user interfaces

Casey Muratori's 2005 video introducing immediate-mode GUIs as an alternative to retained widget toolkits. He explains the motivation and shows minimal-state button logic.

A short talk by Will Dayble of Squareweave arguing that you should design software as if the user were drunk: distracted, impaired in attention and vision, and prone to misreading. It is a user experience talk built around that framing.

A short demo of Code Bubbles, an IDE interface built around editable code fragments in bubbles instead of files. It was a research prototype for Java development.

Paul Turner of Google presents kernel interfaces for user-level scheduling of real threads, aiming at a uniform synchronous programming model across C++, Java, Go and Python. It introduces the switchto-style system calls behind Google's fibers.

A demonstration of the 1982 Xerox Star user interface, including its desktop, icons, documents, networking and printing. The uploader argues that Apple's later Lisa and Mac interfaces evolved from these ideas rather than copying them.

2kliksphilip examines UserBenchmark, a hardware comparison site known for strongly biased, pro-Intel writing. The video explains the site's credibility problems and points viewers to better sources for CPU and GPU information.

Second half of a demonstration of the 1982 Xerox Star user interface. It shows how the Star differed from the later Lisa and Mac interfaces, with strengths in networking and printing and little direct manipulation.

A 1982 Xerox PARC film, presented at CHI '90, in which Star designers David Canfield Smith and Charles Irby give an overview of the Xerox Star interface. It shows the document-centric, icon-and-window office system.

A seven-minute demo from the author of Notcurses, a C library for text user interfaces. It shows the 2.3.0 release, which adds Sixel and Kitty bitmap graphics integrated into its multiplane character-graphics model.

Lex Fridman interviews Bryan Johnson, founder of Kernel and previously Braintree, about brain-computer interfaces and Kernel's non-invasive brain monitoring hardware. It covers what the devices can do today and the company's plans.

A JSConf 2014 talk visually breaking down algorithms behind everyday UI patterns, such as dropdown menus that vanish when the mouse drifts and picking the nearest target to the cursor. It shows how these are implemented in JavaScript.

Street interviews of over 50 passersby in Times Square, asked what a browser is. Many answers show people confuse browsers with search engines or the internet.

A short Italian-language clip about the Canon Cat, a text-oriented personal computer from Canon designed by Jef Raskin, who started the Macintosh project. It shows the machine in use.

A short compilation of the gesture and multitouch interface scenes from the film Minority Report.

A full upload of Alan Kay's 1987 talk, with demos of several Smalltalk-era software systems and ideas about visual, kinesthetic and symbolic reasoning. It includes a Smalltalk program written by a 12-year-old and footage of the Rand tablet.

John Ousterhout's slides-and-voiceover lecture on Paxos, made for the Raft user study comparing how students learn Raft and Paxos. It is a full introduction to the Paxos consensus algorithm.

Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, talks at Curry On 2015 about user-focused language design. He explains the principles behind Elm and how to make a functional, typed language as approachable as JavaScript.

Symbolics developer Kalman Reti gives a short introductory demo of a Symbolics Lisp Machine running Genera in an emulator. It shows the context-aware command line, typed on-screen objects, and the live-editable system, including swapping in a C-compiled JPEG decoder.

John Ousterhout lectures on the Raft consensus algorithm, made for the Raft user study comparing how students learn Raft and Paxos. It covers leader election and log repair.

John Rauser's Strata 2014 keynote argues that programmers can learn statistics quickly by simulating random processes and shuffling data. He explains p-values through resampling rather than formulas.

Kristy Viers demonstrates the iPhone Magnifier combined with VoiceOver to describe the user's surroundings. She shows how the built-in feature reports scenes, faces and lighting.

Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail and founder of FriendFeed, speaks at Startup School 08 about listening to users. He covers feedback, features, aiming for 100 happy users, and treating "that's impossible" as a statement of limited experience.

Richard Stallman's TEDxGeneva 2014 talk describing how nonfree programs give companies control over users and what users can do to regain control. It introduces the free software movement and the four freedoms.

The opening episode of Ted Nelson's Computers for Cynics series, in which he casts doubt on conventional accounts of computer basics. He argues that conventions and packaging are mistaken for technology.

A MIX08 session from Microsoft's Office team on how the Office 2007 ribbon was designed. It explains the user-feedback and telemetry behind it and the alternatives that were rejected.

The Centre for Computing History reunites Chris Curry, Steve Furber and Hermann Hauser to rewatch the BBC drama Micro Men on its tenth anniversary. They reminisce about Acorn and the early British home computer era.

Scott Jenson, a veteran UX designer formerly at Apple and Google, argues that the 'UX/UI' split pits programmers against designers and narrows ambition in open source. He makes the case that desktop UX has stagnated and that open source projects could lead experimentation beyond current interaction models.

Archival footage of Larry Tesler demonstrating Gypsy, the modeless text editor he and Tim Mott built at Xerox PARC, running on the Computer History Museum's restored Alto. It is a long hands-on walkthrough of one of the earliest graphical document editors.

A satirical Onion Talks episode in which a startup founder explains making money by selling his users' data to oppressive governments. It parodies tech conference talks and monetization of communities.

Chris Houser's Clojure/conj talk on why Clojure's exceptions destroy information as the stack unwinds, unlike Common Lisp's condition system, which can resume from the error site. He surveys the existing libraries that approximate conditions, explains why they don't compose with each other, and considers what a better design would look like.

A REACT episode where teenagers try Windows 95 for the first time and react to the retro interface and technology.

A one-minute clip of Steve Jobs in 2010 saying companies should ask users before tracking them, and that people's personal data is like their diary.

A Burnistoun sketch in which a voice-recognition elevator cannot understand two Scottish men saying the number eleven. It satirizes voice interfaces that fail on accents.

A satirical Onion news segment announcing a Google feature that lets users opt out of Google's data collection by moving to a remote village without Google products or sunlight.

Dick Hardt's fast-paced OSCON keynote on Identity 2.0 and the move toward user-centric digital identity. It is also famous for its rapid-fire, many-slide presentation style.

Accursed Farms' hour-plus critique of the modern desktop GUI. It argues that current interfaces are a regression from older designs such as Windows 7 and proposes principles for better ones.

Avi Bryant demos Dabble DB, a web-based spreadsheet-like database for building apps without code. It shows how users can model and relate data through a smooth interface.

Alan Kay demonstrates GRaIL, a graphical input language system from around 1968 in which hand-drawn strokes become boxes, connections and dataflow-style programs.

Rick Reed of WhatsApp speaks at MeetBSD about running a messaging service on FreeBSD and Erlang at huge scale. He covers the stack, tuning and the challenges of millions of connections per host.

Chris Granger presents Eve, a programming environment designed to be approachable for humans, at Strange Loop 2015. The talk covers the project's approach and design ideas.