Alice Rawsthorn has an article in the New York Times titled "The Demise of ‘Form Follows Function’":

But our ability to work out how to download and play music on a Shuffle is largely determined by the design quality of the software that operates it — the “user interface” in geek-speak, or “U.I.” If the “U.I.” is well designed, you should be able to use the device so intuitively that you will not have to think about it. But if it is badly designed, the process will seem so confusing that you will probably blame yourself for doing something wrong.

That is why the first wave of U.I. designs sought to reassure us by using visual references to familiar objects to help us to operate digital ones. Take the typewriter keyboards on computers, and video game controllers modeled on TV remote control pads. As our confidence has grown, U.I. design has become more sophisticated, increasingly relating to our physical behavior, rather than objects.

Ms. Rawsthorn could be forgiven for being a design writer and not a tech writer, and therefore not knowing that nobody uses periods in the acronym "UI." But surely someone at the Times should have pointed that out.

The New York Times crosswords are usually extremely careful about fact-checking, so I was surprised to disagree with two clues in the past two months.

The April 20 puzzle had the clue "Googly-eyed Muppet" with ELMO as the answer. To me, googly eyes have pupils that move independently and randomly. Cookie Monster has googly eyes. I say Elmo does not. Indeed, Elmo with googly eyes would be disturbing.

The March 19 puzzle gave "Tai chi instructor" as the clue for the Japanese word SENSEI. Tai chi is Chinese, so this was a bad clue.

Come on, Wil, you're usually better than this!

UPDATE: I see from the Times crossword blog I was not alone in my reaction to SENSEI. But I don't see anybody else objecting to ELMO in the blog entry for the 4/20 puzzle.

I cannot fathom why the authors of some shareware apps don't put the price on the app's web page. I have to click a "Buy Now" link to find out. This feels to me like either someone was a bonehead and neglected to display something people obviously want to know, or they're trying to hide something.

Is there a school of thought — perhaps empirical evidence — that this practice increases sales? That would at least explain it, but I'd still find it annoying.

Other than the company logo, the following should be the most prominent items on an app's web page:

• High concept. A very quick description of the product. I should be able to see at a glance what it does for me.
• Requirements. Whether it's for Mac, PC, and/or other.
• How to get. A download link, the price, and a "Buy Now" link. These items should be grouped together.

There can be other goodies — feature lists, screenshots, screencasts, testimonial blurbs, and so forth — but the above items should be absolutely trivial to spot.

Here are some examples.

Bad. IllumineX doesn't display the price for ecto on the product's main page. [UPDATE: See the comments for a clarification from Gary of IllumineX.] The download link is all the way across the page from the "how to buy" link and looks very lonely:

So-so. Lemkesoft displays the price for GraphicConverter, but it could stand out a little more:

Also the price is not next to the download link, which you have to scroll down to see.

Great. Red Sweater Software does it exactly right. Each product's home page shows the most important information at the top in a clear layout that's consistent across products like MarsEdit and Black Ink:

Everybody, please do what Red Sweater does.

I see Kutiman has a Wikipedia page.

Also there's an article on 43folders that, besides embedding the awesome "Mother of All Funk Chords" video below, makes this point:

Unsolicited tip for media company c-levels: if your reaction to this crate of magic is “Hm. I wonder how we’d go about suing someone who ‘did this’ with our IP?” instead of, “Holy crap, clearly, this is the freaking future of entertainment,” it’s probably time to put some ramen on your Visa and start making stuff up for your LinkedIn page.

Thinking some more about the tools he used — I wonder if he downloaded the videos as mp4's (which is easy to do) and then imported them into Final Cut Pro or some such. I don't know much about video tools so I'm just guessing.

Saw the really cool mashup below on avc.com. I wonder what tools Kutiman used to make it.

I would love to have a desktop application geared toward making these — kind of a GarageBand for YouTube mashups. Browse YouTube, manage a library of downloaded clips, assemble them into tracks, alter pitch and speed, and spit out the final product ready for uploading to YouTube, including attribution of all the links that were used. If such an app exists I would love to know about it. Besides the technical and UI challenges, I imagine such an app might push the boundaries of YouTube's terms of usage.