Most users think, Mac UI is all about slick graphics and “cool” icons. Well, that might be true partially, but user interface design isn’t about photoshopping or designing cool looking icons. According to Jakob Nielsen, aesthetics is just one aspect of usability. There is much more to user friendly software than just the “cool factor” or great icons. Recently, I was using Microsoft’s Excel to edit a dozen...

If you were following my tweets, you might be knowing that I got a invitation from Microsoft to test Microsoft Office 2010. Invitation to test Microsoft Office 2010 Yeah, From the screen shot it should be evident that I’m using a mac now. I testing Office 2010 by installing it on my Windows 7 Virtual Box image. Being a usability guy myself, In this article, I will primarily focus on usability aspects of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and...

OK, many of the programmers would have been confused as how to design a dialog on your website. In what order should the dialog contain the OK and Cancel Buttons? Should it be OK – Cancel like Windows or Cancel – OK like the Mac? Are there any “rule of thumb” why a certain standard should be followed? Or is it just a matter of taste? Firstly Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines state that, rather than OK or...

Bing has this cool feature called “Popular Now” shows what people are searching for recently. Today, Michael Jackson died and people were searching for his name it seems, and Bing rightly highlights two search keywords releated to that, 1) Michael Jackson 2) UCLA Medical Center. Micheal Jackson popular search on Bing Bing is too “cool” to be used as a browser home page for Mozilla Firefox than the damned...

Ah… Bing… Wonderful product from Microsoft IMO. I always wanted to save the wallpapers/images that appears on the front page of Bing.com to my local PC. But visiting the site everytime and saving it was cumbersome. So I thought of writing my own C# utility that could do that job for me. The utility is just 10KB (yeah Kilo Byte) is open source, free from any kind of obligations. But if you use it in your app, I would be happy if...