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Upside-Down Inverted Triangles and Other Interface Details

050816_triangle.pngHere’s how much tiny user interface cues can matter: this afternoon, I spent about five minutes scratching my head in front of an Open dialog box in Adobe Photoshop, trying vainly to locate the files I’d saved several months ago to a particular folder. They just weren’t where I expected them to be.

The dialog box was displaying the contents of the folder in list view, and I had clicked on the Date Modified column to sort most recently modified items last. At least that᾿s what I thought I had done; the triangle icon was in fact in the correct mode — pointed end at the top, wide end at the bottom. But apparently, some kind of preference file had been corrupted, and the list was actually sorted so that the most recently modifed items appeared first.

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Form Doesn’t Function

The black art at the heart of information design in XHTML and CSS is wrestling forms into some semblance of orderliness. In building a small site for my girlfriend (more later), I spent about three times the effort that should be necessary for getting a handful of standard form fields — name, address, phone, email etc, — lined up properly. It was a relatively straightforward job in Safari, surprisingly difficult in Firefox, and just hopeless in Internet Explorer. Fields were misaligned, clearing oddly, refusing to conform to declared widths… painful.

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Form Doesn’t Function

The black art at the heart of information design in XHTML and CSS is wrestling forms into some semblance of orderliness. In building a small site for my girlfriend (more later), I spent about three times the effort that should be necessary for getting a handful of standard form fields — name, address, phone, email etc, — lined up properly. It was a relatively straightforward job in Safari, surprisingly difficult in Firefox, and just hopeless in Internet Explorer. Fields were misaligned, clearing oddly, refusing to conform to declared widths… painful.

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Peter Jennings Dies at 67

Peter JenningsOf the three network news operations, I’ve always found ABC’s to be the most serious and comprehensive: I’ll never forget watching former “World News Tonight” anchor Frank Reynolds during the confusion that immediately followed the failed attempt on President Reagan’s life in 1981. His mix of command and empathetic frustration was a model of adulthood for me; for a long time, well before the advent of cable and the sham of Fox News, I thought television anchors were men of honor, that they earned a level of respect on a nightly basis to which young people should aspire.

I felt that way about Reynolds’s successor, Peter Jennings, as well. He took over the nightly news duties in our household at about the time that I first started understanding that there was a world out there and that it worked in peculiar, foreign ways. My father and I would watch Jennings together every night, and as the anchor revealed the names of new countries and people to me, my father would explain their hidden back stories. I learned a lot from those evenings, both about what lay beyond our shores and what was so important about what lay within them. As a result, I always preferred Jennings’s urbane, worldly delivery over his rival broadcasters, by far. It didn’t bother me much when Tom Brokaw or Dan Rather left their posts earlier this year, but I felt heartbroken and despondent last night when I learned that Peter Jennings had died of lung cancer.

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Try Before You Buy Fonts

There’s something broken about the way typeface licenses work. First, in my dozen or so years of working in professional design studios, I would say that most of those digital environments have habitually ‘pirated’ typefaces — or at least regularly violated licensing agreements — by more or less copying and distributing fonts wantonly. Everyone knows this.

For better or worse, the type industry has chosen not to crack down on this behavior by imposing unwieldy digital rights management or other draconian schemes on the market. Compared to the increasingly onerous anti-piracy measures for traditional application software, little attention is paid to preventing the proliferation of unlicensed typefaces, and by and large most designers enjoy the benefits of such a lax approach. But that rampant piracy has a negative effect: it keeps prices for quality typefaces high, or at least high enough to inhibit frequent designer adoption of new ones.

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M.I.A.: Bluetooth Trackballs

Kensington Turbo Mouse 5.0It’s been forever since I’ve used a traditional form factor mouse — whether with one, two or more buttons — as my day-to-day input device. At the office, I have a small Wacom Intuos tablet, which helps me traverse the 2,560 pixel-width of my dual monitor setup; it’s great. For my home setup, I’ve relied on some model of Kensington-branded trackball device for over a decade; right now, I have a four-button Turbo Mouse 5.0 that I bought in 1998. Believe it or not, it runs over Apple’s long-obscolesced ADB technology, and I use a Griffin iMate ADB-to-USB adapter to get it working with my modern, USB-only Macs.

