Edward Tufte Talks information Design 193
BoredStiff writes "The Weekend Edition of NPR ran a story on Edward Tufte — the outspoken critic of PowerPoint presentations — he has been described by The New York Times as "The Leonardo da Vinci of Data." Since 1993, thousands have attended his day-long seminars on Information Design. Tufte's most recent book is filled with hundreds of illustrations that demonstrate one concept: good design is timeless, while bad design can be a matter of life and death."
Read his books! (Score:5, Interesting)
His books are required reading in our lab and I encourage everyone who is involved in presentation of data of any kind to spend some time with his books.
Hmm.... (Score:2, Insightful)
So let me get this straight... Your dissertation got no attention until you included the principles of design explained by the world's foremost critic of powerpoint-style presentation software, but only bec
The popularity of PP (Score:2)
However, methinks that the GPP was more benefited by the crazy animations, anyway.
Re:Hmm.... (Score:5, Informative)
Powerpoint used well (Score:4, Insightful)
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Check out http://presentationzen.blogs.com/ [blogs.com]. The main focus of this great blog is to get presentations to tell a story, and to use highly visual images to enhance that story. The focus remains on the presenter, however, and not the slides. Handouts are still cool, and in fact recommended, so you don't have to create a "slideument" that fails as both a presentation aid and hardcopy documentation, but they should be able to completely stand alone from the presentation (a.k.a something like a white paper).
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When I give a presentation, I put a maximum of five points on the slide (and often an explanatory picture). Thes
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Smart slide design doesn't mean cramming more tiny text onto the slide. (If that's all it was, why would you need an expert?)
Information can be packed many ways.
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Yes.
If you use the default templates you will have just a few bullet points on each slide and lots of space lost to border embellishments.
That's not the full story. Even without the wasted space in the "Auto-content" templates, Tufte argues that there still isn't enough space/resolution on a PowerPoint screen. I tend to agree with him when I compare the 3x3' office projection screen with the 10' tall, 6'
Re:Hmm.... (Score:5, Informative)
This can be done with Powerpoint, Keynote and a variety of other packages. However, the problem with them is that people often use things like 3D graphs where inappropriate, fill up screens with lots of little text whereupon they say "don't read this, I just wanted to show......". Also the distracting use of transitions that flip and pop and such and cute little sounds that do nothing for the message except cloud it are common things that folks like Tufte and interestingly enough David Byrne have also commented on.
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Kind of like how we all scoffed at drop shadows, but they really do serve a useful purpose -- they make it absolutly, 10
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1.) The topic at hand.
If your topic is financial, you aren't going to get away from charts and graphs. That doesn't mean you should stick with the default style but you should also not distort the data trying to make it fancy. If your topic requires audio, video, or some other "special" media, then use it. If it doesn't, then don't as it is just a distraction.
2.) The audience it is intended for.
I have seen some hideous presentations simply because
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I've found this combination to be quite effective, and takes up less time/space than 'I am now going on to
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A tool that is aimed at the masses and provides drawing tools (ever seen the default formatting after inserting a new chart?), slide layouts (bulleted list anyone?), and design templates ("Balance"? "Clouds"? wtf?) that when used lead to hideous presentations has failed.
They should instead aim for tools and a UI that when used mindlessly at least leads to presentations that don't make
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Tufte's gripes against powerpoint is the inappropriate use of such software. If you read his work he has several main points:
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Re:Read his books! (Score:5, Informative)
Strunk & White, "Elements of Style".
Clarity in Technical Reporting (Score:2, Informative)
Well, if you mean for technical academic prose, here's a little gem from NASA (it's an oldie):
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However
After buying several of them I'd add the caveat that the marginal value of each book drops rapidly below the purchase price, at least to my eyes.
Tufte appears to be one of those scholars who have a truly splendid insight, then dine out on it for the rest of their careers
Outspoken Powerpoint Critic? (Score:3, Insightful)
I did about 5 months of powerpoint stuff in the army (after which i was released for mental health reasons.. =\), and from my experience powerpoint has no use other than make managers and commanders feel important.
