If I could make one suggestion for future versions, it would probably be for trees to become “untethered”. That is, preserve the top portion without the intervening trunk. I have on a couple of occasions been walking down the street and gotten a branch in the face. This is a painful and, let’s be honest, humiliating situation.

Link: Trees Reviewed →

Via: Information Aesthetics. Link: Introducing the Google Visualization API →

We showed thousands of random colors like this to people on Mechanical Turk and asked what they would call them. Here’s what they said:

Link: Where does “Blue” end and “Red” begin? →

He acknowledged in open court that his order had led to questions about “a possible violation of the First Amendment.” As a teenager might put it, “well, duh.”

[...]

The judge also saw that his injunction, even if had stood, was essentially useless. Other Web sites – some based outside this country – quickly picked up Wikileaks’ materials and reposted them, making the order moot almost as quickly as it came down.

Link: Thomas Elias: First Amendment to the rescue →

Problem with this “live by our rule or die” approach is the fact that many apps for the Mac, we love so, because they disobeyed the HIG. And I don’t necessarily mean extreme apps like Shapeshifter, but take for example the HIG saying “don’t create your own menu bar extras. That’s reserved for the System.” We completely shrugged that off and created our own menu bar extra-apps anyway. If there was (run with me on this) an App Store for the Mac; then apps like Quicksilver and Twitterrific would have been turned down.

Other apps which breaks the HIG in this manner are:

• Adium
• CoverSutra
• Growl
• iChat, by Apple(!)
• Skype
• And a whole bunch of other applications…

And this is only one way in which the HIG in not followed in these applications. I am sure there is a slew of other ways as well. Developers break these guidelines, sometimes for a reason, sometimes by mistake, sometimes because the HIG simply did not describe a specific use case.

This is when the HIG are getting dangerous: They have become not only law in the sense that virtually everyone and their blogospehere mother were screaming for Apple to follow their guidelines. Now the same guidelines are the arbitrer of good applications for the iPhone. It is law.

Not to mention games. They are their own mini-environments with custom user interfaces.

Link: Matthew’s comment →

3.3.5 Applications must comply with the Human Interface Guidelines and other Documentation provided by Apple.

In other words: No new interaction concepts, no cool user interfaces, only the same that already is. Apple will decide based on flawed guidelines whether you spent weeks researching and testing your interface or not. Surprising move from a company so focused on being the leader of user interface design.

New in General Photography:

New in Architecture & Mechanics:

Design is thinking made visual

My take:

Design is thinking about communication.

His position is excellent when applied to a static or at least linear medium like movies, not so with nonlinear, dynamic, interactive stuff. Oh, I also just happen to love how “design is thinking made visual” feels on your tongue.

Long have I been looking for a way to break long strings of letters over multiple lines in a good way. None of the CSS inline or HTML/CSS <span> examples I have found have been able to automatically apply to long links or file names. I have found this a special pain when dealing with development for Growl due to the narrow width and often found long file names or URL:s often passed as message content.

For example, let us say you have a 300 pixels wide column but have to write a URL or two there. It will look like this with overflow: visible;:

Take a look at http://this.verylongurl.net/some_content_here/and_link_text_here/index.html, it’s good. So is this http://www.anynormalurl.info/2008/02/22/blogging_url_today.php.

And like this with overflow: hidden;:

Take a look at http://this.verylongurl.net/some_content_here/and_link_text_here/index.html, it’s good. So is this http://www.anynormalurl.info/2008/02/22/blogging_url_today.php.

Or like this where you manually have to split the string into separate <span>:s with added CSS rules to avoid ugly spaces, a method that is also not especially nice to search engines or screen readers:

Take a look at http://this.verylongurl.net/ some_content_here/ and_link_text_here/ index.html, it’s good. So is this http://www.anynormalurl.info/ 2008/02/22/ blogging_url_today.php.

There has to be a better way

To the rescue comes the <wbr /> tag which is a behavioral and in a sense optional tag for web browsers which essentially says “it’s okay to break here if you want”, not unlike like a hyphen. Which means some browsers will interpret it slightly different, but as long as we can get a good way to break these long links and filenames we will be happy.

Adding a few such tags to our example will give the desired result:

Take a look at http://this.verylongurl.net/some_content_here/and_link_text_here/index.html, it’s good. So is this http://www.anynormalurl.info/2008/02/22/blogging_url_today.php.

