16 posts tagged “rant”
It's always interesting to look at the way in which people overcome the problem of navigating the web. The problem being that nowdays content is full of sidelines and links. As you're reading your favourite blog (mine, surely ;)) they might link to another post, such as this one about The Problem With Tabbed Interfaces. From there you might be intreaged by Cyrus Najmabadi's post. And from there Tabbrowser extension. Before long you've got a long list of things to read. Even before you're finished with Jeff's post there are 10 possible other interesting pages to read, and that's excluding the comments. Reach into each of these and there are hundreds of possible fasinating webpages.
If you're anything like Jeff that means you will have one or two browser windows with hundreds of tabs (despite this coming up a few times in his blog I annoyingly can't find any references to it now). If you're anything like me that means you'll have five or six browser windows with six or seven tabs each as I split things up into logical chunks. Maintaining and navigating this hodgepot of links is a difficult task.
This is because navigation is a tree, but most browsers like to make you think it's a list. A list is easy enough for people to understand. With under 10 items it's easy enough to maintain. The trouble is it just doesn't scale.
Back to Jeff's post - here's what links one may visit organised firstly as a tree in which you can easily understand what links to what, giving you the context of how it relates to other content.
The Problem With Tabbed Interfaces
- iRider
- Make Vista's Alt+Tab Thumbnail Bigger
Obviously once you get to Wikipedia there's no end of interesting things. And from every website on the internet you will almost always get to Wikipedia. And then never leave.
The cosmological argument, via Where's Waldo, is bizaarly removed from the problems with tabbed interfaces. But nether the less, that's inevitably how people navigate the web. So what does this bizaar sequence of interesting reads look like in Firefox as I'm browsing?
The Problem With Tabbed Interfaces I hate tabs in web browsers Tabextension3 Outsider FAQ iRider iRider Download Make Vista's Alt+Tab Thumbnail Bigger Where's Waldo? Where's Waldo (TV Series) HIT Entertainment Thomas and Friends Anthropomorthism Cosmological Argument
Except whilst doing that I was talking to a couple of people on IM, and one of my friends always sends me about 4 links as a replacement for the traditional "Hello, how are you?" so it really looks like this:
The Problem With Tabbed Interfaces I hate tabs in web browsers Openmoko Tabextension3 Outsider FAQ iRider Apple March 6th Event iRider Download Make Vista's Alt+Tab Thumbnail Bigger Audiosurf Where's Waldo? Where's Waldo (TV Series) HIT Entertainment Thomas and Friends Anthropomorthism Cosmological Argument
What links are related to the origional post? Which are the one's my friend sent me? How on earth did I get to Thomas and Friends? Who knows.
Interestingly IE uses a kludged tree. All the links you open from a webpage open in a list of new tabs after the current one. This means that you get a tree, only flattened into a list. It's quite confusing at first, but once you realise what it's doing it's useful at times. But why squash it into a list?
There's probably a plugin to make Firefox use a tree for tabs, but I've yet to find it.
I've heard a lot of people claim their illegal downloading of music is sort of like Robin Hood, stealing from the rich music companies and giving to the poor (themselves). Makes it sound almost noble.
The trouble is that there is too much good free music for this analogy to hold up. Which is why I like to compare it to stealing bottled water instead. Everyone knows bottled water is not really that much better than that which effectively comes out of your tap for free*. They make an insane profit by convincing everyone they need expensive, fancy bottled water, the greedy bastards. So let's fix this injustice by stealing the bottled water. Except then the retail outlet loses money. And you could just get the water from your tap.
It's the same, in my opinion, as illegally downloading music, except with the roles reversed (the makers unfairly lose money, not the distributors). If you really cared about the injustice you wouldn't steal the music, you would do more to support various movements such as Creative Commons which give artists much finer control over how their music is used and netlabels which as a culture tends to give more rights over to the artists.
I'm building up a catalogue of good sources for free music at the moment. I've got a few sites, but I want to be able to cover a wide range of music, and unfortunately a lot of good free music does tend to skew to the hip-pop/drum and base/instrumental side of things. I'm also working on some criteria by which to classify a record label as "fair", which obviously is more difficult than "the artist has chosen to put the music out for free" which is why I'm starting with free music.
* For this to work, think of the water bills as equating to your internet bills, though it doesn't really. But it fits better than Robin Hood. Besides, most people I know using the Robin Hood example have never paid their own water bills.
It always annoys me when websites force links to defaulty open in a new window/tab (from now on referred to as window). It strikes me as an arrogant assumption of how you want to browse - you want to keep their websites open when in fact the truth is sometimes - a lot of the time - I don't. It is also a major distraction to browsing continuity as most browsers will defautly focus the newly opened window.
It is trivial to open something in a new window yourself - in most browsers a middle click will do it, and a Ctrl+Click if not (though almost all mice now have middle mouse buttons and touchpads some combination that makes it possible). There are arguments that some find precise click difficult, and so will often accidentally activate the mouse scroll feature instead. In my personal experience I have found people have little problem with this, but I have seen no actual evidence for either. If it does happen to be a problem for a small section of users it can be turned into an accessibility feature.