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Compaired to Word, power point is a feast for the eyes!
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My experience is that overhead slides are usually barely worth anything, as the effort to update/re-do them is such that they're sub-par in design and presentation.
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If used poorly, PowerPoint is a tool for combining cue cards, sound effects, clip art, and cheesy animations. Yes, even Keynote's animations are cheesy.
Re:Outspoken Powerpoint Critic? (Score:5, Interesting)
As a side bonus, you'll get eye contact from your audience rather than the disconcerting experience of looking out at a sea of faces who are all looking slightly to one side, peering at:
- Standard Tufte line
* high-data essential
- Good to have eye contact
But on the whole I agree that PowerPoint isn't inherently evil if used as a way of doing a nice slide-show of reasonably detailed elements (graphs, pictures, movies). The only problem is that the resolution of projectors is still pretty wretched compared to printed graphs.
Re:Outspoken Powerpoint Critic? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not everyone pays attention to the speaker all the time, never missing a single word or meaning.
Also, pretty pictures keep people from deciding their text messages are worth more attention than your presentation or so a professor of mine says.
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2 reasons:
1) The powerpoint words summarize your point while the detail you speak expands on it and gives examples, etc.
2) When the presentation is distributed, the summarized line is a helpful cue/mnemonic for those that can't memorize the entire presentation word for word, and those that don't want to wade through an enourmous amount of d
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Could someone explain with concrete examples what it is that makes Keynote superior to PowerPoint? The impression I get from Tufte isn't so much that PowerPoint itself is bad, but that low resolution, temporally separate decks of slides are bad. True, PowerPoint is heavily biased toward the bulleted list, but other than that I cannot see how Keynote can be much different, though I have never used Keynote.
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I found Keynote superior for the following reasons:
1) Ease of building presentations and embedding of graphics and movies.
2) Transitions (cross fades) for certain types of data allow for smooth flow of information allowing transparencies and overlays that facilitate interpretation.
3) Built in alignment guides for text and images so things are not jumping all over the place from slide to slide.
4) Cleaner interface and ease of exchange of data when building presentations with others.
5) Integration w
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Here's a hint for those of you Powerpoint addicts in the DOD: get a workstation and use General Dynamics Viz' Command Post of the Future. A blatant plug, of course, because I work for the group that writes it [gdc4s.com], but the entire concept of a series of static, throw-away slides is so 20th century. If you can't manipulate and dig into information live, and have those viewing the presentation doing the same, then you're real
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It just kept Firefox reloading, and nearly sent me into a seizure.
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But then, I'm using windows so I should be the one with prob^H^H^H^H
Well, isn't that unusual?
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This has its place, certainly, but I think you're absolutely right to say this, even if you didn't mean it:
That is to say, you are utilizing all but a tiny fraction of the benefit, and thus your software only adds a tiny fraction of benefit.
It's true that involving your audience can be a good thing, but depending on what you're presenting, it's usually much better to completely d
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Put up only pictures, graphs, and charts. Usually, if one has something good to show, it'll come our well regardless.
That being said, looking at the pictures of the blurry dogs in Tufte's presentation made me want to throw up and gave me a headache.
Re:Outspoken Powerpoint Critic? (Score:4, Interesting)
1) No matter what my company says, they get a white background presentation with a small logo in the bottom left corner of each slide. I refuse to use background templates of "company colors" 2) No crap on the borders. I can't stand the waste of space that borders use up. I would rather make my table 20% bigger than have a pretty pattern of lines off-setting the slide 3) Text titles no bigger than 36 font, text subject matter no smaller than 24 font 4) Preferably 1, if I must then 2 plots to a slide 5) No test describing the plots on the slide, I should be doing that 6) No bar charts! I hate bar charts 7) Bold primary colors, none of this 'earth shades' 8) Plots imported from a graphing package. I use Sigmaplot of Origin. Excel is the armpit of graphing.
