I’ve just released Tofu 3.1 , an update to my text reader for the Mac. Its interface controls now use the new Liquid Glass appearance on macOS 26 Tahoe, and the app icon has also been adapted for Tahoe, including dark and clear variants. I’ve also done some code maintenance which prepares Tofu for compatibility with future macOS releases. Like previous versions, Tofu remains free. If you enjoy it,…
Like many people, I like to have an idea of whether I’m phsically active enough to maintain my health. I used to rely on my phone’s automatic step counting, with the well-known (and in my case aspirational) goal of 10,000 steps per day in mind. However, when I went swimming – one of the more conscious efforts I’ve made to stay fit – my phone would never find out, sitting oblivious in a locker…
There is no shortage of software metronomes in this world. I imagine that many people pick it as an exercise when learning to design or program, believing it to be a nice and simple task. Yet despite this abundance of options, I didn’t find one that I was satisfied with. They all somehow missed the mark, not so much in terms of functionality, but in terms of usability and quality. So I set out to…
Tachyo is a new metronome for iOS. It’s my first new app in 15 years, and also my first project after going fully independent earlier this year. Now, you may ask if there aren’t already enough other metronome apps out there. There certainly are many. But, as is so often the case when I look for software, I haven’t found any of them to be quite satisfactory. Beyond the obvious functional…
When I joined Google in 2011, it felt like I was realising a dream. I had been working primarily as a software engineer, with my design activities limited to an unofficial portion of my job and to personal projects in my spare time. Google provided an opportunity to be a full-time interaction designer working with very clever people on widely used products, in a fairytale-like work environment.…
I’ve just published a minor update to Licensed, my free app for storing software licenses. It fixes a bug where the contents of the Notes field were not legible when using macOS’s dark mode. Download the latest version here . You can read more about the previous update to version 1.5 in this blog post . Also, I now gratefully accept donations , in case you enjoy my free apps and would like to…
Tofu started as an experiment 20 years ago. It was based on a hypothesis that long lines of text and vertical scrolling made it challenging to read on your computer. Arranging text in columns seemed like an elegant way to address both the movement and the line length. I was amazed at how well the solution was received. Of all the apps I’ve made, Tofu has been the most popular. It’s also the one…
In 2014, I announced that I was not planning further development of my Mac and iOS apps. I have a couple of updates on that. Licensed 1.5 now available One thing I still intended to do was update Licensed, my Mac app for managing software licenses. That update is finally here. I’m sorry it took so long. My main motivation was to add an export function, so that you could get your data into other…
For the last 15 years or so, I’ve been using IMDb to look up how good movies are supposed to be. I also try to do my bit by submitting ratings for those I’ve watched. So far, I’ve rated nearly 700 films. In recent years, I’ve noticed more and more people referring to Rotten Tomatoes as their trusted source. Also, IMDb has started listing Metacritic’s score alongside their own, and Google can show…
I have a very high threshold for joining social networks, but I recently overcame this in a rare instance and finally started posting on Twitter . If you don't use an RSS reader, this may be the best way to find out when I publish new articles. I also share briefer thoughts there which I wouldn't put on this blog (this post is already exceptionally short). Here I am: @amar_designer
Colour management is a pretty arcane subject to most people, even if it’s relevant to their work. I recently spent some time trying to understand it, and encountered two challenges. First, I didn’t find any really clear explanation of the concepts involved. Some are thorough but difficult to follow. Others give practical advice without elucidating the fundamentals. The second problem is that…
UPDATE – 1 July 2023: Tofu is still alive , with version 3.0 now available, and Licensed got an update too . Wow, that was longer between posts than I had intended. Seriously, though, I'm sorry for the long silence, and for the lack of updates to my software. I'm going to tell you a bit about what's happening with my apps, my life and this blog. So what’s been going on? After many years of working…
