Our sister blog Engadget is reporting -- based on some leaked screenshots -- that Google may be moving to roll out a single cohesive interface for all its web apps.

The screenshots come from an anonymous source and are as-yet unverified, but it would make sense given their obvious intentions to centralize a lot of the Web's communication channels into Google Wave.

With the eventual (but sooner-rather-than-later) release of Chrome OS, a unified, standardized, user-friendly UI is an obvious step forward. Judging by the gallery of screengrabs over on Engadget, it would seem the change-over to the new interface is not all that far away -- and don't be surprised if you see a Userscript pop up to apply the updated interface before Google makes the change official anyway!

[via Engadget]

If you're fortunate enough to be running Windows 7, you have probably already noticed its best new feature: the new reworked quick-launch-cum-easy-access-taskbar -- or 'Superbar' as I like to call it.

What you might not have noticed is that some applications now have new context menus if you right-click them on the Superbar. Usually these menus have quick-access links to documents you've recently edited, or tabs you've closed in your web browser.

And with Steam, the one-stop shop for all your gaming needs (really, it's the best place to pick up casual-play, $10 games. Give Braid a go, if you want to play the best puzzle game in recent years) -- you can now access Steam's innards directly from your Superbar! Recent games, favourite games, your friends list -- you name it, it's all there and easily accessible.

Now, if Valve would pull their fingers out and release the next episode of Half Life, I'd be a very happy man. I guess I'll have to make do with yet another round of Peggle Extreme for now ...

[via Long Zheng of Istartedsomethingsomething]

10/GUI from C. Miller on Vimeo.

Kitschy soundtrack, good voiceover and an intensely thorough demo add up to one cool re-imagining of our conventional human/computer interaction. In other words: this looks as close to the UI in Minority Report as I've ever seen. The key seems to be rewarding the user for having 10 fingers, and using all 10 to do a high number of operations in clever ways. This is really, really clever, too, just check out the name: 10/GUI. Check it out, you won't be disappointed. Well, if you hate using your fingers you might.

When it comes to paring a browser's UI down to the smallest possible size, the discussion always seems to focus on Firefox. Granted, Firefox is a very customizable browser, and with the right extensions cleverly applied, you can minimize its UI. But as John Holdun notes, often overlooked in this regard is the fact that Safari is very capable of being pared down to almost nothing, and you don't need any add-ons to do it.

In fact, if you're comfortable with keyboard shortcuts, all you need to do is learn a few key ones and you'll be able to minimize Safari to a Title bar and tab bar. One warning - I've only tried this using Safari 4.0 on a Mac; I don't have easy access to Safari running on Windows, but I imagine that there are equivalents for the keyboard shortcuts I'm about to discuss.

Firstly, let's get rid of the Toolbar -- that is, the bar with the back and forward buttons, address bar, and search field. To hide the toolbar, click View > Hide Toolbar from the menu, or simply press the Command-| shortcut key. Don't worry, if you need to enter a web address quickly, you can either show it again using the same shortcut key combination, or better yet press Command-l to have the cursor automatically placed in the address bar. Type something and press enter, or tab to the search field and type something and press enter, and your page will open, and the Toolbar will immediately hide again. Slick.

The other desktop real-estate offender is the status bar at the bottom. Hiding it is just as easy - the shortcut key combination is Command-/. Like John, I tend to like to use the status bar to snoop on the destination address of links by hovering over them. This takes an extra step now, but the extra room gained by not constantly showing the status bar is worth the occasional inconvenience for me.

There are plenty of people out there who would be willing to give Linux a try if Linux UI designs looked more like Mac OS X. Mac4Lin brings Apple's UI design to a Linux install near you, including great details like app icons and even the Dock. It looks like the Mac4Lin project had been stagnating for a while, but it's finally at v1.0, and looking good.

Mac4Lin works on a variety of Linux flavors, including Ubuntu 9.04 and GNOME 2.26, but there's no KDE version (yet). A lot of third-party apps that use GTK for skinning, like Firefox and Songbird, look great in Mac4Lin. An unstall script is also included in the latest version, in case you decent you don't like the OS X look, and you'd rather go back to your default UI.

I wrote a while back about Cappuccino, a web app framework that parallels Apple's Cocoa framework for desktop apps. That was back in September, when 280 North had just released an amazing presentation app called 280Slides that essentially brought Apple's Keynote to the web. Cappuccino has evolved a lot since then, and 280 North just made a big leap forward by releasing Atlas, which is roughly the web equivalent of Interface Builder for Mac desktop apps.

What does that mean, exactly? Basically, Atlas enables you to build an entire user interface for your app without coding anything at all. That's great news, because designers who are perfectly capable of planning a good UI might not be competent enough in the coding department to make it a reality. Atlas bridges the gap. If we want to see web apps that are on par with our favorite desktop software, the right tools are important. Kudos to 280 North for developing one of them.

