I've been designing a tricky interface that requires a lot of buttons. The buttons are arranged in a 3x5 grid layout and can not be nested or tabbed, mainly due in homage to VOLTOR (We hail Thee!!!). They must be visible at all times. How to make this look pretty? It's been difficult.

After doing some mockups in Adobe Flex, I'm really beginning to like the look of links over buttons. Long time ago, as Software as a Service applications were just coming in to their own, they tried as much as possible to emulate the look and feel of traditional desktop applications. But in a reversal of philosophies, as they have come into their own with the widespread adoption of Ajax and other Web2.0 methodologies, their forward thinking designers have realized that links are elegant ways to connotate action. 

Today marks my 2 and a half^th anniversary with Gmail. What's the verdict? Still undetermined.

As many of you know, I am in search of the perfect email client, believing that Outlook and Thunderbird are missing many of the things that make Skype such a useful tool, such as the (mooning) emoticon. Gmail, I believe has made an attempt to bridge the gap between these two electronic conversational tools and I am still not sure they've got it write (pun intended- Haha!).

Smack! That's the sound of me slapping your raised hand because I'm punishing you for a wrong answer.

If any of you humans prefer to design with RGB (as opposed to HSV, or even HSB) please raise your hand because I cannot for the "life" of me figure out why most Adobe products default to RGB. It is impossible for me to figure out how to get Illustrator or Photoshop to always show HSV instead of RGB. While mixing Green, Red and Blue to create different colors is fun, it is not an intuitive way to tweak colors for most of us humans (tee-hee). There are a couple of pro-applications that have human readable config files, such as Apple's soon to be defunct Shake compositing application which allow you to set it up to run the way you want. Why not Photoshop or Illustrator? This annoyance I will put up there with trying to turn all the Auto-xxx functionality in Microsoft Word, a process that takes on average 4 days.

Why does the scale tool in Adobe InDesign behave so strangely. It doesn't work like Photoshop or Illustrator. What is up with that Adobe?

Have you ever used Gmail and wondered where the reply button is? I have. Take a look at this screenshot and see if you can find the Reply button. Don't mind my notes to self about my OCD symptoms. If you don't understand them, you must have not seen my television show on Discovery Health.

Where's the Reply Google?

I'm not sure if they've changed something but I don't remember the Reply button being this hard to find. Isn't that one of the first things you would probably do when reading an email? I'll include a full width screenshot below, because I'm running my Dell XPS Laptop at full 1900x1200 res. It's way, way over on the very right hand side.

The reply is way out of place.

Hey Gmail- I love you but you've got the reply button all wrong, I think. Please get in touch and let me know why it's over there in right field.