Captioning Sucks [1]
Captioning Sucks is a new pseudopod out of of Joe Clark’s Open and Closed project. See also: Screenfont.CA. Peruse urgently.
{ Tag archives }
design
Naming things
From Community and Privacy by Serge Chermayeff and Christopher Alexander, partying like it’s 1965:
Until one stops using popular or generalized words to describe specific objects and events, one will continue to be deceived by the associations with them and will fail to arrive at the essential functional aspect of things and places that is the planner’s actual concern in problem — analysis and design.
2008-03-15
Times and situations [2]
Go urgently and listen and listen and listen, because whatever problem you’re solving or relationship you’re negotiating or light you’re bringing into the world, it’s just an interpretation of something someone else did recently, but before you were born.
Thanks @danklyn for the recommendation(s).
2008-02-26
Not network
6 — common ground:
“People lack a place where they can have regular, meaningful dialogues with other people in a casual, social setting. Work and home don’t provide it, and many clubs or groups also don’t provide it because they meet in lifeless environments that feel like someone else’s turf.”
via: Knowledge Hydrant (PDF).
2008-01-04
Forms of work
80 — self-governing workshops and offices:
“Work is a form of living, with its own intrinsic rewards; any way of organizing work which is at odds with this idea, which treats work instrumentally, as a means to other ends, is inhuman.”
via: Alexander, re: brickyard and occupants.
2008-01-02
umich course announcement — Topics in Disability Studies [1]
Course announcement for a winter 2007 class, open to undergraduates and graduates at U-M, highly recommended (see also a recent syllabus):
This course provides an interdisciplinary approach to disability studies, including focus on the arts and humanities, natural and social sciences, and professional schools. Some topics include the history and cultural representation of disability, advocacy, health, rehabilitation, built environment, independent living, public policy. The point of departure of the course is the idea that disability provides a critical framework that reorients the basic assumptions of various fields of knowledge, from political science to architecture, from engineering to art history, from genetics to law, from public policy to education, from biology to poetry, and so on. Disability Studies views people with disabilities not as objects but as producers of knowledge whose common history has generated a wide variety of art, music, literature, and science infused with the experience of disability. Students will have the opportunity to interact with visiting speakers from a broad range of fields. The course is offered for 1 or 3 credits. Accessible classroom with realtime captioning. For more information, please contact Kristine Mulhorn and Tobin Siebers.
I took this course in fall 2006. It was a powerful antidote to a bunch of horseshit baked into the School of Information MSI curriculum, and therefore recommended for any HCI types.
2007-11-24
Single window mode (purple title bar button) in OS X Previews
From the party-like-it's-2000 department:
A couple of the Mac OS X developer previews had a weird purple button at the top right corner of window title bars, where the magical lozenge can be found more recently. This button appeared in a few developer previews, but was removed before the first really crappy public release.
This button was actually a toggle between normal layered windowing and a nasty “single window mode” which allowed only one window to show at a time. Single window mode simply minimized the existing (single) window whenever an action opened up a new window.
For more on this behavior and screen captures of what the button looked like in disabled and enabled states, see John Siracusa’s review of OS X developer preview 3 (start reading around ¶5).
The magical lozenge which occupies the same spot in more recent Mac OSes has two purposes. First, you click it to show or hide the toolbar. The second purpose — and the reason it’s a magical lozenge — you ⌘-click it to cycle between the various icon/text and toolbar size configurations. Like all forms of magic, this one has its downside as well, in that the odd ugly duck application may manage to do something just totally insane when you click the magical lozenge, at least until they fix the thing.
