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Blogs » Archive for September, 2007
Throw your Mac out the Window!
Off the back of my esteemed colleague’s recap of why he loves his Mac so much, I thought I’d offer a competing view.
OK, so I’m not actually advocating that you throw your Mac out the window. The thing’s not completely biodegradable yet, and you could always use it as a monitor stand. Besides, there might be somebody walking by (unless that somebody is Steve Jobs, and then, by all means — give it the old heave-ho).
But I do think, in light of all the praise that is heaped on OS X for being time-saving, intuitive and just plain pretty, it’s worth exploring some of the aspects of the user interface that the Mac gets plain wrong. My biggest gripe is with an element of the interface that is pretty darned fundamental — keyboard shortcuts.
Disclaimer: I am both a Mac and a PC user, and have been for a long time. Here’s my beef.
On Windows, keyboard shortcuts within an application:
- provide complete coverage
- are easily discoverable
- are intuitive
- are consistent, and
- generally don’t step on each other’s toes
My experience with OS X has led me to the conclusion that keyboard shortcuts in Mac apps are none of the above. Let me illustrate my point …
Mac vs PC and the Future of the Web
The following is republished from the Tech Times #173.
Are you a Mac person or a PC person?
Having recently dipped my toes in the Apple pool, I have a theory about why people seem to fall in love with the Mac when they try it. Believe it or not, it has something to do with the future of Internet Explorer, and of the Web itself!
Mac vs. PC: What floats your boat?
Okay, I’ll admit it: I fell for the Mac—hard. Just like all the other geek fashion victims before me, I’ve come to depend on my Mac as if it were a part of me, and I’m happier with it than I have been with any other computer before it.
I went in with a healthy dose of skepticism, mind you. I was determined not to become one of those suckers who hugs his Mac to his chest, gleefully exclaiming “I love it! It just works!” Oh no, the Mac would have to prove to me that it was actually better than the ubiquitous PC.
Heck, it took Apple announcing that you could run Windows on a Mac for me to be willing to give it a try. After all, if the …
News Wire: How to make HTML email rock
- +1.5 Years: Where Are We Now?The Dojo Toolkit’s Alex Russell notes the amount of time that has passed since IE7 was released, and how little has been said by Microsoft about IE.Next. Is Microsoft working on something amazing in secret, or is IE at risk of renewed stagnation?(tags: ie microsoft )
- Screen Shots And Feature Overview of Delicious 2.0 PreviewLike the SitePoint Design Contests, Delicious (formerly del.icio.us) is launching a complete re-write of the service to improve the scalability and agility of the system. A complete rewrite means a complete redesign, however, with plenty of new features!(tags: socialnetworks yahoo! )
- Mobile Usability Tips #1 – Registration and LoginThe first in a series of tips on enhancing the usability of mobile web sites, this brief article provides hints on how to design usable registration and login forms for mobile web sites.(tags: mobile design usability )
- WordPress 2.2.3WordPress 2.2.3 contains an important security fix. Upgrade your installation immediately.(tags: security php software )
- Rainbow Hash CrackingAn eye-opening peek into the password cracking technique of Rainbow Hashes, which in a recent test was able to crack the …
Public Website Admin Tools: Divide and Conquer
One of the first steps when designing a web application is figuring out how to administer the beast and where these admin tools should live. Often this comes down to one key question: should the public website itself also be the administrative tool? While there is no single approach that works in every situation, I generally find that keeping the administrative tools separate makes more sense than embedding the tools within the public facing website. Key reasons for attacking this problem this way are:
Differing Nature of the Beasts
Public-facing websites and website administrative tools are, by nature, fundamentally different sorts of applications. Your public-facing website needs to be highly accessible to any number of browsers, platforms and users; it should be highly standards compliant and Google-friendly. From a development perspective, scalability is a massive concern. This means things like completely disabling ViewState and arguably session state, or avoiding such useful tools as ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanels in preference to much more streamlined scripting.
On the other hand, your administrative tools are likely aimed at a very small set of users on controllable platforms. Bandwidth usage is likely not …
Don’t make users take responsibility for our problems
You know what, I really hate CAPTCHA.
The other day I was speculatively signing up for a Facebook account (I’m not particularly interested in being on Facebook, I just wanted to have a nose around its code), but signing up was a tricky process. You didn’t correctly type the text in the box, it said, referring to the security check image of two words you have to type-in to confirm you’re a real person.
Yeah sure, except I can’t see any words, all I can see is a message that says Loading….
