Interesting notes on user interface design

[Updated Mar 5, 2017]

I've been bookmarking these notes on UX design. Some of them are worth reading over and over. Well, ideally they should be applied but I'm a server-side engineer. So, the most I can do is identify applications of these concepts in the tools and devices I use:

• 5 Interface Laws Every Software Designer Should Know 
• Fundamental Design Principles – For People Who Can't Design Good 
• Ten Laws to Design By 
• 14 Golden Eggs of Good UI Design 
• Design Principles 
• Dieter Rams: ten principles for good design 
• Class notes on The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman
• iOS Human Interface Guidelines (Ahem.."The" UX bible) 
• 5 Secrets of Apple’s UX Design
• Principles of user interface design
• 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design - Jakob Nielsen

Some old notes I had made earlier (also read the links in the comments) - #1, #2.

Until next time!
Ashwin.

Definition: Weird - When you see Google presenters at Google IO touting Macbooks and talking about building and using Android.

Some books I read, mostly sci-fi and mostly average

Wireless by Charles Stross
Short stories. Some were good. Some too dry, felt like filler - meandering time travel stories with no plot.

Line War (Agent Cormac 5) by Neal L. Asher
Interesting. Some intrigue. Read like the Silver Surfer meets powerful AIs. Last book in the Ian Cormac saga.

The Fifth Head of Cerberus: Three Novellas by Gene Wolfe
Surreal, feverish, strange, slightly disjoint, even satisfying at first a but mildly disappointing ending.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Collins Business Essentials) by Robert B. Cialdini
A brief distraction from Sci-Fi. I bought the book after watching his interview on Youtube. Not a bad read.

Marooned in Realtime (Peace War) by Vernor Vinge
Takes post apocalyptic novel to a new level. Pretty impressive time scales, although a bit sad and disappointing in the end.

Duplicate Effort: A Retrieval Artist Novel (Retrieval Artist Novels) by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Average. Beginner writer. Starts off in a mildly interesting, vintage Asimov type of setting but the writer's inexperience shows.

Courtship Rite by Donald Kingsbury
Couldn't finish it. Waste of time.



Ashwin.

Summer reading (if you like technology)

I've been meaning to share these links for a while now.

I spent a few days digging up a few, interesting computer science algorithms we were introduced to in school (a while ago). Back then we didn't have ubiquitous internet access nor did we have 10 years of cumulative collective knowledge via Wikipedia, blogs, articles and tangible "computer sciencey" use cases like the ones at Google, Twitter, LinkedIn to demystify them for me. During my recent wanderings on the interwebs I found these nice articles:

• Morris-Pratt string searching
• Binary heap
• Huffman coding on a string
• Knapsack problem
• Lock-free algorithm
• Topological sort 
• Bin packing

Folks doing interesting work experimenting with BerkleyDB and also LevelDB type of LSM stores at Yammer, VoltDB and LinkedIn.

A very detailed and thoroughly researched presentation on the state of the art in Metrics-monitoring-logging.

The Google Chrome and Android guys have been writing and presenting about the how they've been pushing browser and mobile technologies. I'm pretty sure Apple also does these things but they don't seem to talk about them openly. What impressed me was how far Web technologies have come - in terms of tooling and profiling. The sophistication is almost at par with high performance server side technologies

• IPC style communication between Tabs and other clever stuff in Chrome
• For Butter or Worse: Smoothing Out Performance in Android UIs
• Making Good Apps Great: More Advanced Topics for Expert Android Developers and slides 
• Jank Busters: Building Performant Web Apps

The confusing array of Java Web technologies requires some sorting out - Comparing JVM Web frameworks

Being a Java developer (meaning clueless about lower level, system stuff), sometimes I try to find articles about what others are doing in lower level languages, to help me stay grounded (I wish). Last month I found some on bit twiddling and other native stuff. Although I have to admit I forgot almost everything the moment I finished reading them.

• JNA, JNI and raw Java performance 
• Fast Intersection of Sorted Lists Using SSE Instructions (Haven't even read this one, but looked interesting)
• Why is processing a sorted array faster than an unsorted array? 
• Fast bitmap decoding

Networking and latency - they go hand in hand.

• Latency numbers every programmer should know - there are many variations of this on the internet
• A decent presentation on marrying the latest distributed storage techniques like Eventual Consistency and Append only stores with Messaging - High performance network applications in the Capital Markets. At one point during the presentation the speaker is asked a question by someone in the audience "Isn't this similar to NoSql.. " or something along those lines. It seemed to catch him by surprise that others in the NoSql world have been doing this for a while
• Network switch buffer saturation problems - TCP incast - what is it?. Some of the comments are also interesting

The guys working on and using Lucene also have interesting things to report

• Turbocharging Solr Index Replication with BitTorrent 
• Building a Real-timeSolr-powered Recommendation Engine 
• Solr, Lucene & Hadoop at Etsy

I know all this has been "nice to know" or "file it for later" kind of reading. So, here's a really useful, simple Java article on handling properties and configuration files in Java using Apache Commons Configuration.

Enjoy your 4th of July holiday (for those in the US)!