It seems that many of the apps in use today rely on or display feeds or lists of data; be that a Twitter timeline, an RSS feed or a list of history in a version control system, there’s a common trend in UI for using lists.
But displaying lists in applications can be much more than trivial, certainly for applications on …

You’ve created an awesome piece of software, which you have been working on for months. You’ve refined every aspect of it; the aesthetic qualities, the data model, the user interface and experience.
But now you need people to buy it. You release a demo version of your software which allows your potential customers to get a feel for the app and …

Attending Matt Gemmell’s workshop last week was a great exercise for thinking from the user’s perspective – something which we, as software developers, often do not usually spend enough time doing because of being wrapped up in other things.
As developers, it is hard for us to detach ourselves from what we do and cater to the user. We live on …

We’ve all seen it before: dialogs which ask you whether you are absolutely, completely, invariably sure that you want to close without saving changes. And you click “Yes” in your haste, and then realise that you actually kind of needed that unsaved presentation that you’d been working on all evening.

A flawed design
It’s a pretty common design in applications even today, …

People like clicking; after all, wasn’t the mouse the main piece of hardware that lead to the GUI and made computers more accessible?

But people don’t like repetitive, boring tasks. And one of the areas where this is done especially poorly is when performing batch operations on large sets of data, where the user has to go through several stages to …

The other day I was using Cyberduck more heavily than I would usually, when I was doing a whole load of uploading. When I came to close the application, I was presented with this dialog:

It’s a fair enough dialog, I have been using free software which someone put their own time into and I’m appreciative, and might think of donating …

I have talked about piracy before, but I was inspired by Matt Gemmell’s take on it in Episode #9 of the MDN Show:
Piracy is pretty much an unsolvable problem. That’s a controversial thing to say, but I don’t mean it’s absolutely technically unsolvable, but it’s one of these situations where you have diminishing returns. The better your protection, the better …

After downloading the new Chrome beta for Mac OS X the first thing that struck me was how well it blended into the native Mac UI. The window takes on the standard OS X window appearance whilst working into it with the tabs which are built into the title bar. This wasn’t simply a port of the Windows version, it’s …

Users don’t like change. Perhaps one of the most apt demonstrations of this is with Facebook. Only today, changes were made to Facebook, basically consisting of a new setting on the front page:

Which can be changed to:

(Dependent on your level of stalkiness).
Being a moody teenager myself, I am, naturally in contact with.. A lot of moody teenagers. And there has …

I’ve been working on a software project recently, and I got to the point which every software developer dreads: naming. Although naming isn’t the most important feature of a piece of software, it’s good to come up with a name that at least works pretty well. This particular Dilbert cartoon comes to mind:

As Jeff Atwood noted on Episode #37 of …