Bottomline is that if you have to use sounds and animations to capture the audiences attention, you're not doing a good job as a presenter, or the audience is just plain not interested in your subject (which happens).
Re:Outspoken Powerpoint Critic? (Score:4, Funny)
res ipsa loquitur (Score:3, Funny)
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more useful than the article (Score:5, Informative)
Gettysburg address in powerpoint (Score:5, Funny)
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Manager leaves suicide note in powerpoint (Score:4, Funny)
Don't forget this classic [theonion.com] from The Onion.
GMD
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From who's perspective? (Score:5, Insightful)
PowerPoint: stretching Truth and Content since 1997.
People ready software, indeed. Lots of people have nothing to say or lie when they say it.
Example: the Vista project manager giving a status report on features implemented, bugs solved and milestones met (this needs "filler") and projections for hitting delivery dates (this needs "less than truthful"). PowerPoint to the rescue!
Seriously, though. In Tufte's world, those without something truthful to say simply would say nothing. I like that world. But, I live in the Internet Age and know that world, perfect as it is, does not exist.
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A lot of his work is more about how to analyze presentations as it is about how to create them. That's an invaluable skill in the world of bad PowerPoint presentations.
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No doubt. Most of us, fortunately (and Tufte more than most of us) do get some choice about how to make our living.
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I don't entirely agree with this. It depends on the motivation of the presenter. If the objective of the presentation is to manipulate sentiment and/or data then this can indeed be a very successful approach. For proof, take a look at Fox News.
It won't stand up to closer scrutiny of course, but the whole poi
majority? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why is he described as outspoken when his opinion is in the majority?
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All our cows are outstanding in their field
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Do as I say, not as I do.
We all hate Death-by-PowerPoint. We've all spent days stuck being bored shitless by PowerPoint presentations, yet when it comes to presenting, most of us still do it.
I usually find that powerpoint is mandatory whenever I'm talking to more than about 20 people. However, I use no words unless they are annotating a diagram, hammering home a key point (max 3 per presentation), or are a bookend to the presentation.
Wikipedians (Score:5, Interesting)
Every page element should signify some meaning; a heading should be underlined to distinguish it, but only if it is not otherwise distinguished by font size, vertical whitespace or some other typesetting. One element variation should suffice, as long as it's a bold change. A table should have borders only if the data are unclear otherwise. It's sad that as useful as Wikipedia can be, it still suffers from so many flaws [slashdot.org]. Wikipedians could learn much from Tufte, or from any study of technical communication.
Bad Design (Score:4, Insightful)
But TWike like OggVorbis, is a ridiculous name that actually hurts the program by alienating people from exploring what it does after they see or hear the Program name referred to in some random context. Giving programs stupid names is a deep disfunction of the Linux/Open Source community. Seriously, we need to get over this.
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When I am overlord it will be mandatory to have the first question in a FAQ be "What is it and what does it do?".
I don't want to have to wade through low-level descriptions of the API just to work out that it doesn't do what I want it to do.
Re:Bad Design (Score:5, Funny)
Wiki is a Hawaiian word meaning 'fast' or 'quick', so it does at least partly describe the function of the software. You might complain that not everyone is familiar with Hawaaian words, but then not everyone is familiar with baseball terminology from which you derived "BullPen". Open source software tends to have a very cross-cultural, cross-language audience. Do you suggest that projects rename themselves for each language they target? Projects are named for marketing purposes, to be memorable and appealing. It sounds very much like you just hate the idea of marketing, so I will rename you CrankyBastard, which I think we can all agree is memorable, appealing and accurately describes you!
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Re:Bad Design (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, Tuffte talkes about this very phenomina using terms familiar to anyone in design: affordances. Affordances are learned aspects of a particular domain. Affordances, as Tufte has touched upon in his design for information clairty are to be used, not avoided. Everyone had to learn what MP3 meant. Everyone had to learn how to read a chart (or, if they weren't a jock on a fast road to CEO at Daddy's firm, fail High School geometry.)
