Skip to main content

Habit Forming and Interfacing Features

Isn't it amazing how quickly habits can form?

The last time I used a Mac on a daily basis, OS7 was the new thing and although I've had Macs around since then, my personal machines have all been Windows or Linux (Usually KDE) interfaces. Like many though, Tiger temped me back and so when it came to get myself a new daily machine I went for a MacBook. Given my limited time to spend playing with new toys these days I've been relying on my friend who similarly made the switch a few weeks before me for hints and tips. One of which was the suggestion that I adopt Adium as my IM network aggregator *. Which I did 3 days ago.

Now at first I was a little distressed by the fact that when I opened a new conversation it was realised via a new tab on the conversation window (if one was already open) - that was until I found out that I could grab the tab and drag it off the window to invoke a new one.
This has now become second nature - so much so then when I was writing a paper earlier today with many, many reference tabs open in FireFox I naturally tried to pull one of the tabs off the browser to create a new window so I could view two pages side by side. I'm a long time FireFox user and quite aware of how tabs behave and so it must have been the habit formed through Adium use and the fact that dragging content to form new windows must be such a damned good idea that informed my actions ;-)

Now thinking about this further I pondered how useful it would be to be able to pull bits of web pages or files off of their donor pages to form new instances or even notelets. I await with interest to see what magic micro formats might allow in this area. And that got me thinking about ....

Anyway, I'm looking for other examples of this kind of drag-and-create type functionality if anyone wants to comment any I'd be grateful.

* My next job is to use Growl to aggregate the Adium alerts visually and deactivate the sound, 'cos cute as the little Duckie is, my IM networks have a lot on event traffic (constant stream of people signing on and off) and the constant Quacking is doing my nut!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Art of the state

A few weeks back I was working with the dev team at WGC on some interface design for our product prototype. We came across a point at which we have to give the user the ability to indicate their desire to save a current state. As we discussed the various ways in which we could visually indicate a 'save' action button, I realized that as a whole the industry has settled on the image of a 'floppy disc' such as this: Now in this day and age the floppy disk is an anachronism - have any of the myspace generation even ever seen one? It is certainly a few years since the average family PC came with a floppy drive as standard equipment and an online life requires little in the way of tangible media. - and yet the iconography persists. The more I thought about this however, the more I came to think that if we needed to provide a user action which is exemplified by an outmoded concept, then maybe we should rethink our interface and indeed application architecture at a deeper lev...
3 comments
Read more

Pro-ams, Prosumers and Innovation

As a team, Technology Research has been paying a great deal of attention to the importance of the end user in the process of innovation and development. We have witnessed over the last couple of years how companies and organizations such as Amazon and Google have benefited by opening up their innovation process to amateur enthusiasts and how others such as Flickr who have made Web Services API's available for experimentation have added value to their product through enhanced capability, flexibility and functionality developed by third parties . And there are many, many other examples. In concept the hacking, adaption or customization of software is not new. The home computers of the early 1980's practically demanded end-user programming, computer Games 'modding' has been around almost as long as computer games have and the definitive open-source example of Linux shows what can become of enthusiast lead development. What is new is the fact that smart organization...
Post a Comment
Read more

Wake for myPod - consumer electronic bereavement

myPod is dead;-( So, never been a Apple fetishist, the endless PC vs. Mac debate bores the tits off me, much in the same way as the C64 vs. Spectrum arguments with the inherent ridiculous diatribes about the relative merits of PEEKing and POKEing against endless CHR$ing wasted many an hour of my youth. I’ve use both Mac and PC in my time and get on with them both. I have a couple of old Performa’s and an LCIIin my loft (though these are skip rescues rather than purchases), but all my machines are PC based, now mostly XP save for a Linux Tosh Laptop. I gotta say all in all I prefer the nuts and bolts of the PC format and do tend towards thinking Apple lean in a little into the form over function. But still, I was happy with myPod. I bought my wife an iPod for Christmas 2003 and after playing with it for a month bought one for myself, overriding my first digital player choice of the Zen. Although part of this was because I kinda like iTunes and partly because I’d ended up encod...
Post a Comment
Read more