
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Battlestar Erratica
I definitely like the new Cylons better than the old ones, although I wonder where the big lizard-head guy went. Please forgive me as I geek out a little here, but… People are saying that Battlestar Galactica‘s plot is starting to show evidence of lacking any real long-term plan or direction. That is, they fear…
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Design Patterns: Don’t Reinvent the Widget
Yahoo’s interaction design department has for the last year or two been developing an intranet dedicated to sharing, internally, their interface design conventions and standards (or, to use the current hip jargon, “Design Patterns”) for their internal development teams, to ensure quality and consistency of interface widgets. It’s kind of an IA “style guide” for…
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Averaging Gradius
Everyone bunches up near the top to escape the enraged atomic volcanoes! [continuing the theme of my previous post, here’s some more multiple-exposure stuff…] Check out “Averaging Gradius“, a great project by “Mr. R. LeFeuvre” at The New Gamer. This amazing video uses multiple-exposures to compare the game playing tactics of ten people playing “Gradius”,…