20 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2023
    1. The novel workflows that a technology enables are fundamental to how the technology is used, but these workflows need to be discovered and refined before the underlying technology can be truly useful.

      This is, in part, why the tools for thought space should be looking at intellectual history to see how people have worked in the past.


      Rather than looking at how writers have previously worked and building something specific that supports those methods, they've taken a tool designed for something else and just thrown it into the mix. Perhaps useful creativity stems from it in a new and unique way, but most likely writers are going to continue their old methods.

  2. Apr 2022
    1. Another fourteenth- century manuscript of Hautfuney’s index to Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum historiale. The absence of rubrication and the narrower columns make the entries harder to identify although the two indexes contain the same information.
  3. Jan 2022
    1. As John Palmer points out in his brilliant posts on Spatial Interfaces and Spatial Software, “Humans are spatial creatures [who] experience most of life in relation to space”.

      This truism is certainly much older than John Palmer, but an interesting quote none-the-less.

      It could be useful to meditate on the ideas of "spatial interfaces" and "spatial software" as useful affordances within the application and design spaces.

  4. Feb 2021
    1. In object-oriented programming, information hiding (by way of nesting of types) reduces software development risk by shifting the code's dependency on an uncertain implementation (design decision) onto a well-defined interface. Clients of the interface perform operations purely through it so if the implementation changes, the clients do not have to change.
  5. May 2020
  6. Apr 2020
    1. This is one possible path to take in that you simply reject the registration and ask the user to create another password. Per NIST's guidance though, do explain why the password has been rejected:
  7. Dec 2019
  8. plaintext-productivity.net plaintext-productivity.net
    1. Avoiding complicated outlining or mind-mapping software saves a bunch of mouse clicks or dreaming up complicated visualizations (it helps if you are a linear thinker).

      Hmm. I'm not sure I agree with this thought/sentiment (though it's hard to tell since it's an incomplete sentence). I think visualizations and mind-mapping software might be an even better way to go, in terms of efficiency of editing (since they are specialized for the task), enjoyment of use, etc.

      The main thing text files have going for them is flexibility, portability, client-neutrality, the ability to get started right now without researching and evaluating a zillion competing GUI app alternatives.

  9. Sep 2019
  10. Aug 2019
  11. Mar 2019
    1. Shneiderman's eight golden rules of interface design This is a simple page that lists and briefly explains the eight golden rules of interface design. The rules are quite useful when designing interfaces and the explanation provided here is sufficient to enable the visitor to use the principles. Rating 5/5

  12. Jun 2018
    1. One consequence of thisposition is a more radical understanding of the sense in whichmateriality is discursive (i.e., material phenomena are inseparable from theapparatuses of bodily production: matteremerges out of and includes as part of itsbeing the ongoing reconfiguring of boundaries), just as discursive practices arealways already material (i.e., they are ongoing material (re)configurings of theworld) (2003: 822).Brought back into the world oftechnology design, this intimate co-constitution ofconfigured materialities with configuring agencies clearly implies a very differentunderstanding of the ‘human-machine interface’.
  13. Nov 2016
    1. Every theorem of mathematics, every significant result of science, is a challenge to our imagination as interface designers. Can we find ways of expressing these principles in an interface? What new objects and new operations does a principle suggest? What a priori surprising relationship between those objects and operations are revealed by the principle? Can we find interfaces which vividly reveal those relationships, preferably in a way that is unique to the phenomenon being studied?
    2. Speech, writing, math notation, various kinds of graphs, and musical notation are all examples of cognitive technologies. They are tools that help us think, and they can become part of the way we think -- and change the way we think.

      Computer interfaces can be cognitive technologies. To whatever degree an interface reflects a set of ideas or methods of working, mastering the interface provides mastery of those ideas or methods.

      Experts often have ways of thinking that they rarely share with others, for various reasons. Sometimes they aren't fully aware of their thought processes. The thoughts may be difficult to convey in speech or print. The thoughts may seem sloppy compared to traditional formal explanations.

      These thought processes often involve:

      • minimal canonical examples - simple models
      • heuristics for rapid reasoning about what might work

      Nielsen considers turning such thought processes into (computer) interfaces. "Every theorem of mathematics, every significant result of science, is a challenge to our imagination as interface designers. Can we find ways of expressing these principles in an interface? What new objects and operations does a principle suggest?"

  14. Apr 2016
  15. Nov 2015
    1. There is a lot of evidence that quite subtle changes to user interfaces can have dramatic effects on how the interfaces are used. For example, the size of a search box or the text that accompanies it can considerably influence the queries that people submit.

      -- David Elsweller

    2. The whole gendered usage of hearts seems to have escaped Twitter. So does the fact that people fave (with stars) in complex ways - they are bookmarks, they are likes, they are nods of the head. But they are not indicators of love. I feel very weird loving tweets by random men I've only just started a conversation with. Not that there's anything wrong with feminine. But women - and men, in their own ways - are well-aware of how feminized visual signals get read by others, and in an identity space like Twitter, I suspect that will really minimize usage. Or at least until we all get used to it.

      -- Bonnie Stewart