jemnotesversion 2 / featuring design or see all/search

Go here, and after a brief (and captivating) message you’ll be straight in and enjoying the sight. Well done.

When writing software, it’s better to very carefully think out how your users should (want) to use your software, rather than providing many different configuration options for them to choose among various sub-optimal methods. I just opened the preferences dialog box of a large piece of software, and was irritated to see how much junk was in there. I think I’d rather not be able to configure what I want, than to have to move through 1000 options trying to find if the one I want exists.

Smashing magazine has an unusual name, but a good article with some usability findings. They’re not necessarily completely reliable, but they’re stated in a clear, usable (ahem) way: “the ideal search box is 27 characters wide”.

Logitech’s mouse website has an unusual interface, but shows some signs of very careful thought, and some interesting elements. Sadly it has some badly-thought-out stuff, too—for example, there’s some ajax stuff that makes loading feature details very fast, but then the back page operation doesn’t go ‘back’ from the user’s point of view. This leaves you confused.

Lots of clean, simple web designs.

Excellent graphic design: SOFA.

When typesetting mathematics with LaTeX, note that \mid is a vertical line with spacing as befits a binary relation, and \vert is a vertical line as an ordinary symbol. Compare: $p(x mid y)$ (with \mid); $p(x vert y)$ (with \vert).

An unusual, but clever, interface for searching flights.

Interactive Ruby terminal via ajax. Very well implemented.

Slicehost clearly know what they’re doing, with a simple, clean website, and nice tools—including a web browser based console for emergency situations.

Nicely designed fruit website. Especially check out the charts which show fruit availability. Very clear.

(mt) Media Temple have a very nicely designed website (though quite small font sizes).

kuler.

Very odd, but also quite interesting industrial design. Reading this made me realise that sorting these entries by date is silly. I’ll fix this sometime.

Edit on 2009-12-07: I’m finally moving to version 2 of jemnotes, which addresses this.

travelocity done right: ITA software.

Nice looking free fonts: exljbris and Gentium.