Shaun Inman and The Heap

I’ve been a fan of Shaun Inman’s blog for a while — it was actually coming across the original site of his a couple of years ago that caused a bit of redesign of the UI for ICE: suddenly the UI we’d done looked amateurish. So we sat down and came up with something we were happier with (maybe with a fair amount of “inspiration” — not too much — from sites we liked such as Shaun’s).

Anyway, somehow-or-other I ended up back at it about a month and a half ago. At some point he had redesigned the site to use “The Heap” — basically stories are coloured according to month of the year, category and age. (Obviously the “age” colouring changes as the posts get older.) It’s a marvellous piece of ambient UI engineering. Who knows if it’s actually useful; at least it makes all the pages of the site look slightly different :). I tend to think it works a little better than that, though.

The heap concept was interesting enough that it’s actually one of the things that made me setup this blog again, and do it by writing my own software — I was hoping to put some interesting things in (perhaps I still will, someday…) Back to the point of the post: it’s a cool idea, and it’s one that would actually translate well into a whole bunch of UI situations. If you haven’t already seen it, you should check it out.