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Recently about Design

The Status Bar Evolved

In the current version of Sifter, the status bar does a great job of communicating and reminding you of the status, but it overwhelms the other significant attributes. Continued…

Personalizing Support

One of the most frustrating things about software development is receiving condescending or otherwise rude emails about your software. I suppose that It comes with the territory, but I felt like there had to be a way to minimize it. Continued…

Our Way of Doing Things

There are a handful of "features" that we have strong philosophical objections to. We receive a not insignificant amount of questions about some of these, and I think it helps to explain our thoughts on the decisions that we've made.... Continued…

Lists vs. Tables

Tables are great for purely numerical data. However, when records are a mix of numeric and text data where each column has varying length, significance, and relationships with the other columns, it doesn't make as much sense. Continued…

Unity, Color, and Meaning

Now that we've been using Sifter in the wild for well over a year in addition to receiving tons of feedback during that time, we've really been able to develop a clearer vision for what Sifter should look like and how it should work. As a result, we've been able to be much more thoughtful about how it all fits together. Continued…

Designing Row Groups

The devil is in the details. It's a bit overused and certainly clichéd, but it summarizes a valuable truth when designing. Now that we've sorted through some of our information architecture challenges, I wanted to really look at our new designs and question the value of every pixel to edit the interface down to it's simplest necessary elements. Continued…

Milestone Improvements

We're big believers in evolutionary design rather than revolutionary design. With milestones, this became especially true. I briefly shared our thinking behind designing and building milestones into Sifter, and this is a follow up to show how our thinking and the interface have evolved. Continued…

Phased Ambitions

Since I began thinking about adding milestones to Sifter, I've been thinking about some really cool integration throughout the interface. That thinking led to a significant amount of time sketching and designing how they would work. The more I designed,... Continued…

Choose Your Own Adventure

Features. It's such an innocuous word. New features can usually be summarized in a single word, and therein lies the problem. For instance, implementing Search was much more complicated than its one-syllable description might imply. Most features unfold in a... Continued…

Fluid Icon for Sifter

For those of you who use Fluid to create site specific browsers for your web apps, we've finally created a high quality icon for you to use with Sifter. When we set out to create the original icon, we intentionally... Continued…

The Latest

We built a simple bug and issue tracker named Sifter and we blog about it when we're not working on it. We think it’s a great way to get feedback and keep everyone updated on our status.

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