Ross's Posterous

This icon, built into Mac OS X itself, is used to depict a "generic PC."

Seems accurate to me.

You'll find this (and many others) in /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources/. As Fraser Speirs points out, it's a gold mine for your slide decks.

App Cooker is an iPad app that helps you design other iPhone and iPad apps. Here's a screenshot from their web site:

I don't think I've ever seen a company do a better job of explaining why prices will be going up. They clearly chart out the increase in value at every stage.

I suppose it helps that they're actually delivering an increasing amount of value. Contrast this with the rising prices charged by wireless phone carriers, which delivers the same (or less) value as your costs go up.

I was inspired by a recent post on the Balsamiq UX Blog to find a better way to capture annotations in my wireframes. The Sticky Note component takes up too much visual real estate, and I've gotten feedback that the notes are hard to read.

I dove into Russ Unger's book for some ideas, and ultimately borrowed an approach from Will Evans. The images shown here illustrate that Balsamiq's Treat As Markup feature can be applied to any component, making it easy to show/hide annotations.

Even better, Balsamiq's export features respect the Show/Hide Markup setting, allowing you to easily add or remove the annotations from the resulting PDF or PNGs.

I'd love to hear from anyone who's used a similar approach.

Many people I work with aren't familiar with personas. For their benefit, and to keep everyone's eyes on the prize, I got the idea to put a small persona avatar in the top corner of each mockup.

I'm hoping it will be harder to design (or sign off on) a poor experience, since you'd have to "look the person in the eye." Also, I'm thinking this will be helpful for the developers, who are more likely to be confused if the project contains many different personas.

In this example, "Kelly" is a busy mom. (Please forgive the cliché.)

Has anyone tried this? Is it commonplace already? Are there any downsides? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Photo credit: Sean Dreilinger

A good lesson in storytelling, whether or not you give a crap about computers.

If you missed the January issue of Vanity Fair, do yourself a favor and check out this slide show featuring Ralph Lauren’s unbelievable classic car collection.

Here’s a sample.

I'm not sure when this feature was added, but I'm almost positive it hasn't always been there. The YouTube API didn't expose this setting for a while.

Either way, I'm happy now.

Definitely a keeper.