Wayne Pan

Then why am I getting ads for manhunt.net on my profile?

I’m flattered, but I’m pretty sure my profile is clear on this matter:

At first I was in denial. Now I’m on acceptance. Fine, Miker, leave.

I like Miker, simple as that. Hire him, but only if your company is on the “raggedy edge of mobile”.

In another case of how execution trumps idea yet again, Verwandt.de is reportedly growing twice as fast as Geni.com. Even though Verwandt.de is an EXACT clone of Geni.com they’ve executed their multilingual versions faster.

Myspace > Friendster, Google > Yahoo, iPod > *, etc.

Yesterday was a nightmare of a computing day for me. Along with my Ubuntu box not wanting to restart (which was my fault, I upgraded the kernel without upgrading the video drivers, sigh) my Macbook’s keyboard would not work intermittently. At first I thought it was faulty hardware until I looked online and found a whole slew of people with the same problem.Apparently the keyboard likes to go to sleep under Leopard. Appleinsider.com is reporting that the keyboard disappears from Apple’s System Profiler utility. Third party software has been ruled out as people with 2 week old fresh Leopard installs are reporting the same issue. There’s no official fix out yet, only temporary solutions workarounds. You can…

• Use an external usb keyboard
• Press and hold a key until the keyboard wakes up again
• Open and close the lid
• Reboot (eg. The Windows Solution) and hope it doesn’t come back.

Hopefully Apple fixes this soon, feels like the freezing issue all over again. Which actually hasn’t happened since I’ve upgraded to Leopard! Update!

 About MacBook, MacBook Pro Software Update 1.1  

This update addresses a responsiveness issue on MacBook and MacBook Pro notebook computers. Some MacBook and MacBook Pro systems may occasionally experience a temporary suspension of keyboard input which can last a minute or longer. The Mac OS X 10.5.1 update is required before installing the MacBook, MacBook Pro Software Update 1.1. Download 

This is quite possbily the greatest Firefox shortcut ever. I use my web history as a substitute for bookmarks but often times I mistype some urls and these get saved in the dropdown. Now I can remove them individually without clearing the entire history. This not only works on the url bar, but in ANY form in firefox, like logins! Mistyped your email that one time? Select it and hit Shift-Del and it’s gone.

You may not need this now, but one day you’ll thank me!

Last night I was trying to grab all the photos off my friend’s fotki.com account. I couldn’t find any link to download a whole album easily. I fired up wget with some simple options and that failed. The reason? I was trying to grab the original images (basically the link ‘Get Original Uploaded Photo’ on this page for example).

If you view the source you’ll see that the link is actually generated by javascript:

document.write('<br><a class=text3 href="');
document.write('http://images111.fotki.com/v750/fileaZ5N/f145a/4/41967/110006/AestheticBalllet.jpg');
document.write('" mce_href="');
document.write('http://images111.fotki.com/v750/fileaZ5N/f145a/4/41967/110006/AestheticBalllet.jpg');
document.write('">Get Original Uploaded Photo</a>');

After realizing this, I wrote a quick php script to grab all the images. Because of this, I’m never using fotki. I know why they make it difficult for you to do such a thing (bandwidth expenses, etc) but in todays world of mediafire.coms and unlimited email storage there’s little reason to do it. Other than to piss me off and force me to resort to coding.

I just finished watching one of the better YUI Theater talks “Designing the Rich Web Experience: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interaction Design on the Web” by Bill Scott. If you’re an interaction designer, product manager, or general front end engineer I would highly recommend the video.

Scott begins his talk with emphasizing that we need to focus surfacing vocabulary. Rich internet applications continue to mature and in general we all need to get on the same page regarding interaction. Just like the Gang-of-Four and their Design Patterns for OOP allowed software engineers to talk about the discipline using the same vocabulary, all the new interactions on the web need a similar movement.

The rest of the talk covers general principles in designing RIAs. Here are the general talking points, obviously watch the video for a non-bastardized version

Interaction

• Make it direct - Direct manipulation of data on the page. Being able to edit data in it’s read state, inline editing, drag and drop re-org of lists, etc all increase usage.
• Keep a light footprint- Keeping common user tasks easily accessible and in front of the user. The longer (not only in time) it takes a user to do something, the less they’ll do it.
• Cross borders reluctantly - Page loads are speed bumps. Users have to digest new pages, less speed bumps = better flow

Feedback

• Give live feedback - Communicate to user that something is happening. Use a load bar versus ‘loading’ to make time pass faster. Client side validation on forms, etc. YTF technique is a prime example.
• Offer an invitation - Use empty space to invite interaction. Use visual cues to signal to users which parts of the page are interactive
• Show transitions - Transitions/animations are more than just eye-candy. Use them to speed up time, draw focus, visual confirmation

Information

• Think in objects - Don’t view pages as text, think of the user’s mental / workflow process in terms of the objects that they interact with on your website.
• Tie information to interactivity - Interactive elements accompanied by reactive information makes the interface seem more intelligent. (eg. Google Finance / Timeline View)

Click more for the video.
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Some things that have been spinning around in my head that don’t deserve a whole post…

There was a good post on Ajaxian on the subject of unobtrusive javascript. It points to an outstanding article written by Christian Heilmann called The seven rules of Unobtrusive JavaScript. I understand unobtrusive javascript, what it means, and the reasons why it’s needed. However, there are a few times when it’s just not practical. For example, if your application heavily depends on javascript then having a hard rule to always use unobtrusive javascript doesn’t make much sense.

You can actually gain a few things doing the opposite like performance and even save developing time. (See the video posted on yuiblog.com - Joseph Smarr: “High-Performance JavaScript: Why Everything You’ve Been Taught is Wrong”)

Naturally, it’s best practice to use unobtrusive whenever possible, but when pragmatic enough I can see both sides of the coin.

For all you designers out there, Style Ignite has a very nice article about tracking the web 2.0 trend of horizontally divided pages. Out of those samples, I like Wishlistr.com the best.

Normally I read John Dvorak’s column with a grain of salt (I mean when you make a thousand outrageous predictions, you’re bound to strike gold once in a while), but he had an interesting thing to say about the GooglePhone that puts things into perspective.

People have had eons to program for the Windows smartphones and nothing has come of it. What’s so different now?

Puts the whole OHA/Android thing into perspective doesn’t it.

So today Google dropped the bomb, which was really more like a water balloon. It announced Android, the Gphone that wasn’t. If you’re lazy like me, you can watch the official video. They haven’t demoed anything, no devices announced, and yet I’m blogging about it like thousands of other people.

There’s not much to say, since they basically announced nothing, is that I hope it succeeds. The more innovation in mobile the better I say.
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