There's this amazing flash app, WORDCOUNT / Tracking the Way We Use Language / which shows the most common words in some corpus (I'm not sure which it is), with some very nifty ways of navigating and showing the data.

I love software toys like this because they stretch our notion of what software can be like. Some might dismiss the finer points of this UI as eye candy, but I think it actually has a subtle bit of usefulness that might actually make interfaces easier to understand.

Responsive, animated interfaces deliver the goods much better when you're presenting the user with some sort of metaphor. Take dialog boxes, for example. In Windows-land, you click some button, and suddenly a window appears. You don't necessarily have any clue as to which application popped this up (things like this become painfully obvious when you're teaching someone how to use Windows who hasn't built up the requisite scar tissue).

Compare this with dialogs on OS X. You see them slide down from the top of the window you're working on, giving you a nice, subtle clue as to what's going on.

Another example: I was working with IntelliJ's IDEA (a wonderful, wonderful IDE), and noticed they had added a scrolling feature (when you're working with code, you do an awful lot of jumping around). At first I thought "why did they bother?" But upon using the new version more and more, I noticed that this bit of animated scrolling gave me a MUCH better spatial sense of where I was in the code.

I do think that it's worth spending the effort to include things like this in software... in very small, subtle, but pleasing ways, they make software much easier (and more satisfying) to work with.
posted on 7/28/2004 10:08:00 PM

Flickr is a reallly neat service that deftly combines elements of photo sharing, chat, discussions, and social software. They have a really nifty rich flash client as well that really shows off the possibilities of flash-based clients.

But the really nifty bit I just noticed (shown below) is a display of a person's image tags, sized by the number of photos with that tag. Simple, subtle displays of information like this just please me to no end. Incredible work, whomever it was that came up with that bit.


posted on 7/19/2004 11:39:00 AM