lex parsimoniae

They finally made my hover-screen

I did a little double-take last week as I was leafing through my RSS feeds.  Engadget had a story about a touchscreen that tracks a hovering finger: So what? About two and a half years ago, I wrote an article about usability where I ran into this exact problem while using a touch-screen phone. I’m [...]

If HTML is dead, what’s next?

The introduction of Apple‘s iPad got a lot of people talking about “apps” again. There’s no denying the oppressive popularity of apps today; everybody’s got an app store and everybody’s playing catch-up with Apple. Apps are the new hotness. Yesterday, Stephen Forte (Is the iPhone (and Android) the harbinger of death for web pages?) observed [...]

New syncing options for WinMo phones

Image via Wikipedia Microsoft and Google have each announced syncing tools for Windows Mobile phones recently, but based on what I’m seeing, I’m sticking with a service you’ve probably never heard of. Microsoft announced “My Phone” last week, and today announced that it will be available for free.  At present, it’s in limited beta, but [...]

On Tooltips and Affordances

I just got a new smartphone – a T-Mobile Wing, in fact, and I like it a lot.  I’ve never used Windows Mobile for any extended length of time, though, so I’m still learning a few things.  This morning, while trying to figure out what a button did, I caught myself doing something astounding, and I gained a whole new appreciation of affordances.

This phone, if you’re not familiar, is a touch-screen smartphone with a slide-out keyboard, so if I’m doing anything remotely complicated, I’m usually using a stylus to point to the screen.  This is sort of interesting all by itself, because in many ways the stylus acts as an interface metaphor for a mouse, which is, in many ways, acting as an interface metaphor for a finger.  It’s no wonder parts of the UI are screwed up!