Now admittedly that’s a bad example — presumably they’re using some dodgy Ajax which doesn’t work in Opera for Mac (my browser of choice), and usually such images are generated server-side without the need for scripting, hence this problem doesn’t occur.
But I still hate them because CAPTCHA tests are an accessibility black spot. What are you supposed to do if you have a reading or cognitive disability and simply can’t make them out? Man, I have perfect 20-20 vision, and more often than not I can’t read the damn things; it’s very common for me to have to make three or four different attempts before I get it right.
(I might also …
News Wire: Two New Opera Releases
- Update to Internet Explorer’s Cookie JarThe latest auto update to Interent Explorer increases the limit on the number of cookies per domain from 20 to 50. The total size limitation of 4KB of cookie data per domain remains unchanged.(tags: ie http )
- Forbidden Color Combinations?The COLOURlovers site has a fascinating article showing off color combinations that traditionally don’t work, but in specific cases actually do.(tags: design )
- Google Gears 0.2 developer release ready for downloadGoogle has a developer preview of Google Gears 0.2 Beta, its browser extension for building offline-capable apps for Firefox and IE6. The new release offers a cross-origin API and improvements to WorkerPool, including XMLHttpRequest and Timer support.(tags: google javascript software ajax )
- Top Ten Mistakes of Shopping Cart Design Revisited: A Survey of 500 Top E-Commerce WebsitesA list of common mistakes with e-commerce shopping cart design were identified in a 2002 usability study. This article revisits that list and reviews how 500 of the top Internet retail sites of today implemented their shopping cart design.(tags: usability design )
- Lazy Function Definition PatternA classic example of a functional programming pattern in JavaScript. …
Four events to keep you learning
I wouldn’t call myself a conference junkie by any means, I’d be lucky to attend one or two a year. And I certainly don’t think of myself as the eternal student, but when I gave it some thought a few minutes ago, I realised that I’ve studied, while working, for ten out of the last 14 years… So it got me thinking, and I’m pretty sure what it comes down to is that I like to learn new things.
Now, given that you’re on a Sitepoint blog reading about Usability, it seems to me that perhaps you like learning new things too…
In any case, one of things I frequently lament is the cost of attending overseas conferences and the distance Australia is from the rest of the conference-hosting world. So, it gives me great pleasure and a mild dose of illicit delight to share with you a few upcoming Australian conferences that focus on or include user experience topics.
OZ-IA
OZ-IA is a conference that’s held in Sydney over the weekend of September 22nd and 23rd. It’s primary focus is on Information Architecture, though there are also presentations on related topics as diverse asEthics, Analysing quantitative data and …
FullCodePress Designers Share Their Design Secrets
The organisers of the FullCodePress international site in a day competition asked me to interview some of the team members about their experience and the process they followed, and to share some of my thoughts on how the two sites were judged in this competition.
My first interview was with the teams’ designers: Sarah Peeke, from the Australian team who came runners-up, and Steve Dennis, from the winning New Zealand team — the CodeBlacks.
Interview with Sarah Peeke (designer for Team Australia)
Matthew Magain: How did you tackle the hurdle of creating your client’s visual identity in only a few hours?
Sarah Peeke: I came into this competition thinking the organisation would already have an official logo in place. Once we agreed that there was a need to create one, it certainly presented a further challenge.
The name of our charity was The Ripple Effect (an organisation that helps change the lives of Thai children and their communities). I wanted to steer away from the cliché of water drops, and the client had mentioned that they wanted to incorporate the children’s hands into the branding, so that was what I focussed on. In the end, though, there were many design elements …
Design Contests 2.0 to Launch without Servers
The team here at SitePoint HQ seems to be holding its breath over the imminent release of the revamped SitePoint Design Contests. After many days, evenings and weekends of intense development, the application is now on the verge of going live … weeks before its servers are ready! This minor miracle—and several others—have been made possible by the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.
As if the planned from-scratch rewrite of the existing functionality on a state-of-the-art, multi-server scalable PHP 5 architecture and with a totally standards-compliant front end weren’t a big enough job, the project became more and more ambitious over time, with new features and usability improvements being added in at every stage.
Meanwhile, the development tools were changing too. To give just one example, the team took a weekend to throw together a continuous integration framework that would make it easier to deploy builds to the staging server and send emails to the team when a change to the application broke the automated tests.
Even the infrastructure was a moving target. After a lengthy planning period during which a shiny cluster of new, dedicated servers was assembled on paper and shopped around to …