guckenheim » computers

skip tracks. iPhone secret.

flo — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 20:21:29 +0000

One major gripe with the iphone was that it isn’t easy to skip a track. ok, let’s back up for a second: you walk down the street and this thing replaced your music player. So far so good. Less stuff to carry around. On comes this ‘parappa the rappa’ song with the rapping chicken trying to teach you how to drive… and at one point in your life this song might have been funny, but now it’s just not ((maybe because you are in a chicken factory) The froggy flee market sale song will always be hot!).
A purist could say that this is a lesson to be less promiscuous with ones’ iTunes library.

…ah, screw those nihilists and just double-press® the clicker on your right earbud and skip the dammed track.

somehow I just did it out of intuition, i probably lived with too many apple (computer), inc products for too long. So if you find this tip useful, please let us know what track you were trying to skip and we’ll feel for you.

3d desktop implementation

flo — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 23:29:35 +0000

this is very well done. more thoughts about this later on.

miniature analogue

flo — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 07:32:32 +0000

the latest fangohr case study just when up.

we built a g-scale (1:24) bungalow house and a blog. the physical model reacts to actions taken on the site. view the casestudy

more pictures

The making of (last day)…

pipes

flo — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 20:16:00 +0000

Just playing around with yahoo pipes. I made a feed that shows pictures of 13 pants around los angeles and 13 pictures of monkeys around africa, combines them and translates them to german.

I am sure there are different uses for it…

new adobe creative suite 3 icons

flo — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 21:56:58 +0000

“The deadline is in twenty minutes. Launch illustrator, after effects, photoshop, flash and get to work…”

I dropped all of adobe’s icons in the doc to see how confusing they would be.

This is the wheel that is the justification or system for the icons.

the discussion is ongoing…

Usability in button placements and labelling

flo — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 03:53:11 +0000

Just cross posting something I wrote on the Adobe labs forum for the Photoshop CS3 beta. This subject is always creeping up again:

—–

I am seeing a lot of Yes/No button labels (when replacing a previous workspace for instance). It’s not good form to use those. It’s much quicker for users to assess an actionable term like “replace” on a button and act on it. “Yes / No buttons” require the user to read and understand the entire error message and then make the mental leap to agree or disagree with it, thus slow down the user interaction and make more room for error.

There was a story involving an euthanasia machine made by an Australian doctor connected to a Windows terminal, that drove the point home. After choosing cancel it would ask:

Are you sure you don’t want to kill yourself? Yes / No

Much more clear:

Are you sure you don’t want to kill yourself? I want to live / I want to die

Button placement can be a time sucker too: On Mac Os the default button is on the right, because people (exceptions for some languages) tend to read from left to right. They also scan the buttons left to right, so it makes the most sense to use the space on the right for the button most often used, instead of having to track back all the way to the left (a la Windows).

It would be great if you could avoid yes/no dialogs, use descriptive button labels and place the default button on the right.

It’s been a while since system 7, but a lot of these conventions now make as much sense as they did then.

Example of a bad dialogue, by the new Adobe Reader 8:

Thanks for listening,

Florian Fangohr

honest communications
for a better tomorr[oh]

http://fangohr.com

web 2.1 brings back the

flo — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 18:31:25 +0000

ah, the server-side blink-tag

rechargeable double a

flo — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 18:15:20 +0000

smart idea. this double a battery has a flip cap and charges on any powered USB port.

http://www.usbcell.com