Steven Pemberton : Views and Feelings ←↑→

This is a series of articles that I have written and published. If I have a blog then this is it. There is an RSS feed.

• Ten and the art of computer-power maintenance: the ten €/$/£ computer.
  A contemplation on values.
• Why XHTML
  Why XML parsing is advantageous and why XHTML is relevant.
• Why you should have a website: it's the law!
  Why Web 2.0 is bad for the web, and how we can fix it.
• Newsnight interviews Gutenberg on the invention of the book
  After the success of their interview with Tim Berners-Lee, BBC's Newsnight decided to interview Johann Gutenberg.
• Things that Stay Us from the Swift Completion of Our Appointed Tasks (Revisited)
  A decade ago I tried to predict how much mail I would be receiving now. Was I right?
• The Power of Two
  Available computing power doubles every 18 months. Why aren't we taking advantage of it?
• Scratching someone else's itch
  Why open source can't do usability
• So Big, So Bad, So Often
  Badly designed programming languages cause viruses.
• Hotel Heartbreak
  Why are hotel booking sites on the Web so terrible?
• Letter Writing, Telephones, and Television
  So is the net bad for human relationships?
• Restrictive practices
  Region codes on DVDs are a stupid idea.
• The Kiss of the Spiderbot
  The economic value of making websites accessible.
• A Pixel is not a Point
  Screen resolution (pixel density) is increasing. Don't use pixels as a measure of font size if you want people to continue reading your web pages.
• Go away!
  Web sites that don't care if you can see their content
• Choose one: fast, correct, or pleasurable
  On the definition of usability.
• Electric IP
  What will it mean for the user if Internet comes out of the electric plug?
• Did convergence kill the clock?
  Will devices converge to one all-powerful device, or will they stay separate and learn to communicate?
• The culture of uncertainty
  A proposed explanation of why some websites are apparently so wilfully hard to use.
• In search of the killer app
  Successes and failures of the mobile Internet.
• The design of notations
  Many eyes make UI bugs shallow, too.
• Photocopy this article!
  Why publishers should be encouraging digital copying like Napster.
• Abusus non tollit usum
  Is it OK to use the word "Affordance" about aspects of screen interfaces?
• So much for WYSIWYG
  Horror stories from a multi-lingual environment.
• The accidental death of reviewing
  Peer-review has structural problems that may just go away
• It rings for me
  How our interactions with devices live in the fringes of unanticipated possibilities.
• The demise of the book
  If you're one of those people that thinks there's nothing like the feel and smell of a lovely book, come over to my house sometime and smell mine.
• Local Optima
  Before you design an interface, you need to observe your users
• Image image: Image Image Image
  One day we will all be glad that there are accessible websites
• Our subliminal art
  Zen and the Art of Interaction Design
• The Screen is not Paper
  Why you shouldn't use PDF for documents intended for the screen
• Mysteries Worth Pondering
  Inconsistencies within and between systems
• Teenagers, Sex Education and Microsoft
  The sad state of platform interoperability.
• Flags are not Languages
  So don't use flags as icons representing languages.
• Hell and Documentation
  Why documentation should be designed using user interface techniques
• Programmers are Humans Too, 2
  Why are programming languages so bad?
• If Six Were Nine
  'Smart' software. Ha!
• Quick! The Future is Coming!
  If technological advances of computing are so easy to predict, why are we so short-sighted?
• Never is a Long Time
  Why screens will replace paper eventually
• Beep Beep!
  Sound in the user interface
• Programmers Are Humans Too
  Why is it so hard to write a GUI program?
• Metaphorically Speaking
  Wrong use of terminology
• Things that Stay Us from the Swift Completion of Our Appointed Tasks
  Why are mail readers so uniformly bad?
• Gbldgk
  Why notations should be designed using user interface techniques
• No Such Number, No Such Zone
  The pains of telling computer systems what your address is
• Let Vs Coniectvre VVhat the VVorld VVovld Be Liqe Had the Roman Empire Not Fallen
  Character sets, and how badly most of the world is supported
• A Word of Encouragement
  An argument for blind reviewing
• Parallel Worlds
  What sort of mess would we be in if filestores had developed in the same way that user interface software has?