For example, I am a big fan of functional naming. Instead of a variable named $CORNED_BEEF I would use $HASH_PIVOT. However, if you are an ESL like 95% of the world, it won't matter what you call your variables becuase the non-native aspect will always stand in the way. You will have to learn what those identifiers mean and then remember that.
The same holds for software. The 'lingua franca' of Computer Science, hence much programming and software marketing, is English. The language of musical notation is Italian. From study I know what agitato and determinato are. But it does not help me that they are Italian for agitated and determined, respectfully, because I had to learn their definitions in English. If I spoke Italian I could have pulled the names for those musical styles out of thin air just listening to music. However, they are just words attached to those concepts for me, abstract labels and nothing more. However, I do not see any difference between this hundreds of year old phenomina and sotware naming.
But TWike like OggVorbis, is a ridiculous name that actually hurts the program by alienating people from exploring what it does after they see or hear the Program name referred to in some random context.
I don't think we'd get a lot of benefit if TWiki had been called VersionGroupwareType003.
People hunting online for MP3s might dissagree. After all, MP3 just says 'music file' doesn't it? MP3 is a Motion-Picture Experts Group layer 3 file. Yes, I looked that up. I might think that has something to do with the movies, but music? Wiki means HTML TEXTAREA editor with special markup for you web browser. (Really the groupware aspect of Wikis is kinda of a dominating secondary effect.) Ogg Vorbis stands for Vorbis encoded audio inside an Ogg format container.
This is far from the point thougt. Tufte's expertise is to spot on eliminate distracting garbage in a design. Powerpoint is very good at packing in garbage, hence his critisim of it. Simple, silly names are appripirate when differentiating. When they are clutter, like bullets points that take up 40% of the slide, names won't serve this purpose. For evern search.com there is a competitor not wanting to lose mindshare (or trademark infringement lawsuits) by having a very similar name. But pardon me, I have more google'ing to do before I can flesh out that point.
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And still got it wrong. mp3 is a nonsense term derived from the common file extension for mpeg-1 audio layer 3 and mpeg-2 audio layer 3 files (yes, it's two related but different formats - go idiots!). The names for mpeg-1 and mpeg-2 are derived from the name of the group that created them, which is an acronym for "motion picture experts group". You can't expand all the acronyms at once - they're a hierarchy, with 'mpeg-1' and 'mpeg-2' being t
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This is not just a problem in the OSS community -- it's endemic in the entire computing community.
1) Nero. Yes, I get the (bad) joke.
2) BlackBerry.
3) Google.
None of these names describe the function of the product. In each case, the (trademarked) name functions as a
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"If Microsoft made a toilet paper, it would be called 'Butt Wiper'."
I think, on the whole, I prefer a less desciptive name.
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American Express. Founded 1850. Wells, Fargo, the Butterfield Stage. Money Orders 1882, Travelers Checks 1891. Travel Agencies 1915. Charge Cards 1958 Do you see a pattern forming here?
More Microsoft Bashing... (Score:2, Funny)
Keynote, PowerPoint, or any other tool in the hands of the average human being could be catastrophic.
...In other news today GM announced it would include new dashboard functionality to make on the go changes to their new line of trucks. Drivers will now be able to inflate their tires to monster truck level instantaneously, add multiple high beam lights to their roll bars at no extra cost, display gun racks and fishing poles, whistle "dixie" with their horn...
A pressing need: Tufte-style interface library? (Score:5, Interesting)
What I really would like to see is a new widget set (with lots of data presentation support - obviously most of the widgets should be quantitative displays) and a style written in some already well-supported widget set (Qt, Swing,
This makes it a lot harder for schlubs like me who don't really have skills in this area, and don't have time to develop them. Further, it makes it more or less impossible to achieve these sort of fine effects programmatically - I'd like to see interactive displays that are informed by his sort of design sense, not just nice presentations (using hand-outs, of course
If anyone is interested in this - or knows of systems that go any decent way in this direction - please post or e-mail me at:
geoff AT cs DOT usyd DOOOOT edu DoT au
(sorry about the stylized "dot" silliness, but something tells me that the traditional foo AT bar DOT com is probably already being mined by spammers - or will be soon).
