munaf's comments

Hope they use this to invest in customer service. I've been infinite-looped on their automated support line three times.

> At this point you’ve put in the time. There you go. There’s no way around that.

Interesting how the internet is changing this rule. Bo Burnham [1] became a famous YouTube comedian at the age of 16. When he started touring, his shows immediately sold out and he got a deal with MTV for a TV show. Apparently this annoyed some comedians because he didn't pay his dues [2].

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obIGsb-IZMo

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo_Burnham#Uphill

Very cool!

I think it would be worth displaying each message one at a time with a delay in between (that way they could function as a sequential tour in addition to coach marks).

- It feels cramped and crowded with my inbox as a backdrop

- Vertical reading space is limited

- The toolbar is aligned at the bottom of my screen which causes me to run into the OS X dock, which I set visible on hover

- It compresses all message recipients (To, CC, ...) into a single row which makes you have to double-check if everyone's in the right place

- The formatting popover appears over your content if you want it to persist

- I feel verbally limited by its small writing area

- They haven't solved the "too many IM and compose windows are open" problem. When you get into this situation, things feel really crowded and messy.

- The hover state on the formatting toolbar "+" is jarring because the item you hovered over changes underneath you, making you (sub?)consciously worry about a misclick since it will launch a damn-obtrusive Google Drive dialog

- Between the appearance of Gmail as a whole, and this as an addition, my feeling of information overload when dealing with email has only increased. Gmail just isn't very "zen."

Now I regret wording the title this way. Hope it doesn't confuse too many people.

Just realized the title was misleading so I removed the word "render."

I don't think the calligraphy is rendered automatically at the moment. Looks like the author is doing it manually. I'm guessing automatic rendering is planned, but not sure of that.

For the curious, Qlb means "Heart" in Arabic.

Here's Conway's Game of Life: http://twitpic.com/bv2cra

Interesting concept. It actually has some of the ideas we'll be introducing in Wikipedia's mobile website (specifically some of the sidebar functionality).

Interesting. It surprises me that many tech entrepreneurs dismiss UX methods as fluff when they were designed to accomplish this exact goal.

I believe it's Bebas. http://typedia.com/explore/typeface/bebas

Edit: "Typeface is custom, but based on proportions in Blanch." [1]

[1] http://www.losttype.com/font/?name=blanch

Interesting that they took this approach primarily for email referencing. Is it that common of a use case that it's worth changing the entire experience around it (and collapsing the formatting bar, etc.)? I'm assuming they tested some sort of referencing UI in the existing compose screen. Wish I could see that. Also, I'm wondering how image insertion works; modals upon modals can be pretty awkward for users.

My real pet peeve: can we start removing "Compose" from email vocabulary?

Quite sure that news posted by YC companies is weighted higher than others (namely to promote job postings, product launches, and so forth).

Not a library, and not for graphing, but somewhat inspirational: http://hakim.se/experiments/html5/sketch/

According to research [1], fonts similar to this don't entirely do the trick, but they help with certain errors.

[1] http://www.ilo.gw.utwente.nl/ilo/attachments/032_Masterthesi... (page 3)

Since we're on the topic, there's also Tributary if you're doing d3 stuff. http://enjalot.com/

As a UX Designer, I'd say I've needed something like this: a true UI design app that only had the features I needed. None of Photoshop or Illustrator's extraneous features (with respect to a UI Designer's needs, anyway).

One thing that would definitely make me try it is a bundled/stock icon set that is well-integrated into the app. Finding open-license icons for my mockups (or drawing my own) is actually the most laborious part of my design process. If that was somehow shortened, or if I at least had inspiration built into my design tool, I'd be a happy camper.

No, I meant the cursor that's highlighting the current character. This could be my own vision problems, but the size of the text + color of the cursor + motion makes it slightly difficult to tell what character I'm supposed to type on the fly. I found myself stopping and squinting just to be sure. That's mainly why I recommended a fisheye - enlarging the current character would solve the problem, but perhaps it's not worth it for most users.

Beautiful app though!

Yep. I easily Swype without looking. There are occasional mistakes, but it requires very little concentration. Anyway, I think there's too much magic in Fleksy and requires a lot of faith/buy-in on the part of the user to trust it.

Cool? Still haven't decided if it's useful.

Anyway, the cursor occasionally obscures the character and slows you down. Might be worth testing out a fish-eye effect as the cursor scrolls so you clearly know what you need to type.

This is a decent list, but visual examples would help.

If anyone's interested, many of these ideas are derived from Nielsen's heuristics [1] as well as Tognazzini's [2].

[1] http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html

[2] http://www.asktog.com/basics/firstPrinciples.html