With this in mind, surely it makes much more sense to give the power over to the user? Let them decide whether they want something to open in a new window or not. This would create a consistency - they know what to expect when they click on a link. Without some visual indication as to whether the link will open in a new window or not it can get confusing, and the visual indications would become a clutter.
It's not just through laziness that web designers don't make offsite links open in a new window, it's arguably a good design practice.
A friend of mine (they all seem to be Guardian readers) pointed me towards a recent Guardian article relating to Facebook. It's an intriguing insight into, as the title describes, "The politics of the people behind Facebook" and for that it is interesting. But it also bleeds a large critique of Facebook into it, some of which is valid, but others of it seem to just be journalism.
For instance, a much cited criticism is that it breaks down communication and reduces them to mere "pokes" with no-one talking to each other in real life. "I know them in real life, why would I want to talk to anyone else?" when in fact a lot of people use it to keep in touch/informed about people they would normally lose contact with because personal contact is far too expensive a draw on one's time to devote to everyone you might like. And then for people they do keep in touch with normally it provides an extra level and richness of communication. You can be thoughtful, funny or rude in a more immediate time frame.
The article mentions a friend of the author who spent a night in drinking and on Facebook. Oh the horror! Because had he not done that he would have...what? Watched a movie instead? He almost certainly wouldn't have gone out on the town or met up with a friend - he probably just wasn't in that sort of mood.*
As much as people like to push the idea, I seriously doubt Facebook reduces the amount of contact people spend with each other, though I do not have any evidence with which to back up such a claim.
"Facebook is profoundly uncreative. It makes nothing at all. It simply mediates in relationships that were happening anyway."
While this is true, it makes Facebook sound far less important and effort than it is. It's not new, it's not creative, but it is a tool that for whatever reason people have chosen to use. And that reason is largely design and marketing. Not to mention all the work in maintaining and developing the site.
I would also like to ask the author how they would resolve some of the problems he highlights in Facebook's "Privacy Policy", as it would help out...well...nearly every website out there.
"You can't delete anything"
Data needs to be backed up - that's just a fact of life with a service like Facebook. You can't then very easily go editing these backups, it would make it unstable and the whole concept of a backup pointless.
"Anyone can glance at your intimate confessions...You understand and acknowledge that, even after removal, copies of user content may remain viewable in cached and archived pages or if other users have copied or stored your user content."
You simply can't stop this. This is the Internet. As for not being responsible for circumvention, it's basically saying "We've done our best. If someone is better, then there's not a lot we can do". Typical covering your ass stuff you will see most places.
"Opting out doesn't mean opting out"
Basically they are reserving the right to contact you in important cases. e.g. violation of Terms and Agreements. Makes perfect sense.
"The CIA may look at the stuff when they feel like it"
"We are obeying the law".
Nothing there is unique to Facebook. I'm not saying it's ideal, and there are perhaps issues that could be resolved to a limited extent, but they are by no means a problem induced by the nature of Facebook (other than, perhaps, the sheer volume of information). The only real gripe is the personalised advertisement, which I personaly don't mind/am in favour of but I can understand people not liking it.
* Note: I have taken the specific situation described by the author and generalised it to a very imaginable situation.
I'm going to suggest a radical idea. Every game should allow you to save at any point. Shock!
Now obviously some games are better suited to a checkpoint system and quite often it's personal taste. I'm not saying you should be able to save and restore at will as much as you like between checkpoints. Instead that there should always be the option to "Save and Quit", restoring to where you where when you quit. The game dynamics and tension of checkpoints are still present, but you can also stop playing at any point, whether that be because dinner is ready, you have to go out or someone else just has to get on the computer or watch the TV. It would help a lot, especially when you don't know if the next save point is 2 minutes or 2 hours away.
For this to work the game would most likely to have to implement a profile system (where different players use different profiles, each with their own set of save files), but almost every game that uses checkpoints use a profile system anyway.
Some major games may already implement it, I certainly don't play a lot, but I've played a lot of the popular games and I've yet to see it.
It amazes me how many people fail to give their setup programs a decent name. 30 seconds of coming up with a decent name can save a lot of people a small amount of time, all of which adds up. If the ease of my install isn't worth at most 30 seconds of your time then your program isn't worth my time.
You see a lot of installers that are named Setup.exe or Install.exe. Back in the days when the setup was on a floppy or CD this was acceptable - you knew what the setup was for because you knew what floppy or CD was in the drive. However, most programs are now downloaded and this practice leads to dozens of Setup.exe and Install (5).msi's and it's difficult to tell what each one is. If they just named it MySuperDuperProgramSetup.exe it would make everyone's life so much easier.
It's debatable as to the worth of putting version numbers in the install title. It can potentially confuse novice users, but I would argue the benefits outweigh the cons. If you're like me you'll keep install files around in case you need them. If it's a particularly big install file it's useful to know before you merrily go downloading it again from the site if the one you already have is the most up-to-date version simply by looking at the version number in the install file's name.