Re:A pressing need: Tufte-style interface library? (Score:5, Interesting)
Now for a crass generalization: techies always think that a problem can be solved with software and/or obsession. But sometimes, it takes actual skill to do good work. After all, programmers rarely hesitate to get pissy with some noob who works in Visual Basic, but they somehow think that art and design are skills that can be picked up from a book.
If it's really important to you to have attractive visuals, then don't be an arrogant asshole, and hire someone to do the work. It doesn't have to be expensive (go to any art school, and you'll find dozens of young, eager artists and graphic designers looking for a break, and willing to work for reasonable rates), and it will go a long way to making you look more professional and polished.
Re:A pressing need: Tufte-style interface library? (Score:5, Interesting)
However, there are so many cases where there are existing cliches that could be improved. For example, Tufte has a brilliant redesign of a scatterplot that uses pretty much every bit of ink on the screen to convey useful data (for example, the X and Y axes become range bars that show the univariate distribution of data). This could be hacked once and for all into a TufteScatterplot widget. And so on.
One of the major problems with the 'hire a graphic artist' approach is that frequently, we're dealing with systems that will display unanticipated data. I'm working with a statistical problem at the moment (and building some generalized tools to deal with it) and I have no way of knowing ahead of time whether someone is going to work with a model with 60 factors of which 5 are significant or 10 factors of which 7 are significant. I don't know what sort of names the person will give the factors. I don't know whether the significant factors will be all pretty much the same size (e.g. 1.5%, 2.2%, -1.3%) or hugely different (200%, -50%, 10%). When presenting 'significance' in a system, I can't have the system automatically call the nearest design school to handcraft a nice display. Thus, a system that makes a programmatic attempt at trying to achieve ideals of good design is much better than a system that doesn't even bother.
Of course, anyone will be able to cobble together a rotten-looking, dishonest and confusing interface out of these kind of components. So what?
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I also have some experience working with elaborate statistical systems, and I'm very familiar with the truth of the "unanticipated result" argument. Frequently, you can't know what your data should look like until you've massaged it enough to have done most of the design. In fact, I think that's true most of the time, when you're doing novel research. There are very few situations where an off-the-shelf plot or grap
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Good design is not a matter of taste. It's a matter of correctly modelling the concept of the task the program performs. Don't model the physical world. Don't model procedures. Model programming interfaces after *concepts*. If you get that right the code will be reusable for tasks yet to be conceived. That is what makes a design good.
Note that software can't model concepts. That's a paradox. If it could you would have AI (in which
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What I really would like to see is a new widget set (with lots of data presentation support - obviously most of the widgets should be quantitative displays) and a style written in some already well-supported widget set (Qt, Swing, ...) that lives up to Tufte's ideas about maximizing data ink and minimizing junk.
Tufte would like that too. One of the central points of Beautiful Evidence is that software tools are all wrong for presenting information. They artificially segregate it into textual, visual, nu
There is one library: Sparklines (Score:2, Informative)
The FAQ on the Sparkline site helps explain why use that library and not just a shrunken down graph or chart. Though I don't see a great need my self I'm sure there are others who may find it interesting.
J
where can I find edward tufte's... (Score:2, Funny)
Genesis (Score:2, Funny)
He puts his money where his mouth is. (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/s15427625tcq1304
The interviewer asked him about why he self-published:
"After moving to Yale University, I finished the manuscript in
1982. A publisher was interested but planned to print only 2,000
copies and to charge a very high price, contrary to my hopes for
a wide readership. I also sought to design the book so as to make
it self-exemplifying--that is, the physical object itself would
reflect the intellectual principles advanced in the book. Publishers
seemed appalled at the prospect that an author might
govern design."
