From Effective UI:

The point of software isn’t necessarily to engross your users in the experience of using the software, it is to keep them focused on the ultimate goals they’re trying to accomplish in using the software, rather than on the actual use of the software itself. […] To be truly and unobtrusively useful, software must clear the straightest, most frictionless path to the accomplishment of the user’s goals.

Effective UI is a very good book, one of the few instances where a discussion of UI (or UX, “user experience”) doesn’t drive me up a wall. This is…

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For the last few years, I’ve been using a great little Safari plugin called “Sogudi” (“Safari, Sogudi”…get it?). Sogudi allows for keyword searching: you type something like “wiki Safari” and it goes to the Wikipedia page for Safari. This is something Firefox has had for a while, but Safari (and its lack of plugin support) really needed.

Sogudi was great, but I was disappointed to find that it no longer worked with the Safari 4 beta. Even worse, the author had stopped development, having unrecoverably lost the source code. (!) It only took a few weeks before I was fed…

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