Jack Goldman died this month. Mac? Windows? X11? You may think of visionaries who shaped technology as you know it. You might imagine that they were the original thinkers or visionary businessmen. You're wrong. The guy who laid the foundations started out trying to invent the electric car
at Ford, before being hired to Xerox creating the legendary PARC labs that invented computing as we know it; he lived to see
his prediction that "...any electric car produced in our lifetime will have to be a hybrid" come true.
posted by rodgerd
on Dec 24, 2011 -
17 comments
Have you ever wanted to change the functionality of the GUI of a program that you didn't have the source code for?
Prefab is a tool that was made to allow you to do exactly that.
[more inside]
posted by ArgentCorvid
on Apr 2, 2010 -
40 comments
Since SRI and Xerox invented the GUI and the mouse in the late 1970s, technology has leaped forward, but the way we interact with our computers has stood still. "
10/GUI aims to bridge this gap by rethinking the desktop to leverage technology in an intuitive and powerful way."
posted by Plutor
on Oct 13, 2009 -
66 comments
10 Futuristic User Interfaces. [...] we present 10 recent developments in the field of user experience design. Most techniques may seem very futuristic, but some of them are already reality. And in fact, they are extremely impressive. Keep in mind: they can become ubiquitous in the next years.
posted by soundofsuburbia
on Aug 18, 2008 -
57 comments
It's not a bug, it's a feature: Carolin Horn has designed
Anymails, which represents your email messages and folders as micro-organisms. The morphology of the individual organisms and their behaviour within colonies imparts information about the state of your email. You can view QT movies of the application in action (
1,
2), download her
thesis, and download
the Anymails code itself. See some of her other work
here (predominantly in German).
via Madame Martin, the "French Metafilter".
posted by Rumple
on Aug 31, 2007 -
22 comments
GUI Olympics! several corporate sponsors (ATI, nVidia, and others) are
offering up $15,000 in prize money for the best GUI skin any designer can come up with for a few applications. while i think it's great to push for newer and better user interfaces, who do
so many of the designs seem to be pushing complexity over useability? wouldn't a better use of a GUI design prize be to encourage people to improve on a design rather than make it unintelligible? maybe the people pushing the designs need to take
this quiz.
posted by caution live frogs
on Apr 23, 2004 -
18 comments
"We are now deep in the trackless swamps created by thoughtless, feckless UI design — full of glitz and GUI, signifying nothing." In
The Luxury of Ignorance, Eric Raymond attempts to set up a network printer in Linux.
posted by reklaw
on Apr 13, 2004 -
23 comments
Nethack for the rest of us. Ok, all you Nethack purists... sit on your hands for this one. Finally someone has come out with a graphical interface for the venerable ASCII game. Isometric, "Diablo" style -- Maybe it lacks some of the charm and character of the text version. At least I can see what the damn boulder and bear trap looks like. Windows/DirectX only.
posted by crunchland
on May 3, 2002 -
13 comments
Screen Wars, a decent stab by Stephen Levy from Newsweek/MSNBC at summarizing the changes afoot in desktop OS GUIs. Credit where credit is due for some notable Apple alums; more faith than is justified in .NET.
posted by m.polo
on Dec 5, 2000 -
14 comments
Ok, here comes the firestorm.
Joel on Software has some very good things to say -- though, like most user-interface-design mavens, I think about 50% of the time that he hasn't comprehended what the problem really is... but in
this piece, he's wrong.
posted by baylink
on Aug 7, 2000 -
17 comments
Wow, check
Amazon's new holiday look. They've added even more new product lines (home improvement, software, and video games). How many folder tabs can they stuff into that navigation bar?
posted by mathowie
on Nov 11, 1999 -
1 comment
Tired of
killing those processes the old fashioned way? Get this
Doom GUI, and never do a
kill -9 without your BFG again.
posted by tdecius
on Oct 27, 1999 -
0 comments
button that did it, and the ensuing variations that appeared? In any case, we now have
pixely buttons for just about everything,
scripts to make even more,
and GUI frontends to those scripts for fun and ease. And if you want to be kind to their servers; here's the source if you have Image::GD.
