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parkov

766 karma · joined November 6, 2010

Interface design, usability, web development

Homepage: http://thomaspark.me

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parkov··on The downfall of Quora (2013)
I also enjoyed the Quora digests until one day the links stopped going directly to the threads but all pointed to a feed page. I assumed this was another dark pattern to boost pageviews and unsubscribed.
parkov··on Show HN: Famous Outfits
I've created a site just like this as a side project. Especially relevant with Halloween right around the corner:

http://carboncostume.com/

And since you mentioned it, the Driver:

http://carboncostume.com/driver/

parkov··on Free vector icons
Piggybacking on this, GlyphSearch is a tool for searching Font Awesome and several other popular icon fonts.

http://glyphsearch.com/

parkov··on Show HN: GlyphSearch – Search for icons from Font Awesome, Glyphicons, Ionicons
Thanks for the heads up about Font Awesome More. Looking to add any other libraries that are in heavy use out there.
parkov··on Show HN: GlyphSearch – Search for icons from Font Awesome, Glyphicons, Ionicons
I made this to scratch an (admittedly very mild) itch I've had for some time. But I'm betting some of you have had the same itch.

I posted some details about GlyphSearch here: http://thomaspark.me/2013/11/glyphsearch-improving-the-searc...

parkov··on How to Make a Full Auto Book Scanner
Spooky, by pure coincidence that video uses the same book (different edition) for their demo that my blog post does for 1DollarScan:

http://thomaspark.me/2012/12/digitizing-books-on-the-cheap-a...

parkov··on Adobe Edge Web Fonts
I found that equally baffling. I threw together a page that displays the best (according to Adobe[1]) webfonts of the bunch: http://jsbin.com/itayep

[1] http://html.adobe.com/edge/webfonts/#edgeWebFonts

parkov··on Is it true that "not everyone can be a programmer"?
Relevant to this thread, since the goats-vs-sheep study is brought up so often to add authority to the claim, Caspersen et al. were not able to repeat Bornat & Dehnadi's results. They discuss their findings here: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1268845
parkov··on Microsoft gets a new logo for the first time since 1987
I'm not color blind, but I see the same thing. Shading creates the effect of the boxes being different sizes even though they're not. Here's a screenshot:

https://twitter.com/thomashpark/status/238665017145303040/ph...

parkov··on Bootstrap 2.1 released
I wrote about this issue and ways to overcome it a little while back (with pictures!): http://thomaspark.me/2011/10/making-menus-escapable/
parkov··on Skrollr - parallax scrolling for the masses
Here's a nice demo of a similar library called Scrollorama: http://johnpolacek.github.com/scrollorama/

Skrollr is noteworthy because it's significantly smaller (5.5kb vs. 94kb+jQuery), and makes use of HTML5 data attributes for notation.

parkov··on Bootstrap Illustrator Template
Here are Bootstrap templates for Photoshop and Fireworks that were released a week back:

http://www.bentdesignstudio.com/v2/2012/03/twitter-bootstrap...

parkov··on All April Fools' Day Jokes on the Web Are Here (so they don't clutter HN)
Here's a fun one: Replace LESS and SASS with MORE.

http://morecss.org/

parkov··on Great, Another Bootstrap Site
It's easy to tweak the Bootstrap defaults, but trying to keep things as cohesive as the defaults can lead you down the rabbit hole of dependencies. BS 2.0 is a big step up, but I've found that playing only with the values in variables.less doesn't cut it quite yet.

I've tried to hit a sweet spot with Bootswatch (http://bootswatch.com), keeping it a quick-start solution for hackers while adding variety to the defaults.

parkov··on Show HN: Bootswatch, free swatches for your Bootstrap site
Yes, it's targeting 2.0. Both the CSS and LESS files will be kept in sync with Bootstrap. So you won't need to compile anything, just download the latest swatch CSS.
parkov··on Show HN: Bootswatch, free swatches for your Bootstrap site
Cool project! I ended up doing most of it by hand. I started by just playing around with variables.less, but it wasn't giving me the variety I wanted, so I added an extra less file for more custom stuff.

You can check them out on the gh-pages branch in GitHub: https://github.com/thomaspark/bootswatch

parkov··on User Research Gone Astray: The Case of Windows 8 Explorer
To the contrary, I'm looking at this very much from a non-power user's perspective. I think a ribbon is a reasonable application here, showing copy, paste, etc. by default. But look at all of the other functions located throughout the chrome. As the "lambasting it" link says, many of the options that are visible by default are used much less than 1% of the time, according to Microsoft's own data. "Invert selection"?

But more to the point is how the user research data is turned into a redesign in a seemingly mechanical way. "The button was used 10% of the time, so let's make it bigger next time." Without careful consideration, this can be a big mistake, and can miss opportunities for helping users with their tasks at a deeper level.

parkov··on Seven Minutes in Ubuntu: A Mac user's first impressions
Thanks. As a newcomer to Ubuntu, I didn't realize how new the dock was. It seems straightforward and useful to me. But I'm sure there's controversy with it.

Highlighting was done with Omnigraffle. It took some time find a good way to depict the angle of escape. I ended up rotating a quarter circle and cropping the edges off. Hacky but does the trick.

parkov··on Seven Minutes in Ubuntu: A Mac user's first impressions
I'm not familiar with any term to describe this, but "angle of escape" seemed fitting.
parkov··on How Whole Foods "Primes" You to Shop
Quite likely a setup and not some psychological effect. He's relied on similar tricks in the past, such as using video effects to "predict" the lottery [1] and a fake casino set under the pretense of calculating the trajectory of a roulette ball [2].

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG-5qebwflA See drdirs's comment. [2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVThCpMPON0 See mazotu's comment.