So, we can now use the split and join code to easy accomplish what we are looking for to add a line break after a slash:

document.getElementsByTagName(changeThisElement)[i].innerHTML = indata[i].innerHTML.split(”/”).join(”/“);

The Complete Code

This goes in the <head> tag of your document:

<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">
<!--
  // © Niklas Brunberg 2008 — www.interaktion.info. All rights reserved.
  // This software is distributed under the BSD License, you can use it with
  // both open and closed source software. For the legal fine print, 
  // see: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php
  // 
  // Version 1.1
  // 
  // Using this code:
  // 1. Make sure you add a onload="addWBRfunction();" to the <body> tag.
  function addWBRfunction()
	{
		var indata, i, changeThisElement;
    
    	// 2. If you want to use this on another kind of element, just replace "p" with e.g. "span" or "dd".
		changeThisElement = "p";
 
		indata = document.getElementsByTagName(changeThisElement);
 
    	for (i=0; i < indata.length; i++)
    	{  
			// Splits after periods (.) after underscores (_) after slashes (/)
			// and repairs any problems possibly caused in certain tags ending with "/>"
			document.getElementsByTagName(changeThisElement)[i].innerHTML 
			= indata[i].innerHTML.split(”/”).join(”/<wbr />”).split(”/<wbr>>”).join(”/><wbr>”).split(”.”).join(”.<wbr />”).split(”_”).join(”_<wbr />”);
		};
	}
  // 3. There is no step 3.
//–>

As far as I am aware there is only one problem with the and that is the lack of hyphens. If you know a way to set a hyphen only when the browser choose to use the tag I will be more than happy to hear from you. This should work in Safari 2, Firefox 2, Opera 9 and Internet Explorer 6 and later versions of these browsers.

Via John Nack. Link: The Evolution of Tech Companies’ Logos →

The site has documents both the Chinese and Thai governments wants censored and have therefore blocked access to the site from both nations. Now a Californian court has on the request of Cayman Island lawyers ordered that all access to the site Wilkileaks be stopped.

I bet no single byte of the content available on Wikileaks today will be unavailable in three months as well as a year from now. In fact this will be a standard case of what the internet according to old folk lore will always do: Route around censorship.

Links: Daily Kos: Wikileaks Under Attack: California Court Wipes Wikileaks.org Out of Existence →, Wikileaks.org: Wikileaks.org under injunction →

The all together awe-inspiring secret project Orion, about a 5-year manned journey to Saturn using a huge spacecraft propelled by nuclear detonations.

Link: Let’s take a nuclear-powered rocket to Saturn →

I’m a Mac baby. Twenty-three years ago, I was born. So was the Macintosh.

Looking back, I haven’t fundamentally changed since my lower-than-your-kneecap days. I’m just a larger, differently proportioned version of my younger self. Unfortunately, the same thing is also true for the GUI: It’s matured, but hasn’t fundamentally changed in the last 23 years.

Emphasis mine, the desktop needs another revolution. Excellent article over all. Subscription to ACM required. Link: The Linguistic Command Line →

To turn your room lights on, you dock the keychain in a little slot by the door. Inserting the card turns the main lights on. Removing the key card turns them all off. It’s a natural place to keep your key, while doubly reminding you (or forcing you) to turn the lights off when you leave. That’s good design.

Word.

Link: On/Off →

Design:

New in General Photography:

New in Architecture & Mechanics:

This release aims to make GrowlHUD even more at home in the Mac OS X Leopard 10.5 environment by using the real HUD Window (NSPanel) as the original. Therefore GrowlHUD no longer uses HMBlkAppKit by the Shira Project, which was good but not as like the Leopard HUD as I wanted.

GrowlHUD 1.5 →

Gizmodo have pictures and videos of the latest version of the Android Operating System slash Platform for mobile phones. It should be noted that this is far from finished and we do not see much of the interface. Though we can see that it is keypad based and you browse web pages by selecting different objects on it, It is also a magnitude more interface than Sony Ericsson dare to show us.

Via MacPro.se. Link: Android Hands-On Video: It’s Fast, It’s Still Not There →

Well, I guess the answer is quite simple actually: If they had developed a good phone they would have shown how good it was, but now they do not have anything more than a nice shell. I am still looking forward to the day when the more traditional and tech-driven companies such as Sony Ericsson, Motorola and Microsoft takes usability seriously.

