Blog

Craig Villamor and Luke Wroblewski summarize the new interactions we'll be seeing in the iPad.

During Apple's 90 minute unveiling of the iPad this week, a lot of new multi-touch interactions were shown off. But they went by fast. So as a service to digital product designers everywhere, we took the time to extract 8 minutes of new user interface demos from the iPad keynote. Now you can quickly just catch the UI in action on Apple's new native iPad and iWork applications.

More at LukeW...

http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?991

Napkee gets an update with iPhone controls and now covers 100% of what you find in Balsamiq Mockups. What I'm most excited about are the export settings. Under the HTML settings you can now define a title for your exported files, a new name for the Icons folder and you can specify an external CSS file that will be included in each export. More info on the release here.

http://www.napkee.com/blog/2010/01/100percent/

ForeUI have announced a 2.0 release that includes community features for sharing UI components and importing into your library, new element panel management that lets you categorize elements and choose which to display, a powerful tree-based page management window, global properties/variables that can be retrieved by scripted expressions, and custom events that can be triggered from scripted expressions. Sophisticated stuff.

Disclosure: ForeUI are sponsors of Konigi

http://www.foreui.com/blog/?p=658

Instead of throwing in my 2 cents on the "wireframes suck", "lorem ipsum ain't so bad" discussions I'll just echo what Joshua Porter (@bokardo) has to say on the matter:

Lorem Ipsum, wireframes, personas, etc are just tactics. The only thing that matters is: Do people love what you built?

Amen, brother. Here's 1 cent... I agree with Karen about Lorem Ipsum.

Via Inspire UX

http://twitter.com/bokardo/status/7912221516

UX Exchange throws down on The Best UI You've Ever Used.

Stack Overflow throws up The Worst UI You've Ever Used.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/238177/worst-ui-youve-ever-used

Explain IA is a contest created by the Information Architecture Institute to find the explanation of information architecture. Will be interesting to see what people come up with. I'd especially like to see the explanation that explains IA in layman's terms in a way that my non-techie mother could understand.

What is it? Why is it important? What does it mean to you? Some folks may offer a definition in 140 characters or less, while others will use this opportunity to tell a story (using text, pictures, audio, and/or video) about their relationship to IA. Anyone can enter, but only IA Institute members can vote for the winners.

To enter, simply join this group, upload your entry to your Flickr account, add the "explainia" tag, and then select "send to group" from the menu options above your entry. Entries must be received by February 11, 2010. Please see below for more details and to learn about our generous sponsors and wonderful prizes.

Grand Prize
The grand prize of $1,000 is co-sponsored by the IA Institute and Endeca.

To enter, post to the Explain IA group.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/explainia

It's nice to have something good to look forward to every week, and Joshua Porter and Joshua Brewer will deliver by writing a weekly blog about user experience. Nice.

http://52weeksofux.com/

Rosenfeld Media have a book site and Ning community up for John Ferrara's forthcoming book, Playful Design: Creating Game Expderiences in Everyday Interfaces.

Game design is a sibling discipline to software and Web design, but they're siblings that grew up in different houses. They have much more in common than their perceived distinction typically suggests, and user experience practitioners can realize enormous benefit by exploiting the solutions that games have found to the real problems of design. This book will show you how.

This is a book I can't wait to read. It's to be published in 2011, but as with all Rosenfeld books, we get the benefit of reading about the author's research in-progress beforehand.

http://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/game-design/

UXFind is a mashup that uses Google Custom Search Engine and Google App Engine. It provides a search engine tailored for User Experience pros. It indexes over 200 of user experience web sites and blogs. Oddly, they index my old blog iaslash, but not Konigi, so I guess the sources might not be so fresh. It's a great idea, and I've tried to do this in the past too, to just limit to sources I trust. To be honest, I always end up casting a larger net, however.

http://www.uxfind.com/

UX Lx, User Experience Lisbon, is set to take place in Lisbon Portugal next May 12 to 14. Nice time for a trip to Portugal. Speakers include Jared Spool, Luke Wroblewski, Dan Saffer, Peter Merholz, Donna Spencer, Brian Fling, Bill Scott, and Dana Chisnell.

http://www.ux-lx.com/