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slick – the last carousel you’ll ever need

[A full-responsive, CSS3-enabled, touch-ready, arrow-key supporting, draggable carousel that you can instance with one line.][link]

Having built and used probably a dozen different image slider / content carousels this one looks like it covers all of the bases and with minimal markup bullshit. Color me impressed.

[link]: http://kenwheeler.github.io/slick/ “slick – the last carousel you'll ever need”

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Cognitive Lode by ribot

Providing the “[Latest research on consumer behaviour, psychology and biases][link].” This stuff is like catnip for me.

[link]: http://coglode.com/ “Latest research on consumer behaviour, psychology and biases – Cognitive Lode by ribot”

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WTF Visualizations

[Sometimes public shaming is the only way to solve bad dataviz.][link]

[link]: http://wtfviz.net/ “WTF Visualizations”

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How GitHub Uses “Deprivation Testing” To Hone Product Design

[The psychology here is interesting to me.][link]

[link]: http://www.fastcolabs.com/3010972/open-company/how-github-uses-deprivation-testing-to-hone-product-design “How GitHub Uses "Deprivation Testing" To Hone Product Design ⚙ Co.Labs ⚙ code + community”

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Zen Writing Mode on GitHub

[Github has added a new “Zen mode” button to all text areas on the site][link], the clicking of which will grow the writing area to the full window size, hiding the rest of the page, so you can focus on writing without distractions.

[link]: https://github.com/blog/1379-zen-writing-mode “Zen Writing Mode · GitHub Blog”

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Garlic.js

>[Garlic.js allows you to automatically persist your forms’ text field values locally, until the form is submitted. This way, your users don’t lose any precious data if they accidentally close their tab or browser.][link]

Uses localStorage if available, to boot. The author suggests marking up your forms with rel=”persist” and that sounds reasonable enough to me.

[link]: http://guillaumepotier.github.com/Garlic.js/ “Garlic.js”

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Lukas Mathis on Skype 5 for Mac

[A downgrade in every sense:][link]

>Unfortunately, instead of making the Windows version of Skype better, they’ve decided to fix the discrepancy by making the Mac version of Skype more like the Windows version.

Always, always, a bad idea.

[link]: http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2011/03/30/skype_5/ “ignore the code: Skype 5 for Mac”

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Google Maps & Label Readability

[An examination on why Google Maps seem so much more “readable” than Yahoo or Bing.][link]

[link]: http://www.41latitude.com/post/2072504768/google-maps-label-readability “41Latitude – Google Maps & Label Readability”

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Lukas Mathis on Scrolling .vs. Page-flipping

[In response to a response][link], he grabs this quote from Kottke:

>The page flipping animation in the iBooks app though? Super cheesy. It’s like in the early days of cars where they built them to look like horse-drawn carriages. Can’t we just scroll?

He says:

>How is scrolling desirable to the person who is trying to read a book? If I’m reading a book, I want to fill the screen with text. Then, I want to read that text. Then, I want to fill the whole screen with new text, and read that.

and I smile and nod, because he is extremely right. The reason the page-flip metaphor still works is that my eyes/brain shouldn’t have to be in charge of figuring out where I am in the text every time I scroll.

It’s not as simple as eliminating “pages” entirely, I think, but re-implementing the _good_ functionality of pages.

[link]: http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2010/03/06/jon_bell_on_scrolling/ “ignore the code: Jon Bell on Scrolling”

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The Details Are Everything

A new tumblr created by Me, available from now: [The Details Are Everything][link], sifting the user interfaces and experiences I come into contact with in daily life. It is A) An excuse to write more about semi-work-involved things and B) something I’ve been threatening to do for long enough that I needed to either start it, or shut up.

[link]: http://detailer.tumblr.com/ “The Details are Everything”

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Cadence & Slang is a book about interaction design.

Written by [Nick Disabato (nickd)][nick], [soon to be self-published][link]:

>I’m writing a book called Cadence & Slang, due in late 2010. It’s about interaction design, which is the art and craft of making technology easier to use. There have been many products in the past decade that take generous advantage of good design – the iPod, the Flip Video, the Wii – and fortunately we’re moving more in this direction. Technology used to be an awful lot more complex and overwhelming, and we’ve since learned to make it simpler.

[Back the project on Kickstarter][link], so I can read this thing. See also: [the book’s outline][outline] (PDF), and [it’s official site][site].

[link]: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nickd/cadence-and-slang-is-a-book-about-interaction-design “Cadence & Slang is a book about interaction design. — Kickstarter”
[outline]: http://nickd.org/log/cadence-outline.pdf “Cadence & Slang outline”
[site]: http://cadence.cc/ “Cadence & Slang site”
[nick]: http://nickd.org/ “nickd dot org”

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Chrome OS User Experience

[Sketched and screenshotted examples of what the Chrome OS (the open source project is called Chromium) is going to look like][link]. The goal is a noble one: An OS that boots super fast (under 10 seconds), gives you instant access to a modern web browser (WebKit) and gets the hell out of your way.

I am on board with that.

[link]: http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/user-experience “User Experience (The Chromium Projects)”