I am a happy user when it comes to the bundled mail application in Mac OS X, it works great with instant searches and smart mailboxes are a step towards email nirvana. However, not everything is prefect, in fact many things could easily be improved upon, in this article I will focus on one of them: Replies.

If you reply on a mail in Mail.app the message you just replied to will get a small symbol indicating that you have indeed sent a reply. A different arrow will show itself if you forwarded the message.

This works fine most of the time. Though sometimes I send different replies on the same message to different persons, or perhaps two replies to the same person. Such as those pesky occasions you forgot to attach that file you wrote you were attaching and then realised two seconds after pressing the Send button that you did indeed not attach something.

On these occasions Mail.app will only open your last message if you click the arrow. I have a possible solution.

The Process

Finding the above solution, which should scale well with both single and an arbitrary number of multiple message without adding to screen clutter, slower usage or frustration was based on the following requirements in a design process.

First was hard rules for what the functionality should accomodate, because else it is easy to add unnecessary and odd behaviour which in the end will hurt normal usage which is just the case I want to avoid. Thus, these rules:

1. Assume that it is only one message and do not switch mode if there are multiple messages.
2. Do not add new interface elements when the reply is only one message.
3. Do not add additional user tasks if there is only one message.
4. Make use of already existing concepts. No new tasks should have to be learned or at least keep them to an absolute of one cognitive action for the user.
5. Use only data already available in the mail messages. Do not add (or even touch) the data present.
6. Do not open anything modal that the user has not requested. And by this I mean that keep collateral opening of windows, dialogs and other elements to a minimum. Really, do keep them to a minimum.

Putting The Pieces Together

By using the above points as rules for the next step in our design we now know that we can:

• Keep opening the single message, if that was the only reply.

Therefore, nothing new, no new interface elements and no extra user tasks in the majority (most likely, at least) of use cases.

• We can make the addition behave like a contextual menu.

This solves the modal and collateral problems but adds a new: There is already a rather crowded contextual menu available when you right-click a mail message. Also, using the contextual menu requires a cognitive mode switch (not a hughe one, but still significant, comparable to the switch between shortcuts and mouse movements). It takes user resources and time.

• To solve that problem we let a menu appear on a normal click on the arrow:

Click for larger image

This method solves all six rules set up for the behavior of the Mail addition.

Additionally, we can also add a date to allow for additional disambiguation possibilities, however on the account of quicker overview:

Ever since upgrading to Leopard I had the problem of Drupal not recognizing the bundled version of the GD Graphics Library. But there is a solution.

You need the following:

• Developer Tools
• x11
• Latest version of Mac OS X (Leopard) 10.5

Let’s get started

1. Download libjpeg and decompress it to a folder of your liking. I created a folder called source in my home directory.
2. Open the Terminal, type the following commands and press enter after each line:

   cd ~/source/jpeg-6b

   sudo cp /usr/share/libtool/config.sub .

   sudo cp /usr/share/libtool/config.guess .

   sudo ./configure –enable-shared

   sudo make

   sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/include

   sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/bin

   sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/lib

   sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/man/man1

   sudo make install

3. Next, download the latest PHP 5 source code and extract it to your source folder.
4. Type these commands in the Terminal, again, press return after each new line:

   cd ~/source/php-5.2.5/ext/gd

   sudo phpize

   sudo ./configure –with-zlib-dir=/usr –with-jpeg-dir=/usr/local/lib –with-png-dir=/usr/X11R6 –with-freetype-dir=/usr/X11R6 –with-xpm-dir=/usr/X11R6

   sudo make

   sudo make install

5. Soon finished. Open

   /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

   with your text editor of choice and find line:

   LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

   If it is not uncommented, uncomment it by removing any # from that line. Save and close the file.

6. Now, open

   /etc/php.ini

   and make sure the line:

   extension_dir = "./"

   is commented, if it is not, add a ; in fron of that line.

7. Keeping the php.ini file open, look for the line:

   extension=gd.so

   If it is not there, add it to the file and save and close it.

8. Shut down your web server and start it again, either in System Preferences > Sharing or via the terminal with the following command:

   sudo apachectl graceful

Congratulations! You should now have a green screen in your Drupal admin status panel.