Only on Salon.com can a writer write a screed about his consumer troubles, and basically turn it into a 2-page 'why-me', self-pitying bore, and not do any research that would actually be interesting to his readers (for example, what percentage of broadband companies go out of business within 2 years of their startup? How many of their customers have no alternate provider of equivalent service? How many consumers, overall, are affected? How many *employees* of these companies are affected? What effect is that having on the economy overall, thereby affecting *everyone*?), and get said screed published on Salon.com -- and the guy even gets paid for it!
Whoop-de-doo! General aviation pilots have been doing this for years on various handheld and panel-mount GPS and LORANs with and without the maps, and, yes, have integrated these units with moving maps on their laptops. People who drive Mercedes have had this option available for at least a couple of years now.
Frankly, you can do the same trip-planning and navigation with a map and an odometer with a trip meter. Why is this such a big hairy deal?
AMEN! And I'll tell you another thing...
on
Homepage Usability
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· Score: 1
Simplicity and lack of eye-candy: this is exactly why slashdot and google are so popular.
It's fine, when surfing for entertainment, to spend some time 'exploring' someone else's wacky idea of a navigation paradigm. But when you're looking for information (i.e. 'content'), simplicity and *predictability*matters a lot.
Jakob Nielsen and others like him (has anyone mentioned Philip Greenspun yet?) put out these books that make us say 'duh' for a very good reason: 90% of the designers out there just don't 'get it' yet. For every good usability book, there are 50 that describe, in excruciating detail, stupid Javascript tricks, stupid Flash tricks, how to make animated images, and the list goes on and on. (As for Flash: aside from the latest 'shoot the Osama bin Laden lookalike clerk in the convenience store' animation, what *useful* things have you found that were done in Flash?) And people go out and buy these horrid books, and they USE them, people! They do!
I worked at a large beverage/marketing company for two years, some of which was spent doing usability analysis on intranet sites. Almost universally, they were terrible, and this is not an exaggeration. Examples:
Sites that used multiple font faces and sizes for one single page's body text
Sites with splash pages composed entirely of a 640x480 animated GIF (the spinning-globe motif was popular in the mid- to late- 90s)
Sites with nice images, but *no* content
One site was designed with an elaborate beverage vending machine for navigation -- the machine's buttons each had clever, inscrutable titles that, when clicked, would lead the user to a particular section of the site (done in Flash, no less)
one user insisted on having a 'talking head' narrate each of his intranet site's pages, because he had seen that stupid Microsoft Text-Readin' Genie somewhere -- the inteanet site, I might add, was intended for use by people in the field, dialing up with a laptop at god-knows-what-kind-of-horrible-speed
elaborate images, sliced up into navigation bars that swoop across the top of the page, then down to the left (pity thepoor bastard who has to add a button to the left-side navigation bar on those puppies in a year or two)
sites with no links to a site owner or administrator, and no other indication of who might own the site
sites with no link to the main intranet 'home page'
newly-developed sites, being submitted for approval, full of broken links, or anchor-type links done *incorrectly*
framed sites that targeted links to the wrong frame (i.e. you click a link in your left-navigation area, and the left-navigation area itself disappears, and a word document takes its place)
a lot of direct links to Word and Excel documents, and even Microsoft Project files
sites that required 1024x768 resolution to avoid left-right scrolling -- this, 3 to 5 years ago!
All of these sites were put together by alleged web designers or web developers. Damn FrontPage.
THIS is why we need these silly, obvious, common-sense tomes.
Good lord, people, get a brain. Your browser refresh defaults are what determines whether or not your form is populated when you 'click back' into it. If you refresh every page load, you get a blank form. If you cache everything, the form is just as you left it.
I can't agree with you, except for the opinion that Arial or some similar sans-serif should be used.
Also, since when are you supposed to use 'closing forward slashes at the end' of img, br and hr tags? In my own 4+ years of doing this kind of work, I've never seen an img tag with a 'closing forward slash' at the end. Is that some kind of a Netscape 1.0 convention or something?
Agreed -- where's the storage space for my laptop or my groceries? Maybe they're counting on people using a backpack, but, ugh, backpacks are so *gauche*;)
Re:whts with you guys?
on
This is IT?
