It Just Works

I spend my whole time whining about how much I hate this or that application.

So it's a rare pleasure to have something as simple and effective as my Sat Nav.

We bought it, slapped it on the windscreen, pressed the most obvious buttons and drove straight to our destination.

There's a big manual that comes with it but I see no reason to use it.

You can enter an address, you can search for a business by name, you can even browse local resteraunts by food type.

When it's giving the directions it is clear and concise and it even has a choice of US or British english voices.

The screen is crisp and clear and the maps are simple and pretty with nice anti aliased curves and text.

I simply cannot fault it in any way.

Gosh.

When is today?

After reading an interesting article about ID cards it was nice to see this at the bottom: But wait! He's discussing it today? Even though he wrote the article a week ago? Sounds unlikely to me. It sounds like what I really want is an mp3 from last week instead. So, you have to scroll back to the top of the page to find out when "today" is, then find the podcasts blog index, then navigate backwards in time until you find the correct podcast title (Newsdesk) for the correct day, scan the description, and make sure that it's the content you were after. And all for the sake of a correct link. Please Guardian, I like that you're doing all these new and exciting things, but make the little things easier to use, please?

Meaningless marketing jargon

The BBC have decided that the word "podcast" isn't good enough anymore, and so for their BBC Radio News podcast have christened it their "Newspod", which whilst it might sound great in some high-powered caffeinne-fuelled meeting, is completely meaningless out of context, and contains only marginal meaning for those who know what the hell they're talking about.

Losers.

del.icio.us is now an anti-social bookmarking site

del.icio.us have updated their URL bookmark history page, so that now, if for example I look at the history for http://www.eclipsezone.com/eclipse/forums/t65486.rhtml on http://del.icio.us/url/bd8e17cc6069d2573d00b525059c9eed, instead of first being told "8 people have bookmarked this, here they are, and here are there comments" it now says "8 people have bookmarked this, and hey, if you want to find out who they are, just, y'know, look around the page, I'm sure you'll find it somewhere".

How completely useless is that? The user discoverability and browsability (i.e. a huge part of the social networking system that del.icio.us has at its core) is now a definite second-class citizen. Congratulations del.icio.us! Even the tags applied to that URL are now more important! That's not retarded at all, honest!

What a fucking joke. I wonder if a Yahoo! UI team started giving recommendations or something, because after all, we all know that they're the masters of clean understandable web applications.

2lmc also point out the fucking useless page titles.

Ben Hammersley is wrong and iWeb is rubbish for consumers

Ben Hammersley defends the fact that iWeb's output is the antithesis of good Web practice:

No one visits Amazon to marvel at their URL structure. No one cares that Google uses last century'’s markup. No one uses Flickr because of the Ajax. Buzzwords won't save you.

Look where the text is when you load a page. And 'cause it's an image it's never going to wrap or resize so I'm forced to fit my browsing habits to the page and not vice versa as it should be. Plus it must be an absolute joy for the partially sighted, they can't scale the text and I'd bet dollars to donuts that screen readers struggle even though the text is hidden in the HTML.

Finally I can't cut and paste so getting that quote out was an exciting hunt through View Source. So on one level he's right, consumers could care less about buzzwords and nice URLs but on the other hand, the experience iWeb is producing is still absolutely rubbish.

Validation porn has had its day. Enough about the brushes already: give me some beauty.

Or you could give me some usamajility!

IE Se7en Part 2

Phil	i can't believe thy've taken away the word "back" on the back button
	it was the only good thing in IE
	i even wrote a firefox extension to duplicate it! :)
	i can't believe it insists on using http:// every time
	ah, it doesn't always
	weird
G	i am having all sorts of bother typing in addresses
	although I can't pin down what the problem is
	ff clearly does *something* nicer than IE
	I just don't know what :)
Phil	heh
	you know the toolbar to the right of the tabs?
G	yeah
Phil	can you get that to be on its own toolbar?
	i can't
G	No
Phil	great
G	Only the toolbars that you turn on and off in the toolbars option are actually toolbars
Phil	i can move it horizontally, but not vertically
	perfect
G	indeedly
	makes for some narrow tab action
Phil	exactly
	what a complete pain the arse
	and whenever you want to go to the first tab, you can't just go to the very left of the tab bar, but X pixels in
	these people have clearly never heard of postel's law ;)
	but then again, the first tab in firefox is indented by about 3 pixels, bu at least you expect that
G	i've just spotted the chevrons on the edge of that toolbar on the right
	Help is off the screen along with all the extra buttons that apps like XML Spy and Fiddler have added
Phil	yes, same here
G	help
	invisible!
Phil	genius!
G	and no help menu either!
Phil	excellent!
G	Also, all the buttons have the little down arrows on them
	but only half of them are smart push ones
	But instintively i aim for the tiny arrow when I don't need to
Phil	yes, it's hard to predict how they work until you hover over it
	or rather, hover, look, pause, think, click
G	The only indication of smartness is a faint vertical line that is only there when you hover
	utter bullshit
Phil	yes, it's shit
	i also can't believe they've taken away right-click customise toolbar
	that's like a decade of muscle memory for every MS app ever
	oh i see, you can right click on the tools to the right of the tabs to get to "customise", just nothing else
	so annoying that the tabs resize, and yet there's no generic "close tab" button on the right of all the tabs
	so if you want to close three tabs in one go, you have to keep moving the mouse
	not just click-click-click
G	not so fussed about that
	safari is like that so used to it :)
	and if there's just 1 x , i prefer it in the tab to on the side
Phil	yes
	but the tab shouldn't resize in that case
	it should always be in a predictable location
	because once you close one tab, the others all resize and the location you think you were going to, moves

IE Se7en Part 1

Phil	I'm massively underwhelmed by IE7
	whether the main menu toolbar appears is tab-specific?
	none of the RSS stuff works for me
G	heh
	the only thing I've liked so far is
	right click next to the tabs and select "Restore last tab group"
	gosh
Phil	meh
G	yeah, the whole thing is so underwhelming
	It's like Opera
	it's capable enough
	but why would you?
Phil	they've moved the motherfucking main menu, which completely destroys my spatial understanding of everything above the browser window
G	yes
	Well by default the main menu isn't there at all
	which is interesting
	but shit :)
Phil	yes
	i can't turn it back on by default
	i keep hitting alt+f to get it back
G	It's a toolbar
	"Classic Menu"
Phil	??? where the fuck is that?
G	Tools, Toolbars, Classic Menu
Phil	oh jesus
Phil	mother
	fucker

IE 7 Clear Type

Oh look, it turns on clear type to totally muddy my reading experience on my CRT!

Great.

Bonus points for doing it in my Outlook email as well.

Thanks!

Orrible Pap for Moron Losers

The OPML Editor. Have you used that thing? Jesus christ, it's an abomination of not only usability but design and human cognition.