Tue 2008/Jul/29

• Here is a fantastic presentation of how the Office 2007 user interface was redesigned (full blog post). Miguel already talked about this presentation when he went to the MIX08 conference.

  Obligatory snarky comments: the presentation's slides look like ass. Garish backgrounds. Three different fonts on a slide. Bullets. Anyway, that's the visual material. The actual content of the presentation is very interesting.

  Microsoft was in this situation: with Office they had a tremendously powerful piece of software with which people no longer felt comfortable. It's too complex. I don't know all the features anymore. I'm sure it has the feature I want, but I cannot find it. This fucking paper clip never gives me good advice and just gets in my way.

  The thing is, designing or improving user interfaces is Real Work(tm). You have to watch people work and see where they get stuck. You have to make prototypes and see how people react to them. Microsoft did that for Office 2007.

  On a much smaller scale, this is why I think that the plan for document-centric GNOME has a good chance of being successful. We can show Apple and Microsoft that free software has the balls to change the toplevel way in which people interact with their files. We can definitely turn our desktop into a more comfortable environment than what those proprietary environments gave us twenty years ago.

• Speaking of comfortable environments, this is a street cafe one or two blocks away from the grand bazaar in Istanbul. I had the pleasure of having apple tea and coffee with HPJ and JPR on one of those tables, getting relaxed and ready before terrorizing the grand bazaar with our extreme haggling skills.

  

  Let's see how many patterns of good urbanism there are in that place:

  • Pedestrian street whose width does not exceed the height of the surrounding buildings, so you feel cozy.
  • Public outdoor room which makes you feel sheltered and is nicely decorated.
  • Filtered light from the trees, so you can enjoy a cool shade on a sunny day.
  • Street cafe to talk and relax and see people go by.
  • Four-story limit so that buildings don't overpower people.
  • Positive outdoor space so that you have a sense of place.

• I would love it if our Human Interface Guidelines were closer in spirit to A Pattern Language (book) than to Apple's HIG.

• One of the most pleasurable things about GUADEC is the chance to find out that hackers share common interests outside of programming.

  Andy Wingo was telling me about Richard Gabriel's book, Patterns of Software. Christopher Alexander wrote the preface — he's the main guy who defined those architectural and urbanism patterns from above.

  JPR, HPJ, and myself were talking about peak oil. Will free software even be relevant if we can't keep the Internet running?

  It turns out that our baby and Chris Blizzard's as well have the same kind of baby chair and swing.

  It's fun to talk about camera-nerding with Hub.

• Today I'm 0x20 years old. Yay.

Syndicated 2008-07-29 14:44:00 from Federico Mena-Quintero - Activity Log