jonobacon@home

Before I get started I want to provide a cast-iron caveat here: I am not a professional interface designer. While I have an interest in interaction design and usability, it is not my profession and most of my experience is from working on spare-time projects and developing interfaces for those projects. In other words…the views [...]

I want to share a short story with you folks as the basis for a little challenge I wanted to set. Let me start at the beginning. A little while back John Lea, a member of the Canonical Design Team filed this bug. The essence of the bug was grounded in one of the check-boxes [...]

Interface design is a complex business. There are a great many schools of thought about how to build an effective interface, and ultimately no-one is 100% correct. Lots of theory, lots of academia, lots of opinion, but little hard evidence about what design constructs actually work best for general human-computer interaction. Recently I kicked off [...]

The other day I did an interview with the fellas on the Linux Action Show. They are nice guys, good fun, and the interview covered my work with Ubuntu, Jokosher, my new book and lots of discussion. Go and download it.

On the Monday at LCA, there was a GNOME Love session as part of gnome.conf.au. In this session a bunch of us shouted out things to discuss, and I shouted out ‘application design and usability’. What I didn’t realise was that shouting out a suggestion mean’t volunteering to talk about it. Oof! So, I got [...]

When we started the Jokosher project, we wanted it to kick arse and take names when it came to usability, but also attractiveness. This is why my-friend-and-yours J5 is displayed in the New Project dialog, and why we have spent a lot of time on making Jokosher look attractive, yet neat. Dialog design is essential [...]

Here I am at the 10th anniversary event for KDE and its really cool. Last night I had two, count them, two hours of sleep before my alarm went off at 3am. I get back into England at around 11pm. Its a long day, but its worth it. The energy here behind the KDE team [...]

I read Chris’s blog about ALSA, and it does concern me a little. I think ALSA is most definitely the right direction for us to head in, but if users are experiencing a distinctive difference in audio quality, then this needs fixing, and fixing quick. Personally, I have not noticed the difference, but then again, [...]

As an advocate and consultant, I tend to get exposed to a rich tapestry of reasons why Open Source is great and why it is not so great. I am not going going to bother singing to the choir about the great aspects, but I instead want to discuss one of the oft heard criticisms [...]

As many of you will know, I am quite the usability pervert. Understanding how people use computers and creating better and more intuitive interfaces fires me up, and the mere idea of GNOME 3.0 is interesting to me. The reason why I find GNOME 3.0 exciting is that it presents a dream for us; we [...]