Marketing Silliness

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Ok, this is even sillier than brands that advertize the “New Look” of their packaging. Dove is advertising using the “Previous Look” of their shampoo bottle.

Dojo Widgets Quick Start

I used dojo from the days of 0.4 up through 1.1 on a large and complex project, and it was great. I hadn’t touched it in about a year or so, until a couple weeks ago. Now, I have two client projects where I’m using dojo 1.4, and I’ve needed to do some prototyping, so I figured I’d see how quickly I could get a few things up and running using a few dojo widgets out-of-the-box.

I was quickly reminded of a few of the gotchas you’ll encounter when trying to get started with dojo widgets, so I figured I’d write up a simple quickstart guide, in hopes of saving someone else a few minutes (or hours) of frustration.

Here’s a gist with the little things you need to do to get started with declarative style widgets.

Hope that helps you get started using dojo widgets. So far, using dojo widgets for rapid prototyping has been a win, although it has still require writing some custom code (including custom widgets). I’ll report more on the experience soon.

A Week With the Magic Mouse

Recently, Pasha chomped my Revolution MX.  Of course, the one thing she damaged was the mouse’s best feature, the free-spin scroll wheel.  So, I decided to try a Magic Mouse as a replacement.  Here are a few impressions after a week.
The good:
  • The tracking seems very accurate, and the pointer motion is the smoothest I’ve seen in a bluetooth mouse.  The mouse glides easily on most relatively smooth surfaces.
  • Vertical and horizontal scrolling, with momentum is nothing short of pure awesome.
  • The click has a crisp, intentional feel, and right-clicking works well (I never had a problem with right-clicking on the Mighty Mouse either, so YMMV!)
  • No dongle!  And it seems to reconnect instantly even after sitting unused for hours
  • I love the simple preference pane with the embedded movie showing how to use the mouse.  Of course, one could argue that if a mouse requires that you watch a movie to know how to use it, it’s too hard to use.
The bad:
  • The profile is just too low.  Maybe I’m still missing the Revo MX, but there’s really no way for me to rest my palm on the Magic Mouse.  Consequently, I have noticed a bit more hand fatigue.
  • The two-finger left-right swipe gestures are hard.  I don’t think human anatomy was meant to do these while grasping something!  I have to release the mouse entirely with my ring and pinky fingers to make these gestures reliably.  I really like the idea, and the effect, but I think they are just too hard.
  • From a nerd perspective, I wish I could map new and different gestures using the preference page.  There’s MagicDriver, so I may give it a try.  That said, I understand (and usually agree with) Apple’s choices to keep things simple.
Overall, so far, I am very happy with the Magic Mouse as a simple 2 button mouse, with super-awesome scrolling.  If I give MagicDriver a try, I’ll report on whether additional gestures turn out to be useful or not.

4ft Icicles Formed Overnight

It’s hard to tell scale from this pic, but these suckers formed on our
front gutter overnight, and are every bit of 4ft tall.

My Recent UX Presentation at AlphaLab

Last Friday, I gave an overview talk on user experience at AlphaLab.  I think it went well, and there was some good discussion afterward.  The slides are a very quick read (one might even call them stark!), but I figured I’d make them available.  I think they hit the major points that I try to consider when thinking about user experience at a high level, and I also tried to include some concrete things that can help when designing your users’ experience.

Thanks to AlphaLab for hosting the yummy lunch, and to everyone who came and participated in the discussion!

UPDATE: A colleague asked for a PDF of the presentation, so I figured I’d make that available as well.