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Freedom for My Wireless Phone Number

Treo 650 CameraA couple of weeks ago, I bit the bullet on a brand new Treo 650 smartphone, partly in anticipation of possibly getting assigned to a lengthy stint of jury duty. Imagine how dumb I felt when, in response to the heightened security brought on by the recent bombings in London, the courthouse forbade the entry of mobile phones equipped with cameras. And, naturally, I was selected last week to sit on the jury for a week-plus case. Even the best laid plans of mice and mobile phones, right?

In a way, it was actually a relief to be relieved of my mobile phone, but I can’t deny that it would have made my time away from the office more productive if I’d had my Treo 650 with me. It makes me lament the relative scarcity of Subscriber Identity Module technology, or SIM cards, at least in the United States. The idea that I could pull out a SIM card from my Treo 650 and insert it into a camera-free mobile phone — while also transferring my actual mobile phone number and contact database — is enormously appealing.

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State Your Profession

Among the fifty or so potential jurors who reported along with me to the courthouse for jury duty last week, I noticed there was a surprisingly large number who identified themselves as designers. I was in the candidate pool in three jury selection processes, and I heard maybe a dozen people state their occupation as packaging designer, art director, interactive designer, web designer or just plain graphic designer. When it came time for me to answer the judge’s questions, I could only answer sheepishly that I was yet one more of the same.

This is Manhattan, after all, where we have what is probably the densest assembly of design professionals on the planet, so it shouldn’t surprise anybody to find a disproportionate number of design professionals in any gathering. I have a deep and abiding respect for the trade and its art, but every time I hear someone, including me, identify himself or herself as a graphic designer, it makes me cringe a little.

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I, Jury

So I’m sitting there in New York Superior Court this morning, patiently waiting to serve out my jury duty — yeah, I got a summons for jury duty — and I keep thinking back to the last time I was called up for it. That was about ten years ago, when I lived in Washington, D.C., and I’ve never forgotten how I basically punted on my civic responsibility at the time — giving answers to the judge and lawyers that, while not untruthful, probably ensured my dismissal. To this day, I remain pretty ashamed of my behavior then — I can᾿t even remember the rationale behind my need to skip out on jury duty at the time, but it was certainly an insufficient justification.

Now’s my chance to make it right. I found myself feeling not a little bored and uncomfortable on the cold benches of the court room, also actively hoping I’d get chosen this time. The process of selecting jurors from the pool to question is random, but each time they pulled a name out of the hat, I was basically praying it would be mine. Much to my chagrin, it didn’t happen. That᾿s not to say I’m looking to get assigned to an epic, Jacko-style case, but I wouldn’t mind a week or two of court room action. Getting a trial of any greater length than three days, under recently revised state laws, would also have the added benefit of exempting me from further jury service for six years; that’s what you call a great deal. But more than that, I think I just feel compelled to perform this civic duty now. I’m not the irresponsible kid I was at twenty-three, when I was ostensibly civic-minded but more greatly preoccupied with my personal calendar. Basically, I’m an adult now.

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Back to Palm

Treo 650Notwithstanding the fact that I’ve been publicly dismissive of both PDAs and data services over wireless phones, I somehow successfully convinced myself that I need a Treo 650 and ordered one last week from Verizon Wireless. I’ve had it only a handful of days and haven’t yet tapped its full potential, but already I’m pretty happy with it. At the very least, it’s an improvement in speed and responsiveness over my Sony Ericsson T608 which was pretty much a piece of crap. Also, the change in carriers has finally, after some five years or so, brought me back to Verizon — I have no particular affection for the company as a whole, but their customer service is leagues above that of Sprint PCS, and they also really do have the cleanest voice signal of all the wireless carriers operating in the New York area.

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