I am the ghost of groovymother.com. Woooooo!

This is an old page from Rod Begbie's blog.

It only exists in an attempt to prevent linkrot. No new content will be added to this site, and links and images are liable to be broken. Check out begbie.com to find where I'm posting stuff these days.

Filed under 'ui'

March 24, 2009

Balsamiq Mockups

UI sketching tool. Deliberately made to look “back-of-the-napkin”-esque, to ensure no-one spends too long worrying about pixels over functionality.

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February 17, 2007

Don Norman's jnd.org / UI Breakthrough-Command Line Interfaces

Don Norman on search boxes being the command lines of today.

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February 12, 2007

Mac Rumors: More Multitouch from Jeff Han

I saw the demo of this last year at ETech, and it was mindblowing. We’re inching closer to the Minority Report user interface.

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February 9, 2007

The User Interface of Microformat Detection

Some very clever ideas about visually alerting users to the existence of microformats on a web page, plus some interesting debate in the comments about how much Firefox should visually change the look of a page in the name of “usability”.

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January 16, 2007

Basing the Design of History on the User's Memory

Really interesting concepts in changing the history tab in Firefox (which is currently near useless for finding something you remember from a couple of days ago).

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December 28, 2006

Napkin Look & Feel

Java GUI look & feel which resembles a UI sketched out on the back of a napkin. Intended for use when demoing prototypes to customers.

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November 14, 2006

Installing the Zune... sucked - Engadget

Wow. Microsoft make it clear that, however rushed, buggy and miserably unready the Zune software may be, the user experience design was always half-assed.

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November 13, 2006

shell: revealed - Can't drag quicklaunch toolbar to top of desktop

I’m playing with Vista on my laptop, and this “improvement” from Microsoft was pissing me off. Thankfully there is a “solution”. One that is a usability nightmare waiting to happen (drag a folder too close to the edge of the screen, and it becomes a toolbar that is hard to work out how to close).

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November 3, 2006

Label Placement in Forms :: UXmatters

Eyetracking survey recommends placing labels above-and-flush-left with inputs on web forms.

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November 2, 2006

Yahoo! UI Library (YUI)

Wicked-nifty Javascript UI library, generously open-sourced by Yahoo. Using this with Django and Lucene, I was able to knock out a pretty decent AJAXy autocompleting search box within 24 hours of opening my big yap in a meeting and suggesting it as a feature. (The “Design Pattern Library” is also worth a read to anyone who juggles HTML)

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October 30, 2006

Disco - Mac Disc Burning

CD burner for Mac. Fairly boring idea, sure, but the UI is a gorgeous example of minimalism.

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September 12, 2006

July 4, 2006

PhillRyu.com - The Top Ten Most Beautiful OS X Apps

A smattering of free/shareware OSX apps with to-die-for UIs.

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May 26, 2006

IanG on Tap: Office 12 and the Forthcoming UI Cargo Cults

The impending rumble of Office 2007 UI-a-likes is somewhat terrifying.

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March 9, 2006

Picture This: A New Look For Office

MS unveil their new UI for Office. Curious to see how this works in real life, but the photos look like usability could go either way.

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January 26, 2006

Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog

I’ve really been enjoying this blog, tellings stories about the planned (radically different) UI for the next version of Microsoft Office. It’s been many years since I’ve been anxiously looking forward to getting my hands on a beta copy of *Office*!

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About This Site

This is an archive of groovmother.com, the old blog run by Rod Begbie — A Scottish geek who lives in San Francisco, CA.

I'm the co-founder of Sōsh, your handy-dandy guide for things to do in San Francisco this weekend.