The car steering wheel usability exercise

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Apologies if this post shows up twice for anyone using feed readers. Windows Live Writer screwed things up a bit… With today’s cars having more and more functionality – stereos, built-in navigation, the engine computer metrics etc. – the steering wheels start to have more and more buttons. Sometimes it’s on the wheel itself, sometimes it’s on separate “whiskers” behind …

A more user-friendly date-based search

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Recently in one of my freelance projects, the client needed a feature that allows them to search the database for records with a date between two specific dates. Rather than opting for the typical three text fields + a date selector, I added a little trick to make it better…

BumpTop – 3D desktop goodness…?

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I recently got into the beta of BumpTop – You may have heard about it: it’s a replacement for your Windows desktop. BumpTop lets you use “real” actions such as tossing items around the desk, creating piles of items and such. Their site claims that BumpTop is “a fresh and engaging new way to interact with your computer desktop”… So …

Cross-device Opera Widgets challenge

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Opera has launched another widget competition: The x-widget challenge. The goal is to make the best cross-device widget – this means the widget has to work on mobile phones running Opera Mobile 9.5, which supports widgets, and in Opera on your computer.

“Multi-touch” with your webcam

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There’s an interesting project from Microsoft’s OfficeLabs: Touchless, a project which allows you to utilize a webcam to do multitouch style input on your PC. The basic idea is something I’ve thought about as well – have a webcam track a colored object, and use that as a “cursor”. The touchless demo is very promising, although at this time it …

Enso: A useful tool or a fancy gimmick?

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I’ve installed an application called Enso on my laptop. What is it? It’s an application, which turns the caps lock key into a small command prompt, which you can use to run various commands, such as calculating, opening applications, controlling windows etc. Enso is a product of a company called Humanized, which was founded by Aza Raskin, who is the …

The human interface

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I apologize for the lack of posts lately. I haven’t had access to a computer or time to think about anything interesting to write lately, as I’ve been doing my civil service. Anyways, let’s post something now! As a long time computer user, I’ve used many different user interfaces, both software and hardware. The typical hardware you have are the …

Ext JS impressions

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I’ve lately been using Ext JS in a project. Ext is basically a big JavaScript UI framework – like their site says, “a foundation you can build on”. It comes with various interface widgets like Windows, tabbed panels, accordion panels, menus, toolbars and forms to name some. It also has various other things such as nice Ajax tools. But what …

I like pie… menus

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Pie, just like pie menus, is great. What is a “pie menu”? If you don’t play games, you might not be very familiar with this great type of menu, as it isn’t really used anywhere outside games as far as I know. Pie menu is a menu, which opens around your cursor, or crosshair in games, and shows menu items …