I just stopped by OpenOffice.org to download their fine software. I hadn’t seen their site for awhile, and while the current design is pretty nice, they made one tragic error that I can’t help but point out. Here is the current design:

Everything you’d come to the site for, laid with convenient icons. However, for some reason, each of the main links in the body of the page is an entire sentence. If I’m looking for the download link, I just need to see “Download”. The sentences add nothing, but they do make it harder to scan the page, since they distract from the key terms. Further, each line already has an explanation beneath it, if you’re really not sure what the links do. I would have done it more like this:

Much better. If you came here to get help, visually scanning the page will reveal the “Help” link instantly, instead of a couple seconds later. In web design, seconds matter.

Back in college, I had a professor pose an interesting question on an exam. It was worded like this:

“On the back of this paper, write out every keystroke and mouseclick you would take to add five spaces at the beginning of the first 10 lines of a file in a text editor.”

Naturally, some people protested. But he insisted that the literal meaning of the question was to be carried out.

Some students assumed it was a trick question that they didn’t understand, and wrote nothing. Some students write out the entirety of what was necessary to do this in Notepad:

space, space, space, space, space, down, home, space, space, space, space, space, down, home,space, space, space, space, space, down, home,space, space, space, space, space, down, home,space, space, space, space, space, down, home,space, space, space, space, space, down, home,space, space, space, space, space, down, home,space, space, space, space, space, down, home,space, space, space, space, space, down, home,space, space, space, space, space

At the time, I had been learning Vim at the professor’s advice. So, feeling very clever, I wrote this on the back of my paper:

:1,10s/^/     /

In a few days, when the exam was returned, students noticed that the this question had not been graded. The professor answered them:

“Your reward for getting it right is not having to write out an entire page of text to do something trivially simple. If you haven’t followed my advice and learned a good text editor, you waste this much time a hundred times over every time you write a program.”

Invaluable advice for any programmer. Use good tools, and get really good at using them.

[Image Credit]

Song previews in music stores have always fascinated me. I remember when I first downloaded iTunes I wondered: how is the location of the preview in the song selected? Why 30 seconds? Most importantly, why can’t the previews be better?

Thankfully, a lot of music sites I use are better, and are only improving. Trackitdown recently upgraded their player (shown to the left) so you can play the entire song. Strangely, the song stops automatically after the normal preview length of a couple minutes. If you seek to a different part of the song, the preview window shortens to 30 seconds. But if you patiently click where you left off each time it stops, you can hear the whole song.

I don’t think this is poor interface design. I think this is the result of compromise. Stores want to offer as much preview as they can (because consumers want it) but content providers (musicians, music labels, etc.) are afraid of giving away too much for free. Many iterations of “Well, what if we did this?” met with “Well… only if you limit it this way” must have led to the behaviors consumers are now familiar with.

The good news is that the music stores are making progress. Song previews have been gradually getting longer, higher quality, and more interactive with time. The Trackitdown player is a good example. Here are a couple other ones.

Above is the Beatport player. The best (relatively recent) feature of this player is the queue on the right. As with Trackitdown, everywhere in the store where a song is shown, you can either play it immediately or add it to the preview queue. It is a great experience to shop by building up a queue, then sitting back and listening to long, high quality previews while doing something else for awhile, opening up Beatport when you like the current song. All previews are a couple minutes long, but the quality varies: I wonder if different content providers have different preview fidelity restrictions.

This one is the Soundcloud player. This site isn’t really a store: it lets people pay to have high quality hosting for music in order to promote it. This site demonstrates the waveform display that is showing up in many music stores. At first it might just seem like eye-candy, but waveforms have been in DJ tools for a long time because they’re genuinely useful. If you’re previewing a song, and it breaks down to a quiet bit, you may just want to visually identify the busy part get to the point. It’s a great way to quickly triage songs if you don’t want to listen to full 2 minute previews for everything.

I expect full-song previews to show up someday, with sound quality being the only incentive to pay up. This works well for selling stock images: some sites use watermarks, but others simply provide a lower-resolution version of the image as the preview. Let’s hope the current trend continues at least: the more I know about a song, the more likely I am to feel confident enough to pay for it.

Here is a new personal project of mine.

It is still in the works, but I’ve been posting to it as I work on it. It uses a couple interesting WordPress plugins to do the detailed classification: specifically, the fields and tag clouds for flavors, breweries, and beer styles.

The design is not mine, but my policy is to get the site running before spending a lot of time on that part. It’ll be a great site to do a design for when I want some new portfolio material.

Concept Art

Christian Hecker. Glorious sci-fi and landscapes at wallpaper-worthy resolutions.

Mike McCain. More spaceships? Yes.

Guild Wars 2. I’ve loved their box art since the first one.

Useful Apps

Ninite lets you check off the apps you want to make one custom installer for everything you need on a new computer.

Support Details. Much easier than explaining to grandma how to check her screen resolution.

Web Design Resources

Visual Event. The fact that this is a bookmarklet rather than a plug-in makes it that much cooler.

Optimize your site for the iPhone. Not rushing to do this on this site with the number of iPhone visits I get, though.

Vintage Fonts. Can never get enough fonts, right?

Fun

Top 50 iPhone games from Edge. It is still hard to find good iPhone game recommendations, so this compilation was timely and well done.

Secret Menus. Everyone knows about the In-N-Out Burger secret menu, but there are some other delicious possibilities out there.

Red Dust. Hard to believe these are actual photographs of a dust storm.

Interesting

Businesses that sound appealing to get into but are overrated. Traffic-driven web sites is an important one to note.

Irrational fears even rational people have. It is great that Cracked can be as insightful as they are hilarious.

Design in the Wild

Tortured Orchard. “A spirited rebellion of flavors.” Someone in marketing figured out that off-center web designers really like to marinade things.

The Party Pitcher. Come on, that’s what it’s for.

Strange

Smell like Neil Gaiman, or Cthulu, or something.

Mustaches, drum solos, and rights of passage.