I also enjoyed the Quora digests until one day the links stopped going directly to the threads but all pointed to a feed page. I assumed this was another dark pattern to boost pageviews and unsubscribed.
Relevant to this thread, since the goats-vs-sheep study is brought up so often to add authority to the claim, Caspersen et al. were not able to repeat Bornat & Dehnadi's results. They discuss their findings here: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1268845
I'm not color blind, but I see the same thing. Shading creates the effect of the boxes being different sizes even though they're not. Here's a screenshot:
It's easy to tweak the Bootstrap defaults, but trying to keep things as cohesive as the defaults can lead you down the rabbit hole of dependencies. BS 2.0 is a big step up, but I've found that playing only with the values in variables.less doesn't cut it quite yet.
I've tried to hit a sweet spot with Bootswatch (http://bootswatch.com), keeping it a quick-start solution for hackers while adding variety to the defaults.
Yes, it's targeting 2.0. Both the CSS and LESS files will be kept in sync with Bootstrap. So you won't need to compile anything, just download the latest swatch CSS.
Cool project! I ended up doing most of it by hand. I started by just playing around with variables.less, but it wasn't giving me the variety I wanted, so I added an extra less file for more custom stuff.
To the contrary, I'm looking at this very much from a non-power user's perspective. I think a ribbon is a reasonable application here, showing copy, paste, etc. by default. But look at all of the other functions located throughout the chrome. As the "lambasting it" link says, many of the options that are visible by default are used much less than 1% of the time, according to Microsoft's own data. "Invert selection"?
But more to the point is how the user research data is turned into a redesign in a seemingly mechanical way. "The button was used 10% of the time, so let's make it bigger next time." Without careful consideration, this can be a big mistake, and can miss opportunities for helping users with their tasks at a deeper level.
Thanks. As a newcomer to Ubuntu, I didn't realize how new the dock was. It seems straightforward and useful to me. But I'm sure there's controversy with it.
Highlighting was done with Omnigraffle. It took some time find a good way to depict the angle of escape. I ended up rotating a quarter circle and cropping the edges off. Hacky but does the trick.
Quite likely a setup and not some psychological effect. He's relied on similar tricks in the past, such as using video effects to "predict" the lottery [1] and a fake casino set under the pretense of calculating the trajectory of a roulette ball [2].