usability

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Google launches Google Reader redesign, forgets about the ‘Like’ hotkey

Today Google rolled out the new design for Google Reader. Apart from the design, the first thing I noticed was that the keyboard hotkey to like an item has been removed (‘L’). In fact, the entire Google Reader sharing functionality has been dropped in favor of some rudimentary Google+ integration (read what Alex from the [...]

I can’t imagine life without: “The Awesome Bar”

Get to your favorite sites quickly – even if you don’t remember the URLs. Type your term into the location bar (aka the Awesome Bar) and the autocomplete function will include possible matches from your browsing history, bookmarked sites and open tabs. The Awesome Bar learns as you use it—over time, it adapts to your [...]

Equal sized imagery + grid layout = magic

For some reason when laying out almost any kind of imaginary of equal sizes in a grid fashion: magic happens. It’s weird, but it’s true. I’ll give some examples in future blog posts.

TinyMCE editor capturing the key

I’m just sharing the rage here. Now that I’ve picked up blogging again I’ve once again become annoyed with how this TinyMCE editor captures the <Tab> key thereby overriding Firefox’s tab navigation. What makes it even weirder is that it doesn’t even indent anything when using <Tab>. I’ll let this post serve a dual purpose [...]

Usability disaster: OKCupid blog’s “Share Popout”

Usability disaster: OKCupid blog’s “Share Popout”

I was scrolling through a blogpost on the OKCupid blog when I noticed this annoying popout that appeared when you browsed into the comment section. It takes up a lot of space and most importantly it distracts from reading the commentary. It’s just too much in-your-face. Here’s what it looks like: The ID for the [...]

Seth Godin’s “This Is Broken” talk at Gel 2006

Seth Godin’s “This Is Broken” talk at Gel 2006

I’m trying to keep my mind occupied by just watching as much “stuff” as possible, right now that means watching TED talks (or talks linked from the TED website). The first talk I’ve watched so far is Seth Godin’s “This Is Broken” talk at the Gel conference back in 2006. In it Seth talks about [...]

Modern Warfare 2: The party system, matchmaking and finding servers

Since November 2009 I’ve been playing Modern Warfare 2 with a bunch of online friends and while the game is not without its problems, I have absolutely fallen in love with its party and matchmaking system. It’s great to be able to just hook up with a bunch of friends and not have to concern [...]

Annoyance of the year: overriding copy/paste functionality using JavaScript

I got a bit annoyed with NoScript last week due to the continous white-listing while randomly surfing the web, so I reluctingly decided to pick the dangerous Allow Scripts Globally option. However, this has introduced me to an annoyance far greater and that is: websites overriding copy/paste functionalty using JavaScript. Yes, this is actually possible [...]

Usability disaster: Videos from CNN

Usability disaster: Videos from CNN

Apart from the fact that CNN’s video site just isn’t very interesting (for now I won’t go into reasons why), it also has a few minor issues that combined make for a genuine usability disaster. ————————————————————————————————————- Problem #1: When a video is done playing, all player functionality is disabled and after a few seconds the [...]

Due dates in Remember the Milk

I’ve decided I want to get more effective and start settings goals and then follow through on realizing them. No more messing about! One of the steps includes getting more organized and start managing my tasks. To make it more comfortable to create tasks I’ve started using the GNOME Do plugin for Remember the Milk [...]

The little things

It’s pretty nifty how in summary view WordPress will (sometimes?) take the first image encountered and use it as a thumbnail and even automatically crops it. TODO: I have a post where I had added an image and later removed it, WordPress still uses this image as a thumbnail (click on one of the associated [...]

Modes and remembering state

It’s quite cool how WordPress remembers what mode (Visual versus HTML) you were previously in and the size of the editor when writing a blog post . TODO: Expand this post