Always

Kathy Sierra has an excellent post on the problems with showing a stakeholder a demo. Do you work your ass off and make the slickest demo possible or do you show them a sketch on a napkin?

The thing I want to point out is the Java part of the entry. The Napkin Look & Feel shows the power of layout managers in Java Swing and is about the coolest thing ever! Check out a page of the swing set demo using it:

Posted by Brian Levay at 9:30 PM | Permalink

This is part two of a recurring feature where I share with you some of the The Feeds I Read. These feeds are collected together into what I call a UI and Marketing category:

1. Creating Passionate Users by Kathy Sierra just rocks. If you subscribe to one feed in this list today you need to subscribe to this one. She is a chick that knows Java, which by itself is cool, but she has a ton of good advice on getting the user experience right. By just looking at the layout of her blog and the posts you can tell without even reading that this one is going to be good.

2. What's Your Brand Mantra by Jennifer Rice is a marketing blog written by a long time marketing professional. She hasn't been posting as much lately but if you look back through some of her earlier posts you can see that she dives deep into the emotions that make a marketing effort work. Her posts are thoughtful and a lot of times she is on a level that I have a hard time making it up to. She would have been a good psych major.
3. A little bit of Mark by Mark True is all about marketing as well. Don't let his wild hair fool you. Like Jennifer, he likes to talk about how to build and sell a brand but he goes into the details that need to be focused on to build that brand.
4. Jensen Harris is the man behind the Microsoft Office UI. The stories he tells about all the UI changes made to MS Office over the years and the rationale behind those decisions is just too interesting. The stories about the design decisions behind the next rev of Office are even better!
5. flow|state by Jan Miksovsky is another well crafted UI blog. He too hasn't been posting much lately but the simple UI points he makes can have a big impact on any UI out there.



6. Thoughts From Eric by Eric Meyer is a very good resource for CSS related issues and most recently IE7 rendering changes.

To make things easier for the geeks out there that know what OPML is, you can download the file and import it directly.

Posted by Brian Levay at 9:15 AM | Permalink

I had planned to blog about this whole HP and Fidelity fiasco where every single HP employee in the Americas had their personal information compromised because a Fidelity employee had their laptop stolen. I really don't care what Fidelity thinks, they will be losing my personal business, but I do care what HP thinks so I'll keep my thoughts quiet (this time).

In order to help help protect us from identity theft Fidelity has offered to pay for a free credit monitoring service from Equifax. I have used Equifax before to obtain credit reports so when I went to the site to register for the service they said I already had an account. Ok....... I try to login and I couldn't figure out my password. Enter the secret question/answer! That will help me get in.

I think I was just having a bad day because I couldn't even answer my own secret question!!! I'm such an idiot. How can I not remember the answer to that question.

Needless to say this one is being submitted for the next WTF Pop-up Potpourri.

Posted by Brian Levay at 9:44 AM | Permalink