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 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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

A short clip from Udacity's Web Development course in which Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman describes how Reddit grew early on. He explains seeding the site with content from fake accounts.

An episode of the BSD Now podcast in which Bryan Cantrill joins the hosts to rant about Linux interfaces, alongside the week's BSD headlines. The conversation also touches on containers and related systems topics.

GE Lighting's official how-to for factory resetting C by GE smart bulbs, using a long sequence of precisely timed on and off cycles.

A short clip from Star Trek IV in which Scotty tries to talk to a 20th-century computer, picks up the mouse and says 'Hello, computer'.

A short clip from The West Wing in which staffers meet a group advocating the Peters projection and challenge the Mercator map. It was shown as geography humor at a Salt Lake GIS user group meeting.

Walter Bright explains to the Northwest C++ Users Group how the D programming language can interface directly with legacy C++ code. He covers why C++ is hard to interface with and how D approaches the problem.

Rich Hickey's 2013 talk applies language-design thinking to whole systems, covering names, queues, data, failure, and the interfaces between programs. It ends with a call to action for building systems holistically.

Aaron Bieber, a longtime Vim user, describes his experience trying Emacs with evil mode. He covers what he found, what he missed from Vim, and what Vim could borrow from Emacs.

Chris Granger, creator of Light Table and the Eve language, gives a Berkeley data science lecture on what computation and programming might look like in ten years. He covers the path that led to Eve and ends with demos.

A TV show about Ivan Sutherland's 1963 MIT thesis software Sketchpad, which ran on the TX-2 computer. It shows a light pen drawing, constraints, snapping, scaling and object-style graphics, foundations of GUIs and CAD.

Felienne Hermans argues that Excel is the world's most popular programming language and shows how spreadsheets work as a pure functional language. She implements a few mathematical problems in spreadsheet formulas to illustrate why they are so powerful and approachable.

A short clip of Steve Jobs at the 2010 D8 conference, interviewed by Walt Mossberg, defining privacy as people knowing what they are signing up for, in plain English and repeatedly. The discussion centered on location data.

Adrian Crenshaw's DEF CON 22 talk gives an overview of Tor and I2P, then goes through real cases where darknet users were caught. These include Silk Road and its operator.

A short first episode in Zaiste's Doom Emacs series, showing how to get started with Doom, an Emacs configuration aimed at Vim users. It presents Doom as a polished, fast, batteries-included distribution.

Alan Kay argues for rethinking how computer science is taught in schools, drawing on his work on object-oriented programming and GUIs. He discusses how poorly people understand complex systems and what education could do about it.

A promotional video for Leap, the navigation technology invented by Jef Raskin, demonstrated on the Canon Cat computer around 1987. It shows keyboard-driven search and cursor positioning in place of a mouse.