PUBLIC MARKS with tags software & interface

Creating wireframes on your favorite notebook. Take your time and sketch your interface carefully. Pen & paper are the best tools. Complicated software only gets in the way.

A few days ago we lifted the curtains on a project I’ve been deep into for a long time now: GitHub for Mac. This is the first OS X app I’ve designed and thought it might be interesting to share some of the process and things I learned throughout development.

Zoom. Pan. Go. Inspired by Jef Raskin, our zoomable user interface shows you all the stuff on your computer on a single surface. Using zoom and pan to view, arrange and open documents feels so right. In minutes you’ll appreciate the simplicity and intelligence of our answer to the traditional desktop. Take a spin and see for yourself.

User Interface Design Pattern Library. UI patterns for web designers. See examples and read rationale, solutions, and implementations for each pattern.

I held a 6-hour workshop at NSConference in both the UK and USA recently, focusing on software design and user experience. Predictably, an extremely popular topic was the iPad, and how to approach the design of iPad applications. I gave a 90-minute presentation on the subject to start each workshop, and I want to share some of my observations here.

BumpTop is a full 3D experience with smooth, realistic physics, making your Mac’s desktop act more like the real desktop it’s sitting on.

# You need to have passion for software design and development to be able to do it well # The correct answer to any situation is the simple, maintainable answer # Applications not only have to work well, they must be attractive and pleasing to use – user experience is critical to the success of any app

Convertbot Convertbot is a unit conversion robot. Convert currency, length, mass, time and much more in an exciting new way! Converting numbers will never again be a mundane task. In addition to its innovative interface, our robot is smart enough to convert to and from mixed units. Are you 5 foot 9 inches tall? Other converters require you to convert that to 5.75 ft in your head before being able to enter it. Convertbot allows mixed units like Foot + Inches, Pounds + Ounces, and more!

The iPhone has been one of the most popular mobile devices since its release in 2007 due to its innovative design and attractive interface. With the launch of the App Store, many third-party applications for the iPhone were submitted by developers. This article showcases iPhone software handpicked from the App Store with beautifully designed interfaces.

Picok stands for Personal Information Cockpit. It's an open source software package, aimed at enableing users to build their personal information dashboards. The users content is loaded into small draggable boxes, so called portlets, and layed out in a tabbed column-based interface. There are a quite few standard portlets shipped with Picok, but since it is an open system, maintainers of picok installations can easily create portlets of their own. Picok is written in PHP 5, uses the Yahoo User Interface Library and Zend Framework Components and supports MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM Lotus Notes and is ready to be integrated into your corporate intranet, website or community platform as well.

Software to design mockup and prototyping GUI

Reportage is a radically different native Twitter client for your iPhone that provides a radio tuning environment into your Twitter social network. Reportage views a Twitter user as a broadcaster and each user's tweets as a specific broadcast. Similar to a real radio tuner, Reportage allows you to selectively tune into each broadcaster and visualize the conversation.

The AirPiano is an innovative musical interface which allows playing and controlling software instruments simply by moving hands in the air.

Working with a lot of photos to upload can be a pain, especially with any sort of web-based interface. No matter how well-designed the interface is, you're still in a web browser and suffer from the limitations therein. The answer to effectively organizing and uploading tens, or even hundreds, of photos to Flickr is to use a desktop application specifically designed to help you accomplish this task. Enter Photonic.

Openfiler is a powerful, intuitive browser-based network storage software distribution. Openfiler ScreenshotsOpenfiler delivers file-based Network Attached Storage and block-based Storage Area Networking in a single framework. Openfiler is built on the rPath Linux metadistribution and is distributed as a stand-alone Linux distribution. The entire software stack interfaces with third-party software that is all open source. File-based networking protocols supported by Openfiler include: NFS, SMB/CIFS, HTTP/WebDAV and FTP. Network directories supported by Openfiler include NIS, LDAP (with support for SMB/CIFS encrypted passwords), Active Directory (in native and mixed modes) and Hesiod. Authentication protocols include Kerberos 5. Openfiler includes support for volume-based partitioning, iSCSI (target and initiator), scheduled snapshots, resource quota, and a single unified interface for share management which makes allocating shares for various network file-system protocols a breeze.

Lots of icons and interface-elements for Office 2008, together with my Enhanced Labs colleague Jonas Rask

We have already seen the wonders of iPhone's multi-touch user interface with native iPhone Applications like PocketGuitar which turns your iPhone or iPod Touch into a touchscreen guitar. If that wasn't impressive enough then you got to check out iAno - the newly released native iPhone application that turns your iPhone into a touchscreen piano.

Every second child between the ages of five and six has a very special playmate: a computer. Computer software manufacturers and providers for kids' websites make sure that their products are educational. At the same time, optimal usability should not be neglected, as kids do not only have a mind of their own, but also specific needs and requirements of an interactive system. In a study, User Interface Design GmbH (UID) now defines rules for usability engineering for and with kids.

The Sugar software is evolving rapidly, so there are different instructions, depending which version you have. The OLPC software comes in "builds", which are loaded into the laptop's firmware (or booted from a CD image, USB key, or SD card). This page documents the Sugar version in the current stable build (Build 385). You can find all versions of this documentation in [

KForge is an open-source (GPL) system for managing software and knowledge projects. It re-uses existing best-of-breed tools such as a versioned storage (subversion), a tracker (trac), and wiki (trac or moinmoin), integrating them with the system’s own facilities (projects, users, permissions etc). KForge also provides a complete web interface for project administration as well a fully-developed plugin system so that new services and features can be easily added.

There are a lot of choices in today's computing world – what's worse, most of them are too complicated. Hundreds of features, dozens of user preferences, unresponsive programs, inscrutable error messages, crowded toolbars, merciless disrespect for the safety of your data; all of these are problems that plague most of today's software.

At first glance, Quicksilver is a launcher. Command Window When opened, it will create a catalog of applications and some frequently used folders and documents. Activate it, and you can search for and open anything in its catalog instantly. The search is adaptive, so Quicksilver will recognize which items you are searching for based on previous experience. It also supports abbreviations, so you can type entire words, or just fragments of each. When not in use, Quicksilver vanishes, waiting for the next time you summon it.

See, I was going to originally title this "Apple's Secret Theme Tool!!", in an effort to clutch your e-eyeballs dramatically. (I've gotta get this here vortal to be more sticky!) Unfortunately, a public patent filing isn't exactly "secret". And this is all about one of the most interesting Apple patent filings I've seen lately.