RoundCube: Beautiful Webmail
I can't wait to start using this. Please come out soon.
I can't wait to start using this. Please come out soon.
The full story about Apple, Motorola, and the introduction of the ROKR phone.
A look at what "interestingness" does to the microeconomy of a site.
The excellent new sIFR-licious UW Admissions Site, designed and developed by Mercury Cloud.Now that Flash 7 penetration is well into the 90% range, it’s time to start thinking about version 3 of sIFR. One of the big selling points of sIFR 2 was that it was backwards-compatible with Flash 6, but given the most current Flash adoption numbers, that doesn’t seem necessary anymore.
SO… what The Dutch Wolf and I would like to do is provide a new version of sIFR which offers baseline compatibility with Flash 7 and progressive-enhancement for Flash 8.
We’ve already come up with a few things we’d like to add but are requesting feature requests from designers and developers in order to make sure this new version is as complete as possible. Here’s initial punchlist:
A major requirement of this release is that it should only take you a minute or two to upgrade any existing sIFR installations, so rest assured that when the new version comes out, it’ll be a snap to install.
Since we’re already talking about sIFR, I wanted to quickly call out some excellent uses of it I’ve seen over the past few months:
sIFR also was featured in Print Magazine this month thanks to the excellent Patric King.
So enough of the sIFR lovefest… let’s hear some feature requests!
A list of things built with and on top of Del.icio.us.
A sneak preview of the upcoming Flock browser. Good stuff!
I’m a huge Bloglines fan and have used it as my only newsreader for almost two years now. It’s a smart product created by an even smarter person, Mark Fletcher. Almost every single feature Bloglines has added since launch has been implemented with the utmost of care and has improved my experience on the site incrementally. Yesterday, however, the site added two features which are in need of fixing. In their announcement about the feature additions, Bloglines asked users to express their thoughts about the changes publicly, so that’s what I’m doing.
I didn’t even know this was possible, but somehow, the addition of keyboard shortcuts to Bloglines has completely disabled system-level shortcuts in my browser. Bloglines, probably in reaction to Google’s new shortcut-heavy newsreader, has added all sorts of key commands to help users navigate through their feeds. Unfortunately, now I can’t hit Command-W to close my browser window. Nor can I hit Command-Q to quit or Command-T to open a new tab. It took me awhile to figure out what was going on, but it’s definitely Bloglines because if I’m not on a Bloglines page, the key-commands begin working again.
My first reaction was that although this is obviously caused by Bloglines, it’s a bug in Safari that it’s even possible for a site to cause such a crippling. But then I switched over to Firefox and the same thing happened! What the hell! Any key-command gurus know what’s going on here? And is this happening on PCs too? It’s very very weird. I’ve never seen a web page that can cripple a browser like this.
As part of the feature upgrade, Bloglines added something I’ve been wishing for a long time they had: the ability to differentiate between items that are truly unread vs. items I’ve specifically indicated to keep as unread. The difference here being that the latter are news items I’ve specifically noted as important, but I just haven’t had the time to go through them yet.
So the good news is that this feature has been added. Yay. The bad news is that the interface for it is not intuitive and it’s already annoying me. To the right is a diagram of the current implementation. Notice that some entries have one number and others have two separated by a colon.
Take the Kottke example. “0:9″ means that there are 0 items I haven’t read and 9 items that I’ve specifically indicated deserve further review when I find a moment. Other entries, like Meyerweb, have only one number. The “2″ means simply that there are two unread items. These numbers change wildly from month to month from me. Sometimes a site like Kottke will have zero “keep new” items and Meyerweb will have four… it just depends on where I’m at in my neurotic newsreading cycle.
The problem with this interface is a subtle one: First of all, colons imply either “time” or a “ratio”… neither of which apply in any helpful way to this situation. Second of all, there’s no intuitive clue as to whether the first number means “unread” and the second number means “keep new” or vice versa. Bloglines is forcing users to develop this association over time and it’s just not very helpful to do that.
To the right is what I propose. Notice the lack of colons. Notice also that the “unread” number is the only number in bold… thus more closely mirroring what Bloglines users are already used to: bold equals unread. The “keep new” number is set in light gray and unbolded to help you establish a quick connection that it represents a totally different thing. Furthermore, it mirrors the mail application analogy that what you haven’t read is bold and everything else isn’t.
So anyway, that’s my two cents about the Bloglines update. Please address these two issues and I’ll continue to sing your praises as the best way to consume RSS on the web.
Woody Allen (and I think Groucho Marx) once said “I would never join a club that would have me as a member.”
There is a special club, however, that I have refused entrance to dozens of times for entirely different reasons: The Safeway Club.
You see, I’m a huge supermarket snob. So much so that I have an entire post saved up which explains the difference between a good and a bad supermarket.
That said, I found myself at my local Safeway the other day. It’s a supermarket I hate for many reasons, not the least of which is their use of the “Safeway Club Card”. I’ve probably been to Safeway about 40 times in the last 10 years and every single time at the cash register they’ve asked me if I wanted to sign up for a Safeway Club Card. The conversation usually goes something like this:
Cute Checker Chick (CCC): Your total is $45.38. Do you have a Safeway Club Card?
