Book idea: Oral histories of common UI design elements and conventions: Gmail’s Butter Bars and Toasts, rotating pizza mouse pointer, pull-to-refresh, Cut/Copy/Paste, double clicking, Ctrl-Tab, slide to unlock. Context surrounding them at the time + today’s perspective.
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Yeah, and pretty sure it was called the butter bar before Gmail chat.
@kfury is that right?1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Yup. It was the 'notification bar' and it was either butter yellow or bright red depending on the use case. The name 'butter bar' stuck. cc
@zhanna1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes -
Then there's the 'fun bar'/'awesome bar' which is a whole other story.
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That rings a bell, but I might be thinking of Firefox? (AFAIR Firefox’s awesome bar was the equivalent of Chrome’s omnibox, which deserves its own oral history.)
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This book idea has legs... but it might be just us old timers that would buy it.
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I think that’d be the exact challenge: to make it relevant. I’m sure there are interaction patterns/approaches/lessons here that are universal. Perhaps you go back further in time, and next chapter do an oral history of something very new
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(If it’s just nostalgia fest, I don’t think it’d be particularly interesting.)
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Imagine how much you could learn about (and get excited about) text input processing from reading about the vision + details + bugs + successes of something like Omnibox or Google Suggest.
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And god knows we still need designers to be excited about text input. I will shut up now. :·)
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Yeah, one thing my team does now is text input and keyboards for VR/AR (in 3D engines). Every step of the way we figure out if there’s a way we can borrow from elsewhere in Google or if we should create it from scratch. Lasso typing, emojis, cursor movement, voice input, etc.
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Replying to @darrend
Anything that’s shared publicly? Asking in the professional capacity as a writer of a book about keyboards. :·)
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