According to a statistic I just made up, almost half of all interfaces for software (web or download) look like garbage. Of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. With that subjectivity in mind we want to ask you: what are the ugliest, most cumbersome, least effective interfaces out there? Mind you, we're talking GUI here -- command line interfaces are a kind of beauty you simply can't assail. Let's not devolve into a ClearType battle, OK?

Submit your nominees in the comments and we'll take a look at the fugliness. Web apps, downloadable stuff, on any platform you wish, we'll open it up and peek at the steaming guts. Starting next week and running for every Friday (until we wipe out bad taste from the internet, naturally) we'll highlight one special ugly duckling. We'll try to be constructive in our criticism.

Despite the harsh moniker, we're not looking to take cheap shots. The ultimate goal is for developers to learn a little something about user interface design. While we'll keep it tongue-in-cheek, there's always a lesson to be learned in doing things wrong. Considering the specialized nature of design (and UI design in particular), it's completely understandable that indie devs will do what they can. If you take a look on the iTunes App Store, you'll see dozens of atrocious designs, but those are devs who likely have no training in this area. Again, totally understandable. Hopefully we can all learn a little something from these mistakes. Keep it constructive, but don't be afraid to point out foibles, that's what I say.

Silverback basically turns your Mac into a full-featured usability testing station. Add a new project, add some users, and have them come sit down and test out your interface. Silverback hangs out unobtrusively in the background, capturing video of the the entire screen, including a cute (and useful) effect that marks where your tester is clicking. This in itself would be handy, but Silverback also takes advantage of your built-in iSight camera to include a picture-in-picture of the tester's reactions, on top of the screen capture.

This way, you can see everything the user is doing in real time, and they can speak comments aloud as they come up, rather than pausing to write them down. Usability testing the old-fashioned way generally involves expensive setups and lots of instructions, but Silverback is intuitive to use and provides straightforward and informative results. Silverback is currently in private beta, so some testers can test its testing functions (this makes our heads hurt a little bit.)

It seems like every week there's a new application hitting the streets that aims to turn your Windows Mobile device into an iPhone. If you really want an iPhone, you should probably just buy one. On the other hand, if you prefer Windows Mobile applications, but like the look of the iPhone program launcher, we can understand why applications like Pointui are attractive.

Pointui appears to be scheduled for a Jan 1, 2008 launch. There's not much info available on the application's home page yet, but there are a series of Flickr photos and the YouTube video you see above. Pointui replaces the Windows Mobile start page with a new home page that lets you launch applications by sliding from one to the next. The settings menus are also replaced by large easy to see buttons.

It's not clear that Pointui will make it easier to use a Windows Mobile device. In fact, it appears that in some situations it could take longer to find and launch applications than it would take using the default interface. But it's nice to have choices. One of the advantages of Windows Mobile for now is that the SDK is available, meaning there are tons of third party applications that let you customize your user experience. The iPhone SDK doesn't come out until early next year, and somehow we doubt the first thing developers will do is try to emulate the Windows Mobile experience on the iPhone.

[via Mobility Site]

Windows keeps the Start button, taskbar and system tray at the bottom of the display and a menubar in every window. Mac OS X keeps one main menubar at the top of the display, with a 'dock' of larger icons that take the place of the Windows taskbar at the bottom of the display. Linux, for the most part, seems to prefer the Windows UI, typically using a taskbar-like system with menubars again in every window, but through the power of Open Source, you can do just about anything you want to the Linux UI to make it feel more like home. Some people find one approach more useful, while others prefer a different side of the fence. While the debate surrounding one's OS preference isn't showing any signs of subsiding, we thought it might be useful to offer at least a little insight and theory into why some fundamentals of Mac OS X are designed so differently.

One of the basic principles that informs the Mac OS X menubar is something called Fitts' Law, which I first learned about from John Gruber of Daring Fireball in a post here. To keep things brief, however, I'll just quote a short introduction from the Wikipedia:

In ergonomics, Fitts' law is a model of human movement, predicting the time required to rapidly move from a starting position to a final target area, as a function of the distance to the target and the size of the target. Fitts' law is used to model the act of pointing, both in the real world, for example, with a hand or finger and on computers, for example, with a mouse.

To summarize: Fitts' Law is about how far you have to travel to hit a target, and how easy that target is to hit. Apple implemented these concepts (and I'm sure plenty of others) when designing their menubar by pinning it to the very top of the display, not only from a hierarchal standpoint (you can always look to the very top left of your display to find out exactly which app you're in), but also from a 'make it easy as possible to hit this' perspective. You can simply fling your mouse 'up' and you're at the menubar; even if you click on the very top-most pixel above File, Edit or Help, you'll still hit that menu item and activate it. It's a seemingly minor detail, but one that can help quite a bit during one's daily computing.

