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

A history of the GUI from the 1930s through the 90s. Also see Vannevar Bush's visionary 1945 essay As we May Think, which helped to set the wheels in motion. (Check out the Ars Technica discussion for good related links and commentary.) (via The Sideshow)
posted by madamjujujive on May 7, 2005 - 15 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

So I guess it started when Jeremy Hedley made these buttons, dissatisfied as he was with the W3 Validator's default icons. Or was it Winer's white-on-orange 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.
posted by brownpau on May 21, 2003 - 34 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

Apple mergers with amazon.com Well not really but why is everyone copying the tab based interface... it is ugly, not expandable and assumes the end user is a complete moron.
posted by efader on Jan 22, 2000 - 0 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