I never used to be particularly interested in designing mobile applications. I just thought it was a hopeless platform, plagued by tiny screens and keys that were designed for inputting numbers (how often do you actually type numbers into your phone?) I also had never thought of my phone as something that I want to use for various applications. This scepticism had become so ingrained that I…
Tofu 2.0 was released yesterday, which allows reading simple PDF documents, has a less obtrusive full-screen mode, supports scrolling on MacBook trackpads and is a Universal Binary (that is, it includes a native build for Intel Macs). An alpha version with most of these features had been available for quite some time, but it had some bugs, and it only recently dawned on me how to solve the…
The Handbook of Human–Computer Interaction , edited by Martin Helander, Thomas Landauer and Prasad Prabhu, is a book published in 1997 that attempts to summarise research relevant to the design of interactive software and hardware. Its 62 chapters fill 1500 pages and provide advice on a multitude of topics, covering analysis, design and evaluation of interactive systems, as well as the…
I have a thing about correct punctuation, and although I'm aware that most people would find me over-zealous in this regard, I would bring to my defence that it's not just a pointless obsession or a purely aesthetic matter. A bit of poor punctuation will in the best case distract those from the text who notice it and affect their impression of the author, and in the worst case actually give the…
For a few weeks now, my two team-mates at work and I have been using a horizontal whiteboard, lying across the desk surface between us. I had been wanting to try this for a while, but it wasn t possible because of our previous desk arrangement. Now that we have this large area of space between us and no partitions, this small whiteboard fits perfectly without getting in the way. We ve found…
There was once an appearance theme for Mac OS 8 and 9 called Neutech, by Flanksteak Design. I don't think I particular liked the theme as a whole, but it included a desktop background that has been my favourite background for the last eight years or so since I discovered it: Here's a detail: I have made sure I that I always have a copy, which has survived across all the different Macs I've used…
Sorry to be late by a week or so, but there are several reasons why I didn't get a Leopard-compatible update to Namely out sooner. First of all, I didn't have Leopard any earlier than most of you; I bought it on Friday the 26th of October at the Apple Store on Regent Street. That's because unlike many Mac developers who dedicate a lot more time to this stuff and who have an income from it, I don't…
Douglas Coupland last night at the Bloomsbury theatre in London (at what he said was probably his last ever book reading): ...and someone said making a film about Helvetica is like making a film about off-white paint. I think in Helvetica. I love Helvetica. For more of his thoughts on the typeface, also see this piece in the New York Times .
I love the feeling of getting to understand a seemingly abstract concept in intuitive, real-world terms. It means you can comfortably and freely use it in your head to analyse and understand things and to make predictions. No formulas, no paper, no Greek letters. It’s the basis for effective analytical thinking. The best measure of whether you’ve “got it” is how easily you can explain it to…
On the subject of pie charts, information design god Edward Tufte has the following to say in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information: A table is nearly always better than a dumb pie chart [ ]. Given their low data-density and failure to order numbers along a visual dimension, pie charts should never be used. Although I tried for some time to convince myself and others that this is true, I…
One of my pet peeves in web interfaces has always been that on radio buttons and checkboxes, only the small button itself is clickable. In native Mac and Windows interfaces, you can usually click on the text labels of these controls as well, giving you a much larger target, which, in accordance with Fitts' Law , makes them faster to hit. Many, or perhaps most, people would probably never notice…
I've just launched a redesign of my web site , which makes it the fifth version, if I recall correctly. It's based on a simple grid with six columns of 100 pixels width and 20 pixels in between. Those are pretty much the same dimensions as I used for UIScape.com , and I've found them to work quite well: narrow enough to allow some flexibility and wide enough for most content. However, it only…
When I spent three months at Microsoft Research last year, I came across a lot of fascinating work related to interaction design. Colleagues would talk about their projects, people would report back from conferences, visitors came in to present their work, and I found things during literature reviews. Some of the designs I saw and read about were so cool that I couldn't believe they weren't more…