Thursday, October 31, 2002

Is the URL bar the 21 century's answer to the command line? Vista: a prototype for OSAF's Networked Personal Information Manager. is making the blog'rounds. I found the incorporation of a urlbar and back/forward controls very interesting. I would certainly use back/forward over the damnable tree widget in outlook/moz when navigating mail. Perhaps my attempts at Redefining the Tree Widget might be re-focused on a small real estate version of the "topic map"/yahoo/dmoz UI. Once a tree extends beyond the height of the screen, navigation within it is very cumbersome. A final note on Vista -- it seems to be missing one of the most powerful of the browsers features: "usage awareness". Explicit capabilities to *revisit* views/content is an essential component of task orientation in UIs. Likely, there's history based auto-complete inside the urlbar, just not shown in the photos. That's a step in the right direction. 9:02:02 PM    comment

Yet another circular layout... break the chains of your UI toolkit! (more at ecological interaction design) Relatedly, the IE radial-expando menu thing has been updated. 9:52:59 AM    comment