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Here is another fun fact about Chuck Norris: that was him who bited Apple logo. No, this one is really real not just real like previous ones. Long story short. Chuck Norris got offended by that fact that his application for iPhone had awfull sales and blamed — you’ll never guess — Apple usability for that. Apple App Store should be sorry for that some useless iphone run-and-gun app doesn’t sell. Chuck terrorised Apple Inc. that he’ll move to Android platform from iPhone (did anyone care about that?) and rejected design changes Apple proposed. So Chuck Norris created his own design for App Store and Apple used his idea to change the App Store interface. Know what? Chuck was much better counting to infinity and travelling to Mars then as UX specialist. Read more

I found a link to stoplight concept of Damjan Stanković on dirty.ru. Designer offers to add sectors round the stop light so the drivers could see how soon they can move again and stop their engines thus saving gas and nature. Read more

As they perfectly say: there are a lot of talks about invites and so little about Google Wave itself. I’ll help Google and talk about Google Wave. Sorry folks, I don’t have invites to send at looks like had none at all — no easy way to find out and not a word in the Help section. Oh, Google, you are so… so… arrrrgh! Just because it’s invite-only and not everyone can enjoy this, let’s be honest, pathetically cool but practically useless service, I’ll describe you why Google made its best to implement its unique philosophy on awful user experience in one more of its interfaces. Don’t get sad and bored, I’ll highlight just three most outrages GUI fails novelties ;) Read more

I made a pretty business card for photographer with QR code on one side. It sounds like a good joke that you have to take pic of his card if you want him to contact you to take yours. I just feel like I don’t want to right anything more, so I illustrated how it works if you have card, cell phone and app that recognizes QR codes on that phone:

iTunes 8 and iTunes 9 on the right it’s alright ;)

Slightly changed GUI elements setting distance between Mac OS X and its’ competitors, who are in different ways get “inspired” looking at Mac OS X. I hope that iTunes 9 GUI design let’s us kinda spy through the keyhole and get info about how the next Mac OS X design would look like.

By the way, did you know how to turn the best mini player mode in iTunes? Use ⌘W keyboard shortcut. It just can’t be more minimalistic!

I ventured to install Mac OS X Snow Leopard on macmini yesterday. Mac Pro was trying hard to show me on the next display that he is good working under Mac OS X Leopard and was trembling when I offered it to instal Snow Leopard on it. So I won’t update OS on Tough Monica and will let Monica help me with Mac OS X Snow leopard testing. Wonder why? Read more

There are three ways to make a tasty dish. You can take everything you consider to be tasty, mix it and throw into boiling oil. It would be fried and even can be tasty. My friend, who came from London to have a pint of beer with me in Kiev, told me about Fried Mars — you have to fry Mars in boiling oil. Someone can even find it tasty, but let’s get back from Mars to Earth. The second way to make a dish is used by chefs in restaurants: you’ll have to know how to cook masterly. But this is the hardest way and not everyone can do it while the first is within everyone’s power. There is one more way where you don’t have to be virtuoso of cooking but still will be able to make a tasty… erm… result ;) Just cook like it’s written in the cookbook!

I’ve just realised that the metaphor would only win if I use cocktails instead of dishes but the I’ll have to get rid of Fried Mars, so let’s leave the things they are.

So, the choice of the way to cook for a person, who just wants to make tasty dinner but isn’t in any way chief cook, is obvious. He or she takes the cookbook and cooks instead of throwing pickles, Skittles, two sausages, vanilla and unagi in boiling oil, expecting for acceptable result. Read more

Okay, it was morning, I wanted to sleep and somehow wrote long interesting and long comment in one blog. Then I woke up swearing at myself: not recent posts in my blog and I write long comments in others. So I decided to post that comment here, adding pictures. It’s about pay cards for cellular operators and its’ usability. Read more

I remember how it all started. Long time ago, when dinosaurs were using modems, sites were called homepages and word google meant nothing, there still were URLs of the sites. We called it site addresses and if you wanted to look smartass you could say something like unique address of the web resource based in the world wide web. Programmers now known as it-specialists were programming on their own and it brought to the expected results — strange URLs of different pages. I mean something like blablabla.com/?sid=23l&pid=ln123&youare=cookiemonster which could lead somewhere to the search page or latest news from time to time. Then like the knights without fear and with goodness in hearts came new guys. Strange looking, doing nothing but consultations and calling themselves usabilists. Read more

After redesign of the blog I mentioned, I needed to find the way to display my twitter messages on mega.genn.org. I used Twitter for WordPress but it doesn’t load message from time to time because of timeout when fetching RSS. So I improved it a little bit to cache the latest RSS of twitter messages, so we could load that cache if RSS from twitter.com is unavailable at the moment. Read more