[link] "Winning is not about working hard. It's about working smart… and less. As the French know well."

[link] "KeyCue helps you to use your Mac OS X applications more effectively by displaying a concise table of all currently available menu shortcuts."

Interesting shareware. Worth a try.

★ Brandon Walkin, author of brilliant visual designs of Capo and Billings, shares some techniques for reducing UI complexity :

"Interface complexity is an issue every designer wrestles with when designing a reasonably sophisticated application. A complex interface can reduce user effectiveness, increase the learning curve of the application, and cause users to feel intimidated and overwhelmed.

I’ve spent the past year redesigning a particularly complex application with my primary focus being on reducing complexity. In this article, I’ll go over some of the issues surrounding complexity and techniques that can be used to manage it."

Note that all wrong design examples are from Microsoft.

★ Mozilla's Aza shares the quality test used for Ubiquity :

"Thus our test: We ask ourselves, “Would I be willing to teach my Grandma how to use this over the phone?”. If the answer is “Definitely”, we know we’re doing well; if the answer is “Maybe”, we know we can do better; and if the answer is “No”, then it’s often time to rethink the whole thing."

I wouldn't even think of designing a piece of software if the end user had to go through all these steps. I always say that if my little sister, my father and my grandfather need to call me for technical support, that product is not well designed. Nobody ever had to call someone else about the Wii or TextEdit.

(Also, within every single text field in every application on Macintosh, you click on a red-underlined word to correct spelling mistakes. Why would somebody design it differently? Oh yeah, right, for cross-platform stuff…)

★ Alex Payne write about software and hardware minimalism in both computer and phone domains :

"Trust comes, in part, from simplicity. When something is simple, it’s possible to understand it in fullness. When you understand a thing, you can trust it."

Rainlendar2-Pro is a 9,95€ calendar PC and Mac app. Look at these screenshots : this one and this one.

• Cluttered on desktop widget
• Application name, release number and version in the menu bar
• Cool ASCII art in the manager window’s title bar
• Brilliantly ignored Interface Builder helpers
• The columns are not even large enough to display some dates

This is so much wrong, I really hope they will improve the user interface in future versions.

But I’m cool with that : they mention the Finnish city Tampere in the second screenshot. I lived there.

★ NetNewsWire's developer Brent Simmons describes all the UI decisions he had to go through before adding the Instapaper functionality to the feed reader's latest beta :

"It’s not enough just to write the basic functionality and add a menu item that runs it. Even a feature as simple as this one requires some up-front thinking, some design."

★ "This is an emergency guide to iPhone software development, i.e. a guide for competent developers who haven’t written code for the iPhone platform before, and just want to get started right now."

★ "This is a pretty good indicator of the two companies’ design philosophies and quality goals. And this isn’t even considering the software interface that each remote is respectively controlling."

★ "Every since it launched its two truly dominant products, search and AdSense, Google has dabbled in dozens of other products that have basically gone nowhere."

Right… So Gmail, Gtalk, Google Docs, Google Maps, Google Reader, Google News, Google Code have all basically gone nowhere?

Google released Gears, then Chrome, and now Chrome OS. All Open Source. I think these are a great improvement to computer science and Internet, and I can't wait to play with a new OS.