Me: No.
CCC: Would you like to sign up for one?
Me: No thanks. I don’t come here often.
CCC: Ok. Thanks for shopping at Safeway.
40 different visits. Always the same result.
But this time, things went differently. I happened to be buying mostly alcohol (shut up… don’t judge) and the cute checker chick noticed that having a Club Card would take about 30% off my bill.
CCC: Your total is $33.29. Do you have a Safeway Club Card?
Me: No.
CCC: Now you do (throws card in my bag). Your total is $21.94.
Me: Ummm, ok. Thanks.
I tried to explain to the checker the significance of what she had just done but the accomplishment was mostly lost on her. One subtle difference in the delivery of the pitch and I am now a card-carrying Safeway Club member. Doesn’t mean I will start going there any more often, but hey, the card’s in my wallet now so I guess they figure that’s the first step in the assimilation.
All grocery stores with loyalty card programs should sign people up in this way. I can’t refuse a card if I’m not even asked to sign up for one.
Last month’s iPod-A-Month Creativity Competition drew almost 500 entries but was a bit too easy. This month’s was significantly more difficult and unfortunately drew much fewer submissions. The good news, however, is that we not only have a winner in Jeremie Blais of Ottawa, Canada but $2304 was raised for the American Red Cross.
Jeremie’s entry showed effort, creativity, and taste, and as this month’s winner, he will receive an iPod Nano from me and a pair of $150 Etymolic earbuds from iLounge. Congrats Jeremie.
As always, the submission pool for competition ideas remains open until the end of the year.
Hundreds of headlines wash over us every day. And part of why many of us engage in this flow is because we have faith that over time, this torrent of episodic knowledge is going to cohere into something more significant: a framework for genuinely understanding an issue. And we live with it ’cause it sort of works. Eventually you hear enough buzzwords like “single-payer” and “public option” and you start to feel like you can play along.
But mounting evidence indicates that this approach to information is actually totally debilitating. Faced with a flood of headlines on an ever-increasing variety of topics, we shut off. We turn to news that doesn’t require much understanding – crime, traffic, weather – or we turn off the news altogether.

Cameron’s Colosseo letterpress poster is now available: The only question is, black or white? The black is oh so tempting!
Jon Stewart Skewers Media’s Obsession with Chat Roulette: Funniest Wii Craps reference ever, as well. It’s really interesting to me that Chat Roulette is getting this much “attention” when TinyChat has been around so much longer, essentially does the same thing and more, and is much more useful to the average person. Just goes to show how viral public sex acts can be.
The 2005 email that spawned Picnik, Google’s latest buy. If you’re thinking about launching a startup, you should study this e-mail carefully. It’s a perfect example of exactly how a crazy little thought becomes a big idea, and even on its own, it’s better than most “official company business plans” people present to VCs. I gave a talk at Webstock in New Zealand a couple of weeks ago about creating a startup and I wish I had this to dissect at the time. Really good stuff.
I actually really like how clubby it is. Unfortunately it means I won’t be commenting on any Tumblrs since I don’t officially “follow” anyone besides via RSS, but that’s probably ok. Maybe the answer to the world’s wide-open commenting problem is something like this.
I was a guest on Dan Benjamin’s new weekly radio show last week, along with Merlin Mann, Christina Warren, Adam Keys, and Dave Nanian. Subjects discussed include Newsvine, keeping your own identity after becoming part of a big company, and the RADICAL concept of only publishing stuff to your readers and followers that is actually true.
Given that pre-compiling CSS is an official “best practice” these days, why not use that compile step to extend CSS in powerful ways? LESS lets you use variables, nested rules, and other niceties at author-time to clean up your rules and keep everything tidy. I believe The Wolf made something like this a few years ago, but I haven’t heard about it since.
Great article on the ins and outs of three dimensional imagery. Still doesn’t change my opinion that well-shot conventional cinematography is more impressive than the novelty that is Avatar.
This is one of the most useful articles I’ve read in a long time. As we work on focusing, strengthening, and simplifying Newsvine, the concepts discussed by Lukas ring true. “Saying no” has never been a strong suit of mine. It’s very helpful to remember how important of a quality it is. (via fullstopinteractive)
Newly released video of the space shuttle Challenger disaster: It was 24 years ago, I was in 5th grade, but I remember it like it was yesterday. School was stopped immediately and they wheeled out televisions in every classroom for us to watch the news footage. It’s great that this video has been released, but holy crap, how do you tuck something that away for two decades???
New ways of searching are almost never as useful as old ways of searching. Spezify is pretty awesome though. It’s a visually interesting, never-ending, horizontally and vertically scrollable, topic explorer. I don’t think I’d use it for digging deep on anything, but to get a quick visually rich sampling of a topic, it’s quite fun (via tiff, a long time ago actually, over email).
Reminds me of my favorite logo design advice: “Never waste a stroke”. (via gruber)