Tag Archives: ui

WordPress Post formats Admin UI

October 27th, 2011

WordPress 3.1 exhibited an underlying feature that didn’t reveal itself in the UI in much of any way. Post formats. Post formats are sort of like categories of posts but are used to “handle” different post types in different ways. You can read more about Post formats over on the WordPress Codex.

Crowd Favorite has released an open source WordPress plugin * that changes the Admin UI and sets up standards for a few different post formats. Here, their description is better:

“The plugin is a completely additive solution that leverages the default WordPress functionality, while improving the UI and standardizing the names and presentation of custom fields that support the various post formats.”

Post formats has limitless possibilities as you extend WordPress from a simple blogging tool to a much more powerful CMS… but this plugin seems to focus on the modern day blogger.

This interests me in that I use categories to handle my different post formats. Which is how everyone that has ever used WordPress had to do it. I’ve got mobile photos, links, videos, and longer posts I call notes, and larger photos. It would be great to start using post formats to post different types of formats – I’m looking forward to digging into this.

* Side note: So glad Crowd Favorite switched to Github. I hope other WordPress developers quickly follow suit. In fact, I think WordPress.org should change the way they host WordPress plugins to git.

Tumblr Dashboard permalinks…

May 18th, 2009

After playing around with Tumblr for months (I’m cdevroe over there), I finally noticed that the little “page curls” that happen on-hover on posts on my Dashboard from those whom I follow are actually the permalinks to those posts. Man do I wish I found that sooner! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve actually gone to the Tumblr page of the user who posted something I wanted to find the permalink to, scrolled down the page to find the post, and clicked on the date (or whatever their theme had that was clickable). Ugh.

Though I do like the idea, I think this link should be much more apparent.

Side note: A single RSS feed for posts from everyone I follow would be stellar. Maybe it is there and I just don’t know it?

Beak, a fantastic Twitter client from Mike Rundle

May 7th, 2009

John Gruber made an excellent point in his piece called “Twitter clients are a UI design playground“. The excellent point I’m talking about is made apparent within the very title of the piece. That Twitter (I’m @cdevroe, btw) is an excellent playground for designing UIs for third party clients.

Mike Rundle, whom I had the extreme pleasure of working with at 9rules, is – and I have absolutely no reservations about saying this out loud – one of the very best designers I will ever work with. He also doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty with regards to programming. And he’s done just that with Beak – his foray into developing software for the Macintosh (which is, I think, exactly what he should be doing).

Beak is a simple, yet relatively full-featured Twitter application for the Macintosh that has Mike’s visual tastes dripping all over it. The icons in the application, as an example, could be picked out as Mike’s work from a hundred yards.

The Beak UI

One of the differentiators that Beak has going for it, over any of the other Twitter applications I’ve used for the Mac, is the “Stats” tab. Mike chose to use the URL shortener Idek.net, which has a nice, clean, simple API, that allows him to show the number of click thrus on a URL that you’ve shortened from within Beak itself. I think this is both genius and handy. While Tweetie supports all of the URL shortening services I could ever want (and photo posting services too), it doesn’t support showing the statistics of those clicks nor does it even connect me to my account on said URL shorteners (neither does Beak, but at least I can easily check the stats tab).

There are several other nits that Mike has, no doubt pain stakingly [sic], poured over, refined, and included in the first version of this application. Profile pop-up boxes, in-line replies and retweets, and support for multiple accounts all seem like things that someone who was taking the easy way would have left out.

This is still “beta” software people. But I’m very much looking forward to what Mike ends up with before hitting 1.0 and even more looking forward to seeing what he does for his next trick in the world of Mac applications.

Tags, the way Apple should have done it

February 27th, 2009

I’m a little late to the game in mentioning this application – as it has made its rounds around the Mac-Web a while back – but I’d be remiss if I didn’t take a moment to link to it and let you know my thoughts. Right?

Tags UI

I’m a tagging freak. I believe tags are the best way to help organize data into miscellaneous piles of information. It gives us a non-hierarchical (that isn’t a word, is it?) way that we can search for things later. Yes, I’ve read Dave Weinberger‘s book Everthing is Miscellaneous. I told you; tagging freak.

Apple has, in their own way, provided support for tagging in Mac OS X. They have a field in their metadata for files called “Spotlight comments”. Or, ‘the words you’d like to use to search for this file using Spotlight’. So if I have a document that, for whatever reason, is about my cats Pickles and Pookers but – somehow – does not mention them inside of the file by name or in the filename itself, I can add “Pickles Pookers” to the Spotlight comments area and presto! – I can search Spotlight for either of their names and find the file.

Magic.

Tags, on the other hand, adds a certain UI to this process that I think Apple should have done from the very beginning. From inside of any Applescript-enabled application (which is a lot of applications) you can invoke a UI to help you add some tags to that file. You can do this in Mail.app, Finder, inside of iPhoto, and even on bookmarks within Safari. Then, you can do specific searches in Spotlight later for those tags. The screencast on the home page for Tags does a good job of explaining what the application does and what it allows you to accomplish.

Source: Tags | Overview.

iWork and iLife ’09 UI overview

January 8th, 2009

Speaking of changes to iWork ’09, Sebastiaan de With pours over a large number of changes, updates, and other little tidbits of the new iWork and iLife ’09 application suites.

Some of the more interesting and notable revisions are that there are completely new visual styles throughout, new toolbar icons for every application, and much more.

Related: The very same day of the iWork ’09 announcement Sebastiaan released an iWork icon goodie set.

Source: iWork / iLife ’09 UI Roundup.