So, here's a guy writing a book on how to present information and the publisher thinks he knows better. LOL. Naturally, Tufte chose to keep control of the process. In other words, we are to do as he does. (as opposed to do as he says.) This approach reminds me of a lecture our principal used to give. The lecture was on how to lecture. He gave seven different techniques. He delivered each technique by using that technique. This is what Tufte refers to as self-exemplifying. Our library doesn't know it yet but they are buying copies of his books.
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He explains why and how comics can be used to convey very rich messages, while using comics as his medium. The book itself proves his point magistrally. There are quite complicated and often abstract and philosophical issues in there, yet he manages to explain them in four frames, with a few words and very insightful yet simple drawings. They both melt into a message that would take a
PowerPoint Hell (Score:2)
I generally don't do PowerPoint. Once I did, though. My group was presenting a concept of operations for our software as applied to a new project. There were many sections to the presentation, and several of us were assigned portions of it relative to the parts of the system we were most familiar with. I did my section, which I thought was concise and informative, and sent it in to my manager to be placed in order with the rest. The plan was for each of us to actually talk to the section of the presentation
Well, there's just that small detail... (Score:2)
Re:The Leonardo da Vinci of Data? (Score:5, Funny)
And I am the Jackson Pollack of data! They don't let me near the spreadsheets much anymore though....
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Re:HTML Design? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm using a 1680x1050 monitor, and I personally have no problem with Tufte's website. If you've got a huge high-resolution monitor, you're pretty foolish to be browsing with your windows maximised. With the window open to about 2/3 the width of the screen, the content fits perfectly.
The absolute *worst* UI paradigm that has plagued the computing world for the past decade is the maximize button. Ever since multitasking was supported at the OS level, we've had the marvelous ability to work on more than one thing at a time. I don't spread every page of my newspaper out across the kitchen table when I read it. Why should I do the same for my web pages?
Apple was smart to have left it out of OS X, and Microsoft should have left it out of Win95, or killed it with XP. For the first week, it's annoying to drag the corners of the windows around, until you realize how much more productive you can be by having two pieces of work side-by-side. Heck, even for single-tasking, multiple windows are great. If I'm writing a research paper on Shakespeare, I can have a copy of Hamlet open right alongside the paper for quick reference and easy quotations.
Of course, those 14" 1600x1200 laptop screens *are* a problem, because they make text and images unbearably tiny. Apple's the first (mainstream) vendor to tackle this issue head-on, and the next version of OS X should be resolution-independent [tuaw.com], which should open the door for smaller, higher-resolution screens that won't kill our eyesight.
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A lot of people use 1024x768 monitors and maximizing is darn useful, and many more were using them when XP came out.
For the first week, it's annoying to drag the corners of the windows around, until you realize how much more productive you can be by having two pieces of work side-by-side.
Which is annoying given the size of the average persons monitor.
Heck, even for single-tasking, multiple windo
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I don't fold my newspaper in half so I can only read half the page at once, so why should I do the same for my web pages?
Not maximising means you're just left with blank space, wasting your monitor. If you have a 20" monitor and only have your window taking up 3/4 of it you may as well have a 15" monitor.
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Dissagree 100%. Not being able to maximize means having distracting clutter in the background, and increased opportunity to accedentally click on a back ground window and having it pop up in the middle of the page when you didn't want it, throwign you for a distraction when you are trying to get stuff done. Lack of maximize is one of my least favorite features in OS X.
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What if you happen to only be working on one thing at the time you want to read a webpage? Besides this misses the entire point of a markup language. A web page should always render to the size of the viewport the user has chosen. That was one of the original design goals.
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Obviously the two are about the same
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As Ornaments... once the batteries die again.
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I was at his seminar as well (Score:2)
You must not have sat through enough of the kinds of Powerpoint presentations Tufte was talking about or you'd appreciate his comments more.
Textual display (Score:2)
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You breathe the sacred names "Strunk" and "White"
in the same sentence as the flabby cliche
"rolling in their graves"?
Feh.
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