“…I thought everyone might like to know what Network Solutions is doing to discourage domain transfers. In the good ol’ days, you could request a transfer from NSI to another registrar. The new registrar would make the request, the admin contact would approve the request, and the ‘losing registrar’ couldn’t block the request unless the domain owner owed money or the registration had expired… About 20 days ago, NSI changed the process…”

“We get a lot of email from students and usability professionals asking how one goes about becoming an interaction designer, and what background one needs to get into the field. What are good interaction design programs? What real-world skills and experience are required? What, exactly, do interaction designers do on a day-to-day basis?”

“The point is, if you get your facts wrong, you get your map wrong. If you get your map wrong, you do the wrong thing. But worst of all once you believe a map, it is very, very hard to change. We all have deeply ingrained maps. All of us — and particularly successful corporate executives. Because, of course, they are successful precisely because they have had good maps of the world as they have understood it.”

“The original London tube map, ‘Ursa Major,’ the happy chaos of the Tokyo electrical diagram map; Moscow’s circulatory system; and Copenhagen’s clean, joyful modish style: These maps capture our imagination by the way in which each solves a similar problem in a unique and culturally appropriate manner.”

“On Thursday, June 28th, 2001, I was invited to attend a multi-way telephone conference with seven of Microsoft’s top Windows XP executives and developers. I was not told beforehand about the conference’s goal, but since only one person would have been required to tell me that Microsoft had changed its mind about XP’s inclusion of full raw socket support, I presumed that their top guys had been assembled with the purpose of convincing me that I was wrong. As the meeting got underway it was soon clear that this was the case.”

“Magic Lens filters are a new user interface tool that combine an arbitrarily-shaped region with an operator that changes the view of objects viewed through that region. These tools can be interactively positioned over on-screen applications much as a magnifying glass is moved over a newspaper. They can be used to help the user understand various types of information, from text documents to scientific visualizations. Because these filters are movable and apply to only part of the screen, they have a number of advantages over traditional window-wide viewing modes: they employ an attractive metaphor based on physical lenses, show a modified view in the context of the original view, limit clutter to a small region, allow easy construction of visual macros and provide a uniform paradigm that can be extended across different types of information and applications.”

“The time has come, [David Gelernter] said, to fix a problem that has not been addressed in some 15 years: Computers are lousy at organizing our information; the antiquated system of sorting documents into folders and trying to maintain order has fallen apart. “