Stopdesign asks if it’s time to move beyond 960. Hardware suppliers assumed market would want higher resolutions, but in reality final users don’t go beyond 1080×960 px like power users - developers, video producers - do.
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I wrote this answer originally on my google shared items, but I’m reposting here since I need more input.
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My theory is that final users didn’t migrate to higher resolutions simply because it makes typefaces smaller by default. had we grew the screens, while preserving typeface size’s ratio, people would go for it.
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Then again, we depends on corporate defaults, and those depend on programmers that - unlike final users - love smaller fonts to glance at more code.
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If that’s the case, it’s a huge blind spot.

screenshot of my audioscrobbler music stats.
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dunno how the algorythm works… all bands above live in my heart, so I assume it’s working properly.
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for those not in the know, audioscrobbler is a nifty music player plugin (be it itunes, WMP, winamp) that sends the name of the songs you’re listening to a database. before you get paranoid, it doesn’t record the filetype, and the resulting database is protected by creative commons.
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after some threshold, the app starts giving you some insight of your music tastes. it’s a mlog, or your music log.

whoever told you it’s easy to find music in NYC doesn’t know the city. you have to refine your bullshit detector to get past the marketing smokescreen that surrounds the city.
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me and julio are building our own schedule, here. our rules are:

1. it has to be near, walking-distance near (we live in the east village, so there’s no excuses)
2. the music has to be good, and even (have a definitive style, and control your dj friends)
3. it has to be free, preferably, or at least $5 weekdays, $10 weekends. but if we have to pay, it has to be unforgettable

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so far, we voted:
monday: the cock: it’s hard to find a good ol’ nasty fun in this sanitized city, but this place has it!
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wednesday: (and I mean, today) Lit: we even met michel gondry there (we weren’t really sure it was him, but once the dj played a lot of songs the guy directed - lame! - it became clear for us he was the real guy)

promethea DVD
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I’m used to read comics on my computer (all I have to do is to turn my notebook to the side, and view the pages as a slideshow) and since I installed iDVD, i was dying to try it out.
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so, I decided to make a comics DVD, which means, a slideshow DVD with an entire comic collection. I wanted to make sure the navigation was the same or better than the paper version, so I decided for a comic I didn’t read it yet and I would surely love. alan moore’s promethea seemed like a good bet.
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below are some screenshots of my progress. sadly, I realized I had no more blank DVDs to spare, so I have to wait till I’ll buy a new batch.
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click on each image to view it bigger, with technical notes (another nice feature of flickr). then, roll the mouse over each square to read them.
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DVD cover menu: this one is default from iDVD. since you can’t use more than 12 chapters and I had 31 issues, I organized each 3 issues on one.
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chapter detail: iDVD shows the exact same folders and organization from iPhoto (pictures) and iTunes (music). it’s no good at refreshing, tho, so the best move is to organize all folders & pictures on iPhoto, and then start on iDVD.
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project map: iDVD has a limit of 99 images on each slideshow, so a manga has to be chopped down, for example. it worked fine with american comics, tho.
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disclaimer: I made it for my own consumption, and although I downloaded the entire collection from bittorrent (bad boy) I also own the editions. i guess I don’t have to bother about it, since ABC comics is a small company, and instead of think “ohmygod, those little rascals found another way to rip us off” they’ll probably think “hey, another source of revenue for our collections, and look: it’s cheaper to produce than our trade paperbacks!” (sadly, it only works good on dvd notebooks - you have to rotate the monitor to read it)
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update:sadly, ABC comics is a branch of wildstorm comics, which is an offshot of DC comics, owned by warner. shoud I wait the media conglomerate unleash its minion of ferocious lawyers upon my (literaly) poor soul, or is the plutocratic police state of amerika not done yet?

back button troubles
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reading at slashdot about usability problems on OS apps, i remembered some nightmare cases from the company i worked with, still in brazil.
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we were building a corporate CMS, the program was getting bloated (impossible marketing promisses, lack of planning) and we reached an impasse: in addiction to the task at hand, some other tools were added - like IM, bookmarks, notes, quick tutorials - and with just a window to navigate, each new task competed for the user’s attention.
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our solution (me and another interface designer, amid a sea of 11~12 programmers) was to divide the window in frames, separating the central tasks (workflow, word processing, programming) from the peripheral ones (messages, dictionary, to-do-list, quick tutorial).
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the problem: we invalidate the back button (back what? the message? back the work at hand? back the action of sending the message? undo?). since it’s the most used feature, we had to find a solution.
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and we did: a small log window on the bottom of the peripheral tasks window, with a history of what you did, and the possibility to return to where you were, and possibly undo some features. the default would be 3 lines, but a multitasker user could change the preferences to 10, 12 lines. with a better back button than the original one, we could drawn the users to our interface and reduce confusion.
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they loved the ideas, both. sadly, they implemented the first one (the frames), but not the second one (the log window). dunno why, everytime i asked for the second feature, they answered it was easy and could be done later. i assume that the mindset of programmers works this way: if it’s hard to do, it has to be important. if it’s easy, it’s probably irrelevant. that is, a subset of loving to do hard mental jobs, is the impression of any easy job as a personal offense to their abilities.
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don’t get me wrong, i love work surrounded by technical people. they are straightforward, they love a new challenge, and if they are in a project with you, they are all to this, with no passive-agressive, competitive sabotages that some artistic people are full of. but if you get this only-hard-work feature unchecked, you soon get trapped in a bloated, neverending project, with a lot of contempt for criticism.
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well, in the end they accomplised the first feature, but never the second one. the back button was still there, confusing users. some months later, we were moving to another floor, but two programmers were busy finishing something “really important” for the client. i asked what it is, and they said “it’s a fullscreen for the system”.
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“why would they need a fullsccreen system, anyway?” (at the time, it was already know that users feel annoyed by fullscreen browsers, and tend to move away, simply. they didn’t know why the fullscreen. i asked some other people around.
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in the end, all the client wanted was to get rid of the back button. it was his solution to the problem, because we failed to offer a complete one.
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and yeah, the users complained later…

the same data, new media
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nice idea this cinema redux: the app pintscreens a movie every second and builds a big image with all (tiny-tiny) thumbnails. the result is an “unique fingerprint”, an image you can glimpse how many takes and turns the director made… good source of information, I hope more movies to be released this way (he used the technique in 8 classic movies), you can really get some insight of the direction here (perhaps even index movies on different ways).

donnie darko
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jeff was listening gaydar radio, and a song from the movie made me remember to ask thabata to rent it.
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me, thabata, jeff and roger watched the movie (it’s jeff’s day off, so we had a lot of free time).
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the movie talks about time travel. schizophrenia. a tangent universe that can’t stand by itself and colapses. fourth dimension and vectors as goo oozing from your chest. and commitment to Sparkle Motion.
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and some nerds even printscreened parts of the movie to peek some quotes from the book “philosophy of time travel” (i’ve already tried to search on amazon - hey, what if? - but it’s just a prop from the movie).