Entries tagged with “ui” from O'Reilly Digital Media Blog

Matthew Paul Thomas has written a thoughtful and thought-provoking essay on the state of usability in Free and Open Source Software. In "Why Free Software has poor usability, and how to improve it", he gives a concise and well-presented overview over the issues that often plague software projects maintained by volunteers and also lists some suggestions on how to tackle these very problems.

While editing a podcast in BIAS Peak 6 recently, I was disturbed to hear the audio distorting even though the peak levels were below 100%. Turns out the culprit was a stealthy slider.

When half your population can't read, the spoken word becomes crucial. The Literacy Bridge project is designing a portable voice recorder that third-world populations can use to share news, history, and educational texts. In addition to recording and playing back audio, the Talking Book Device (hardware specs PDF) has buttons for basic interactivity — think quizzes and branching. Furthermore,...

The new TechSmith Jing screen-capture program is mighty slick — almost like Plasq Skitch with video. I've only begun to explore Jing, but even the installer impressed me. You can drag the app directly to an alias of your startup drive or double-click an AppleScript installer that moves the file for you and then ejects the disk image. It...