Fly on the wall: “What does this button do?”
Some of the activity this week at our internal 37signals Campfire chat room:
Scannable dates
Socialtext just did a UI overhaul where the dates are listed in this format: 2006-09-19.
Ryan objects because scanning is tough. He argued it ought to be “Sep 19” instead. Jamis countered, “Interesting, I actually find “2006-09-19” more scannable than “Sep 19.” Ryan: “Ah, maybe it’s a programmer mind :)…When i try to read that line as a whole, name and date together, it’s a big jump from reading a name to parsing a bunch of numbers.”
On the other hand, Ryan really digs this image at the ST site:
Boom!
Steve goes, “Boom!”
Mark: “It’s all in the inflection.” Ryan: “Whup!” Matt: “That’d be a great Apple commercial.”
Specific spam
David noted the precise amount of money, down to the cent, he “won” according to an email he received:
Paper vs. Screen
Jason went to Technology Review’s Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT: “I went to this reception at the MIT Museum tonight. Dang, very very cool stuff. Amazing how much important stuff comes/came out of MIT…fascinating…got in a great debate about paper vs. screen and I totally sided with paper…which caused all the techies to freak out.”
Mousepose
Ryan pointed out the new version of Mousepose visualizes your keystrokes.
Jamis: “That’s slick.” David: “Very nice.”
Good vs. bad jargon
Jamis’ response to a draft version of Buzzwords say all the wrong things resulted in some changes. The original version attacked jargon which Jamis defended in some cases: “I do think there are people that try to hide behind jargon, but jargon is also a valuable tool for reducing the bandwidth of communication. When Marcel and I talk about Ruby and programming, for instance, we can use terms that non-programmers wouldn’t necessarily ‘get’, but it allows us to talk about things at a higher level. For example, talking about “meta programming” and “accessors” and stuff.. It’s Jargon but it lets us share ideas more rapidly. Even Einstein spoke in jargon. He had to, in order to communicate his theories with other scientists. You can’t describe the nuances of relativity in baby talk. The problem is the abuse of jargon, not jargon itself.”
In response, the post specified buzzwords and the bad kind of jargon (in this definition, #5 “language that is characterized by uncommon or pretentious vocabulary and convoluted syntax and is often vague in meaning.”) instead of the good kind (#1 “the language, esp. the vocabulary, peculiar to a particular trade, profession, or group.”).
In the kitchen
Whoops
Marcel: “I’d just like to say, autumn is my favorite month and it’s awesome outside.” Ryan agreed. Then Marcel noted that autumn is kind of a weird month. Matt: “Chicago is your favorite state too, right?” Marcel: “Texas is my favorite country, i’ll say that much :)”
In other “whoops” news, Jamis accidently typod the word “calendards.” Mark asked, “Is that like the short-bus for calendars?”
Ergonomic keyboard = stay away
Mark uses this funky ergomic keyboard:
He says, “It works great at keeping other people from using my machine.”
Ryan pointed out the very cool Remote Flying with VR Goggles and a Camera. He said, “I’m really impressed when people hack tangible things together…that’s gotta be satisfying…i think programming a physical thing would be way cool too…like, you spend a day with code, but then when you’re done with a ‘feature’…some robot can move its arm or something”
Aha moment for editing Quicktime movies
Jason discovered a simple technique for piecing together a bunch of quicktime videos into one. Doing demos with no cuts is very tough so he records a section at a time: “The biggest issue was threading them together and having the mouse pointer match up…so it didn’t just appear somewhere else and look weird…that was the hurdle…so what I do now is quickly THRUST the mouse off the screen at the end of a segment…and then when I start the next segment I just bring it back in off camera…and you never know the difference…that was an AHA moment…makes it 500x easier.”
Width and IE7
We’re expanding the Backpack page width a little. We’re designing everything for 1024 now. We’ll give the content area another 100px or so to give it some more breathing room. Will help especially for the toolbars.
We’re also putting more of a priority on adjusting for IE7. More and more support emails are coming about it and it looks like they’re going to make the switch shortly.
Hooray!
A competitor uses this image on their homepage:
Why does that look familiar? Oh yeah!…
Stay classy, San Diego.
Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/fly_on_the_wall_what_does_this_button_do.php