This concept is also present in other major OS interfaces, such as the Windows Start button; fling your mouse 'down and left', click and you'll hit the One Button to Rule Them All. Mac OS X's Apple and Spotlight menus also function the same way: fling your mouse 'up and to the left', click in the furthest pixel up there and you'll activate the Apple menu; 'up and to the right', and you're in Spotlight.

If anything, the main point we want to get across is that there is typically a lot of theory that goes into the design of an OS and how users interact with it. We might not always agree with the approach taken by one camp or another, but at least people are thinking about this stuff, because even in 2007, computers still aren't that intuitive to some users who have yet to hop on board the digital train. The more thought, consistency and intuitiveness OS engineers design into our software, the easier it will be for everyone to come along for the ride, no matter what side of the car they're sitting on.

One of the complaints I hear a lot about Office 2007 is how inextensible the Ribbon is. The truth is that you can customize it, granted it takes a bit of knowledge and the right software tools to make changes to it. This involves a bit of programming in a language much like (and based on) XML called RibbonX. RibbonCustomizer aims to help you change it up without a lot of programming. There is a free starter version and a professional version for purchase ($29.99) that you can download. You'll get a 14 day free trial of the pro edition to see if it ruffles your feathers. The link provided has a feature comparison for both the free and paid versions if you want to know what the difference is between the two.

Has anyone noticed that the Ribbon in Office 2007 does not extend to all Office programs? Publisher doesn't have it, as well as some other programs. It seems that Microsoft only saw fit to include in the most loved and used applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access. I can't help but brace for the fallout from users. First Microsoft tries to build a "zero-learning-curve" model into their new office suite, hoping that users will find it easier to use and eliminate much of the complexity of the system, which is quite noble, then they don't include it in all the suite's applications? I don't see such a unified front and integrated user experience this time around that Microsoft is always so long-winded about. So this was motivated not by customers' needs or the need for one interface, but by rising costs, looming deadlines, and putting out fires during development? In my x-ray vision, I see far into the future and can't help but wonder if this will help Google (and others) spell doom for at least a good sized portion of Microsoft's cash-cow business? There is already a ton of speculation that Vista will be the last operating system to be released by Microsoft (as far as we know the traditional OS) because the web is now becoming more important than ever. I am hearing that Google's online apps will also spell disaster for Microsoft, perhaps in the next decade or so. Do I agree? Well, the jury is still cherry-picking their favorites, so to speak. I have used Google's apps extensively, including docs and spreadsheets, and I must say that I would rather use Google to get the job done and never have to mess with Office, and I am a long time Office lover. If Microsoft wasn't the standard for everything it wouldn't be hard to find other avenues that suit me just fine (as I have found already). Is the selectively programmed ribbon this important, and will it start the downward climb for our dearly beloved Microsoft? It isn't that deep and probably won't matter to most people. We will either adapt to the multi-mode confusion, use something else, or get over it, but my point is that Microsoft increasingly lets quality and the integrity of their offerings go by the wayside. In addition, I think Microsoft must get on the web-based band-wagon before they are run over by online suites of prey. Desktop office software is a dying breed, as you can tell by looking at the marketplace and the fast-moving mass adoption of many online suites now used in addition to or in place of Office. Microsoft needs to crack the whip and get into the game while there is still time. It has been quite shocking to watch them slowly lose their stranglehold. It is a whole new world today.

So you're a software developer and want your program to have a shiny "ribbon" interface just like Office 2007? Well, guess what--Microsoft patented the hell out of it! This should not surprise anybody. However, there is good news for developers, or some of them, at least. Microsoft has announced that it has "created a royalty-free licensing program that will enable developers to build applications that have the look and feel of the new 2007 Office system applications." The license is perpetual, meaning once Microsoft grants you the license it can't turn around and revoke or change it later on. However there are, as you might imagine, some "guidelines" Microsoft wants you to follow when building your own ribbony apps, and they take the form of a 120-page document. Though the deal sounds largely positive for software developers, there is one significant catch: Microsoft won't license their ribbon UI patents for products that compete directly with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, or Access. This is a sensible move for Microsoft, but a bummer for the makers of competing products who stand a lot to gain from making products that look and act just like the dominant office suite in the marketplace.

You can check out the press release and a canned interview about the new licensing program at the link above, but I heartily recommend you skip it and instead head over to Jensen Harris' blog. Harris is Microsoft's Group Program Manager for the Office UI and lays everything out in plain English. He also links to a preview of the guidelines (you have to sign an NDA to get at the full 120-page document) and a Channel 9 video in which he talks to Microsoft laywer Judy Jennison about the program.