Articles posted on October 4th, 2004

NetNewsWire Lite 2: Important information for users with low bandwidth connections

Monday, October 4th, 2004 • 4:12 am

Version 2 of the freeware news aggregator NetNewsWire Lite is already available in beta form (but very reliable and usable as far as I can tell), and there are some important improvements for users who, like me, have little bandwidth available at the best of times. Here are the new options in the “Downloading” preference […]

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Office 2004: Another basic problem with the Formatting Palette

Monday, October 4th, 2004 • 4:03 am

I’ve already had several opportunities to review the Office 2004 UI failure known as the Formatting Palette. One of the most fundamental problems with it is that it is no substitute for the actual dialog boxes that it is supposed to replace. For each section (“Font“, “Alignment and Spacing“, etc.) of the palette, you can […]

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PowerPoint 2004: Doesn’t follow basic UI guideline for checkboxes

Monday, October 4th, 2004 • 3:46 am

Last week, I wrote an item about the recent Jakob Nielsen article on checkboxes and radio buttons in user interfaces. At the time, I thought that the failure to comply with the basic UI guideline — which says that radio buttons are for mutually exclusive options while checkboxes are for lists of options where the […]

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