Category
Design
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Design, General, User Experience
Colts vs. who?! Or Watching For Your Biases
Gotta admit, I know nothing about football. Our family’s sports fanatic is Robert, my brother-in-law. As I arrived at his place, my first question was “who’s playing”. Yeah, that’s how knowledgeable I am. It turns out that sometimes ignorance is, indeed, bliss.
When the score became 24-17 in the Saints favor, I told [...] -
Design
“We’ve Never Done That”
In exploring what we can or cannot do on our new hardware product, I met today with the rep from the company that makes all the nameplates used in our hardware products. I received what I thought was a compliment:
“I don’t know if we can do that. I’m not saying that we cannot, [...] -
Design, UIs I Dislike, User Experience
Wher iz the Diktionary?
Until April 2005, some applications provided a dictionary, but each had its own. Then Mac OS 10.4 Tiger was introduced and included a system-wide dictionary: teach it the word “Hisham” in Mail, for example, and all the other Mac programs now knew that Hisham is not a mistake (though some friends might disagree!)
I thought [...] -
Design, User Experience
New Icons in iWork 09
Sebastiaan de With provides a nice roundup of the UI design changes in iWork 09, newly released by Apple.
Size Does Matter
The icon changes in particular caught my attention. But where young Sebastiaan sees “all sorts of nice UI changes and icons”, this middle aged man sees (no pun intended) a welcome relief to my [...] -
Cedrus, Design
The Making of StimTracker
12.06.08 | Permalink | 2 CommentsMy company recently released StimTracker, a device designed specifically for sending event markers, something that researchers often need to do when using a stimulus presentation package such as our own SuperLab in combination with an EEG/ERP data recording device.
Sounds simple, but the design of StimTracker’s front panel went through more than 30 iterations before we [...] -
Cedrus, Design, Software Development, User Experience
Free iPhones For All
OK, so it’s not quite free for everybody, ya know. I’ve done dumb things before, but c’mon! It’s free to all Cedrus employees who have been with the company a year or more.
Why?
It’s simple, really. With all due to respect to Samsung’s Instinct and other iPhone wannabe recent offerings, the iPhone currently has no competition. [...] -
Design, User Experience
iPhone: Why It’s Not Perfect
Between the time the iPhone was announced and when I finally got one last December, I happened to read Don Norman’s Emotional Design. Don Norman explains how the perfect product must excel at three levels: visceral, behavioral, and reflective.
OMG, It’s Gorgeous!
A visceral reaction is one that you cannot help. It happens at the [...] -
Cedrus, Design, User Experience
ROKR E8: Barely Haptic
After my first day attending CES, I went back to my hotel room and checked out news coverage of the event by Engadget and other tech oriented sources. This effusive Cool Hunting post caught my attention. It described the new, not-yet-released Motorola ROKR E8 (the highlights in the quote are mine):
The latest in [...] -
Design, User Experience
Vista Blues — Literally
In the what-were-they-thinking department, here’s a quiz:
See this next Windows Vista screen. In three seconds or less, determine how many list items are selected:You can’t figure it out? Hint: the answer is not three.
You still can’t figure it out?
The answer is two. Yes, two. In the screen snapshot above, only “RoboHelp [...] -
Design, User Experience
How to Flatten the Apple Keyboard. Or Not?
12.05.07 | Permalink | 3 CommentsAfter my earlier post where the ultra thin Apple Keyboard was taken apart (Apple model number MB110LL/A), Ben FrantzDale wrote to ask if the “bump” where the USB connectors are found can be removed.
In other words, instead of this standard issue keyboard:Ben would like:
I have an idea on how to accomplish this, though it’s non [...]
about me
My name is Hisham Abboud. Curious Chap is my blog about hardware design, user interfaces, and other related topics. During daytime, I play at Cedrus. I still haven't decided what I want to do when I grow up.
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