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

Making travel reservations online has come a long way, and some airlines now even include standard vCalendar files in their confirmation emails, so it takes just a few mouse clicks to add all flight-related information to your digital calendar. One such airlines is Lufthansa, who include vCalendar _invitations_. And that, I daresay, is a bad idea.

AApple's handheld devices are an example for miniaturization at work: with every new release, iPods have gotten a little smaller, and "incredibly thin" is the new "insanely great." Unfortunately, Apple has also miniaturized some of their software user guides

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.

If you're a software developer and you honestly care about the user-friendliness of your software, it is not enough to simply guess which user interface works best for your application: you must _test_ your products with real users. A new usability testing tool for the Macintosh, called "Silverback," now makes user testing available even to those developers who have, so far, found the cost and effort associated with setting up a proper usability test lab forbidding.

The cost of fixing bugs found early in development is much less than the cost of fixing bugs found late -- like during Q A or after a product ships.

Two weeks ago, I complained about something not being quite right with the way OmniFocus -- a task management application based on GTD -- handles repeating actions, which may cause most of a project's actions to be hidden from you. In the comments to that blog post, a reader suggested three possible workarounds. Here's how useful those workarounds turned out to be, plus an official view on the topic by the OmniFocus developers.

Thanks to cross-platform GUI libraries, writing an application that can be deployed on more than just one computing platform is reasonably straight-forward. But there is more to making an application truly Mac-like than just compiling it for Mac OS X.

Have you ever kept track of how often you hit Command-S on an average day? However you use your Mac, whatever kind of apps you are using: chances are that hitting that comforting key combination every few minutes has become a subconscious habit for you. For me, it's so bad, I sometimes hit Command-S while filling out a web form, wondering where the heck that Save As… dialog box came from. The question is: Why? Why do we do this? Why isn't there a better way? Oh, wait, there is!