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Tog on Interface
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Author: Bruce Tognazzini
List Price: $29.95
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0201608421
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co (24 January, 1992)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 57,363
Average Customer Rating: 3.8 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 5 out of 5
A classic that's fun to read
You'll get some good laughs, as you follow Tog through the complexities of designing some of the earliest, and still the best, interfaces out there...he was, as I recall, the Interface Czar at Apple when they were creating the Mac, then worked at Sun, and now is part of the Nielsen Norman Group. The book's good background for his site, AskTog.com. You'll get the basics, without the sour looks of some other interface gurus, and you'll get a sense of the way a leading designer interacted with the developers he had to persuade to follow his lead.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Some insights
It's more on Apple Computer's UI design experience. I don't feel you can apply a lot to the general UI design.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Early Mac newsletter clippings
Diving into "Tog on Interface", a collection of Apple Macintosh developer newsletter column reprints, provides the same guilty pleasure as finding a stack of fifty year old technical magazines. Clearly, there was an audience somewhere, and a dialogue going on, and interesting topics being discussed. But, oh it seems so long ago and what are all those strange mechanical devices they're referring to? On closer study, the second analogy that comes to mind is the Europe-in-7-days package; Tognazzini touches on almost every conceivable topic, if only to drop a reference here or tie in a point there. The comments are usually on target, but left me seeking answers that were deeper and less flippant. This book is riddled with the author's humor and point of view; if you find attempted cuteness or a stream of in-jokes annoying, steer clear. I bought this book after devouring Tognazzini's well regarded web interface design site, which left me wanting more. I didn't get it in this book, but did find what I was looking for in other books on the topic of interface design: Jeff Johnson's "GUI Bloopers", which is organized like Tog's web site, Alan Cooper's Windows-centric rant "About Face" and Jef Raskin's Mac and Canon Cat dominated "The Humane Interface".
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