Blame the Tools for Thought

Giles Bowkett :

This is, in my opinion, the strongest argument for seeing Unix and basic coding skills as fundamental required literacy today. As prostheses for memory and identity, computers are too useful not to use, but if you don't know how to craft your own code which gives you a UX which matches the way you think, you're doomed to matching the way you think to the available tools, and even the best available tools basically suck. Interaction design is not only incredibly hard to do well, it's also incredibly idiosyncratic.

UI Stencils

Clever idea. Stencils for UI designers.

Guess you can make your own with a laser-cutter.

Strange case of paper and pencil "beating" computers.

Personally I love my paper and pen. And I love my computer. When we finally get a computer interface as cheap, portable and flexible as my paper-notebook, then I'll be happy.

Chrome Server looks interesting.

Hat-tip Zby.

A couple of great videos via Zbigniew

Avi Bryant's powerful spreadsheet editor that remembers changes that you make by hand and can apply them in bulk to the rest of the lines in your spreadsheet. Note that Avi's a Smalltalk guy, and a more primitive version of this (repeat last replace) has been in the Smalltalk environment for decades. Cool to see that Smalltalk ideas are still proving revolutionary 30 years later :-) (And cool of Avi to keep discovering them and taking them further)

Another way of doing something similar : Mass Edit which puts simultaneous editing cursors under the user's command. Very clever. That's from a video by David Huynh who seems to be involved in a lot of other neat research, like this mashup tool.

Lloyd Davis's Social Media Empire, driven from a N95.

E.E.Kim on tools