A Whole Lotta Nothing

Flickr's skinner box

Flickr's most addictive page in their giant game that is photo sharing is easily the Recent Activity page. It used to be a slight drag to have to check comments you left on other photos as well as your own, and soon after they redesigned their iPhone version of flickr, I realized the combined activity page was a much better solution to the problem of how to keep up on what has changed on flickr for you.

I'm happy to see upon checking my activity tonight, the same info on the iPhone recent activity page is now showing up in their website proper. Very cool change.

Someone wants me to install adblock

Recording of me trying to follow a link in a Salon article today. Somehow I wish there was a code of online advertising ethics that stated One Must Never Obscure Content With Advertising but I'm not holding my breath for that happening anytime soon.

24 hours with the iPhone: my dream mini computer

After my initial problems, I got a new iPhone from my nearby Apple store and spent several hours using it. My first reaction is that it's very good, meeting the almost impossible expectations I had for it. Photos are fun and look great, movies are nice and will work great on planes, and the iPod functionality looks good.

The thing that really knocked my socks off was Safari.

I do almost everything in a web app, and even with my blackberry pearl I was stuck with a crippled browser that could only use about half the apps I need. It was a breakthrough over my last device (which was painful for more than 1 or 2 web page views) but I never thought having a full copy of safari on a phone would be so liberating (especially since I only use firefox on my mac).

I have a set of tasks I normally do to keep up on all the workings of metafilter, but I used to only be able to check email and read the front pages of my sites on the pearl. Typically that was the bare minimum and I would wait until I got to a desktop to finish the rest of my work. Last night while catching up on some fluffy TV, I used my iphone for about two hours and it was pretty close to what I do with a laptop. I could check the sites, use all my admin tools. Ajax effects worked throughout and I could finally check my bank balance from my phone (my bank's site requires javascript and locked out my last 2 phones).

Usually before I go to bed, I have to sweep through half a dozen sites and apps to make sure everything is on the up and up. I learned that I could do everything on the iPhone, and I could do it from anywhere on earth. This is going to be great for airports and other places where I used to feel bored, trapped, and in dire need of internet access.

So in conclusion, the iPhone is nice from start to finish, but Safari is really the thing that turns it from a phone into a mini-laptop. Once I get more used to two-thumb typing, the last limitations that keep it from feeling like a real computer will be gone.

RSS done right (in firefox 2)

I love the way the release candidate 1 of Firefox 2 handles a RSS feed.

I accidentally hit a RSS feed today and was pleasantly surprised by the user experience. There was an informational message at the top explaining it as a feed, along with a RSS subscription preference option and a nicely rendered (not just XML data) feed.

Here's a short 1.7Mb movie of what that looks like the second time you click on it (the top explanation goes away and you just see the RSS subscription preference).

Speaking of logos...

The new MasterCard logo seemed too obvious:

Priceless indeed. (yeah, those are goatse sticker hands)

Everyone needs a little TLC

Have you seen the new logo for cable channel TLC? The old logo was all serif-y and dated, but the new one reminds me of the UPS logo redo. I wonder if the new TLC logo idea was "what would scrabble tiles look like on a Web 2.0 site?"

Craigslist redo redone

(craigslist redo redo, originally uploaded by mathowie)

I've been a longtime user of Craigslist. I got my San Francisco Apartment using it, bought a few things, and eventually I met Craig and we've talked at conferences together about what it takes to run a community. At the recent SXSW fest, a panel redesigned Craigslist. It's a definite improvement and it looks fantastic (they redesigned the listing pages as well). Other designers took a crack at a craigslist redo that was closer to the original.

The one thing I really didn't like about the SXSW Craigslist redo is that the top bar is all wrong. The dark color pushes it back for me, in a banner-blindness sort of way. I didn't notice it at all for the first minute I looked at the new site. Then I thought about how I use Craigslist, and I'm a big searcher. I either search from the front page, or I dive into the appropriate Sale/Wanted section and search there. I know the tech behind Craigslist is pretty simple and they're not much of a search/IT company, but I would love it if they surfaced search in such a way.

So I redid it. Here is the full size version. I took a screenshot of the redesign and moved stuff around in Photoshop to my liking. It's obviously a very Google-like redesign, but then that's how I use Craigslist. I could picture the Craigslist subpages carrying the search at the top just like a Google result page (just the top 100px or so), so this theme could be continued throughout the site.

Ye Olde School Design

I stumbled upon an old directory filled with mockups that never saw the light of day and figured now that it's five years later, I should probably upload them as a set on Flickr. These are from April-May 2000 with some later ones through in at the end, all done when I was trying to work up a new design for pyra.com, which looked like this at the time.

Tiger

I've been running Tiger for a few hours and so far things seem good. Mail is much faster (but the UI is uglier in my opinion), my phone finally works with iSync, and the spotlight searching is terrific. What I don't quite get is Dashboard.

I mean, I get that it's a flexible way to build little single-purpose applets and that's cool (I run konfabulator on my PC for weather, to-do list, and a calendar), but what I don't like is how it runs on a second quasi-virtual desktop type layer. Why not let me display the weather in a floating window all the time? I reference the small calendar on my PC desktop all the time while using apps like travel websites. It seems kind of lame if I have to toggle F12 whenever I want to use them.

Or am I missing some obvious way to keep them visible at all times?

Temp Signage

The Seattle Public Library's Central location is amazing, and although you could probably get twice the usable space if the building was conventional, I found it to be a really cool place. There are public spaces and private study spaces, the whole thing can be walked from top to bottom even though it doesn't appear to be a "spiral" that would allow that.

Soon after we arrived, Megan mentioned that there were dozens of hastily printed and taped signs added since it opened, due to people asking library workers the same questions repeatedly and many people accidentally tripping emergency exit alarms. So I took a bunch of photos of them. This photo illustrates the problem: even though this looks like a normal elevator, it is only for staff and you need to go elsewhere for the public one, and eventually they added signs to make that clear. It's not quite a This is Broken problem, but it's close.

I'm always fascinated by the balance that must be struck in a public space between function and form. The library is beautiful to look inside and out, but sometimes difficult to figure out where exactly you would do certain tasks. You can tell the designers went for subtle when obvious was needed, especially in an institutional setting. On the first floor, just inside the entrance, many people want to know where the bathroom is. Half the people I went with wanted to know as soon as we stepped in. And after walking and riding a few escalators, I was surprised to find out we were in fact at the top of the library. Scott was telling me on his first trip there he accidentally ended up in a conference room on the second "red floor." Even with the signs, I couldn't really tell what the red floor's purpose was.

So overall, the library was a great space filled with interesting things to look at and useful spaces, but far too subtle for an obvious funtional space like a public library.

le Paypal Error

(le Paypal, originally uploaded by mathowie)

Dean Allen is looking for donations for a new camera and I thought I'd help out.

You ever accidentally choose a different language at an ATM and go through with it anyway? You stumble through the menus based on where you remember the buttons being and you eventually get 40 bucks out but you're lost the entire way.

Using paypal in french is just like that.

And me being a big dumb american, I forgot there are no decimals in EU money, only commas.