high tech, but it’ s certainly trying.

 One intriguing idea transforms the car windows into interactive, transparent displays:

The idea is too expensive to be practical at present, but it shows great outside the box thinking.

 See demonstration video.

[Via Consumer Reports]

 They make the standard Mac OS (and Windows’) column headers look so passé.  I hope that they become standard issue in Mac OS 10.7

Our f ami

ly’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.

Gotta admit, I don’t know anything 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 Robert that the game was over.

Robert: “No way, all the Colts need is a touchdown”.

Me: “It doesn’t look like they will score a touchdown”.

Robert: “These are the Colts, they will score a touchdown for sure, there is plenty of time left”.

Me: “Hmmm, I don’t know, they don’t like they have the fire in the belly.”

And they didn’t score. I was able to see the likely outcome precisely because of my ignorance, and hence my lack of bias.

I won’t go on and on about how bias can affect your judgement about your own designs and user interface, except to say this: be aware of it, we all have it and it can mislead.

It runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

I downloaded and tried the Mac version. It works well.

When you run it, a small ic on installs itself

on the menu bar.

To see your screen the way that a color blind pers on would, click

on the icon and select one of three types of color blindness. Here is an example of before (left) and after:

The simulation is not continuous: once you’re seeing your screen in the eyes of a color blind person (usually male), pressing any key will return you to normal mode.

But Color Oracle lets you assign a keyboard shortcut to each color blindness type, making it easy to simulate quickly.

It’s a great way to get a “reality check”, in the words of Nathaniel Kelso, who helped with ideas and testing.

My first brush with what one can do for color blind persons was a 2007 post by Greg Raiz. Greg described how Apple was using red and green circles (same shape) to illustrate which stores had iPhone availability, and how they later switched to using different shapes (snapshot used with permission):

For a company that cares deeply about user experience, one would expect Apple to provide a similar utility to its developers, preferably with continuous simulation instead of snapshots.

But until then, Color Oracle is a great addition to our

toolbox.

See, after I read Rands’ review of OmmWriter, I sceptically downloaded the program.

I ran it.

And…

And I took a deep breath.

No, not the kind of deep breath you take before your first bungee jump.

Or the kind you take when you’re just about to run from the bulls in Pamplona (I’m assuming — not that I would know).

Imagine being surrounded by noise, lots of noise, with one task thrown at you after the other, and you’re struggling to keep up, you feel like you’re on an accelerating threadmail, and then suddenly… Very suddenly. It all stops.

When you move the mouse, a few options appear.

Resume typing and all options get out of your way. Simple.

OmmWriter saves its files as plain old text files, so there is no support for bold or italics. It’ s fine by me.

Spell checking while you type is available and is equally well thought out: misspelled words turn gray instead of the more familiar and more disruptive red underline.

Nice touch. Surprisingly though, spell checking is not enabled by default.

The only complaint that I have about OmmWriter is the use of an underline cursor instead of the standard i-beam. In my experience, underline cursors work best with monospaced fonts such as Courier. In the following screen snapshot, it’s hard to tell whether the cursor is under the letter ‘i’ or the letter ‘n’, and I often find myself deleting the wrong letter:

The program is still in beta testing. I wish that the release version 1.0 will add

a Find feature and support for smart quotes.

OmmWriter is not the first program to try this minimalist approach but I find it the best.

I eagerly downloaded and tried WriteRoom when it first came out but was disappointed.

WriteRoom bills itself as “distraction free writing software”; the right idea but off-the-mark implementation.

It remains clean if you type

your search query and press Enter.

Other items fade in quickly if you move the mouse

inside the browser window.

This works on all browsers that I tried except Internet Explorer 6 (it works on IE8, I don’t have IE7). Note also the aggressive push for Chrome.

The message “A better way to browse the web / Install Google Chrome” appears on all browsers except Firefox for Windows — it does show in Firefox

for Mac. Bug or feature

?

Most other charts have the axis labels neatly rounded, e.g. if the price range is between 11 and 29,

the Y axis la bels would

be 10, 20, and 30.

But someone forgot to tell the iPhone developers.

Instead, the Y axis on the Stocks app shows the low and high for the stock or index, thus c

onveying very useful information on a diminutive screen.

In the chart on the right, you can tell right away that the low and high for the index are 4683

and 5050.

Recently, I was further impressed with how the app handled an interruption in data feed:

Compare the above with how Yahoo! Finance handled the interruption in data feed on the same day:

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 that Firefox was the only Mac app to still provide its own dictionary instead of taking advantage of the Mac’s built-in one, but I found a worse app this week: it neither uses the built-in one nor provides its own.

The developers suggest that you “Take the time to copy edit your work so that you can avoid embarrassing typos…”:

In essence, you need to type your text in another app, then copy and paste it.

And not just to have your work spell-checked: this app’s edit field is not resizable — a very un-Mac experience.

You don’t h ave to type long before it becomes

a chore.

Yes, you probably realized it by now: the guilty app is Apple’ s own iTune

s. iTunes has always had two faces.

The nice, Mac-like one is fast and feels, well, like a Mac.

The bad face is the iTunes store part of the program that’s built using WebKit.

But this hardly excuses iTunes: Safari too uses WebKit but feels a lot zippier, and yes, supports the built-in dictionary.

? In real life, a wrinkle here and a scratch there lets you know that the folder wasn’ t jus

t purchased, but on our virtual desktops, they all look spiffy.

Keith Lang takes a stab at this and a pretty good one too:

The icons provide nice visu al clues but without

adding color and other distracting elements like a badge.

In other words, just about right.

See the full article here.

Paul Thurrott reports on a new feature called Aero Shake:

“Simply click and hold on the grabbable area of any floating (non-maximized) window and shake your h

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Repeat the action, and those minimized windows will be restored to their prior state.”

Nice. What’s more, P aul provides

a link to a utility that makes the feature available on Windows XP and Vista.