So please, if you are creating an installer, at least name if something sensible like MyProgramTitleSetup.exe or even better MyProgramTitle 1.5 Setup.exe.
Like most people I'm sure I find myself coming up with dozens of ideas for different websites. Useful little things that would really help me and, hopefully, other people. To date I've not developed the expertes to fully impliment and deply any of these, but I often find myself nether the less going through the whole design process. Practice makes perfect, right?
For almost every idea I find myself needing to impliment some social network or another. People need to be able to find friends, manage their status with them, apply some attributes to them, send them messages and interact with them in different ways. And every time I find myself thinking "Who is going to manage a social network just to send them a recipe/file/picture/phone number/whatever?". If it was a comprehensive, well built service like flickr, then yes. But for my little start up project? No.
And so every time I find myself wishing that there was a popular social network system with a decent API that lets me as a developer attribute the data I need and the user have the power of what information goes where, and who they are friends with and how.
Some websites allow you to enter your username and password for an IM account and it will find which of your contact list are already signed up to the service. Which is great for large websites, but not so much for smaller websites whom no-one trusts.
Some popular social networking sites provide an API to interface with their social networking system. Which is great, except I don't know of any that is used by any popular sites. While it is still a bonus that people who happen to use that site as they don't have to add their friends, everyone else does. I know a lot of people who don't have a myspace/facebook/flickr/lj. Why should I limit myself to only streamlining a small proportion?
Maybe I could use all the API's to allow the vast majority of users a streamlined experience. Which is currently the best solution I can think of. But this means a lot of work trying to find a way to integrate all these services.
Even then you are limited in what you can do. I have to impliment a large number of duplicate features outside of these services, such as PMing or any form of management with these services.
What would be really helpful is if someone could come along and design a service that allowed people to manage their social networks, as well as allowing developers to create their own services that interact securely with the social networks, sharing data and allowing the user to cut down on the amount of work they have to do managing their friends. Then they need to convince some big name players such as LJ, myspace and facebook to sign up.
A man can dream.
In the good old days of hefty 20 volume reference books you'd often need a couple more books just to tell you what was in the other books. And if you wanted to find anything in those books, you needed to understand the system that they used (or else work linearly through them). Now the most obvious system would be alphabetically. And so it remains for books, telephone directories and reference cards alike, if you want to find something you need to know the alphabet.
However, this notion has rather ridiculously moved over to computers as well. If you are learning something new, you can very often find handy reference cards that have just the bare essentials laid out nicely. Now the question arises again, how should it be laid out? The answer of yester-technology was of course alphabetically. However, in this new fangled age you can search thousands of words almost instantly, so what is the point in laying it out alphabetically? No one is going to be sitting there working through the alphabet to find the item they want any more, they are just going to search for the word and get it straight away. So surely some other logical grouping should be used? Exactly what can now be defined by the information rather than convention. Similar functionality (mathematical functions, helper functions etc.), relationships (family, friends, word colleges etc.) and so on.
By all means, within groupings arrange things alphabetically if you want (though some things have logical sub-groupings) but why I see so many huge lists ordered alphabetically when there are far more intuitive orderings I don't know. Laziness I guess.
I've been following Russell Brand's Radio Show [bbc.co.uk] via podcast since he moved to BBC Radio 2 a few weeks ago, and I have to say I have been enjoying it muchly. I would highly recommend it.
The broadcast from the last Monday had an interview with Morrisey which Russell seemed to be very excited about, Morrisey being a hero of his. And I have to say, I do very much enjoy Morrisey's music too.
However, from the interview he comes across to me as a bit of an arse. My personal disagreements with his vegetarianism, sorry, not killing animalism, aside he makes two points I would strongly disagree with.
Firstly, he makes the sweeping claim that qualifications are unneeded. Princess Diana didn't need them, he didn't need them, and a bunch of other people didn't need them. So clearly no-one needs them. Never mind that we need quantitative measurements of peoples abilities and motivation to feasibly assign work. It is a combination of training and nationally recognised assessment preventing the need for every place of work to implement a baseline test.
The second is his assertion that there is no point in planning for the future, as tomorrow "he could be run over by a horse". Yes, and you might not. In fact, you've had 17365 days and counting of not being run over a horse. Yes, you should live every day with the knowledge that it might well be your last, but that doesn't mean you should live in ignorance that there is a high probability that it might not be.
However, those irks aside, he is also quite funny. And makes good music.
As I'm sure any frequent Windows user will know the space in your taskbar is precious. If you have lot's of applications running at once you tend to find the buttons for the applications grow smaller and smaller. They tried to rectify this in XP by grouping them together, but it can still become a problem. It's one of the many things MacOS lovers will use to try and convert people.
What doesn't help is inconsiderate applications abusing the space. Take, for instance, InterActual Player (not my normal media player, but it started up with the DVD and I couldn't be bothered to change it).
But InterActual Player does neither. Not only does it make the terrible mistake of not being keyboard accesable, but it also, if you click on Controller, brings up the video. So then, what is the point of having two entries? It is not that hard to set the "Don't show in taskbar" property of the window to false, and it would save me some taskbar space.