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· Score: 1
I have to agree, strongly. The auto-stabilizing system samples the environment something like 30x a second? Although I hesitate to label the scooter itself useful, I think any technology that can maintain an adult human upgright on two wheels with the apparent ease that this one does, and that is supposedly rugged enough to take extended real-world use, is awesome in the original sense of the word.
The applications that immediately come to my mind are gaming and (related) training. Imagine a full-scale, full-immersion first-person shooter where you can finely control your movement in the landscape by simply shifting your weight!
Better yet, imagine the possible applications in aviation -- a craft that automatically maintains itself within a range of 'proper' angles of attack, preventing stalls or unacceptable aerodynamic load, for example? This could be a step towards consumer-grade personal aviation vehicles -- finally safe enough for the average guy to use.
OK, so I think it's kinda cool... so sue me!
Slashdot Mirror
Only on Salon.com can a writer write a screed about his consumer troubles, and basically turn it into a 2-page 'why-me', self-pitying bore, and not do any research that would actually be interesting to his readers (for example, what percentage of broadband companies go out of business within 2 years of their startup? How many of their customers have no alternate provider of equivalent service? How many consumers, overall, are affected? How many *employees* of these companies are affected? What effect is that having on the economy overall, thereby affecting *everyone*?), and get said screed published on Salon.com -- and the guy even gets paid for it!
Whoop-de-doo! General aviation pilots have been doing this for years on various handheld and panel-mount GPS and LORANs with and without the maps, and, yes, have integrated these units with moving maps on their laptops. People who drive Mercedes have had this option available for at least a couple of years now.
Frankly, you can do the same trip-planning and navigation with a map and an odometer with a trip meter. Why is this such a big hairy deal?
- Sites that used multiple font faces and sizes for one single page's body text
- Sites with splash pages composed entirely of a 640x480 animated GIF (the spinning-globe motif was popular in the mid- to late- 90s)
- Sites with nice images, but *no* content
- One site was designed with an elaborate beverage vending machine for navigation -- the machine's buttons each had clever, inscrutable titles that, when clicked, would lead the user to a particular section of the site (done in Flash, no less)
- one user insisted on having a 'talking head' narrate each of his intranet site's pages, because he had seen that stupid Microsoft Text-Readin' Genie somewhere -- the inteanet site, I might add, was intended for use by people in the field, dialing up with a laptop at god-knows-what-kind-of-horrible-speed
- elaborate images, sliced up into navigation bars that swoop across the top of the page, then down to the left (pity thepoor bastard who has to add a button to the left-side navigation bar on those puppies in a year or two)
- sites with no links to a site owner or administrator, and no other indication of who might own the site
- sites with no link to the main intranet 'home page'
- newly-developed sites, being submitted for approval, full of broken links, or anchor-type links done *incorrectly*
- framed sites that targeted links to the wrong frame (i.e. you click a link in your left-navigation area, and the left-navigation area itself disappears, and a word document takes its place)
- a lot of direct links to Word and Excel documents, and even Microsoft Project files
- sites that required 1024x768 resolution to avoid left-right scrolling -- this, 3 to 5 years ago!
All of these sites were put together by alleged web designers or web developers. Damn FrontPage. THIS is why we need these silly, obvious, common-sense tomes.Good lord, people, get a brain. Your browser refresh defaults are what determines whether or not your form is populated when you 'click back' into it. If you refresh every page load, you get a blank form. If you cache everything, the form is just as you left it.
I can't agree with you, except for the opinion that Arial or some similar sans-serif should be used. Also, since when are you supposed to use 'closing forward slashes at the end' of img, br and hr tags? In my own 4+ years of doing this kind of work, I've never seen an img tag with a 'closing forward slash' at the end. Is that some kind of a Netscape 1.0 convention or something?
Oh, you elite cultured Europeans! May I kiss the ring?
:)
Aww, cmon, y'all know that about 80% of you look just like the guys in that picture -- and the rest of you are women! ;)
Agreed -- where's the storage space for my laptop or my groceries? Maybe they're counting on people using a backpack, but, ugh, backpacks are so *gauche* ;)
I have to agree, strongly. The auto-stabilizing system samples the environment something like 30x a second? Although I hesitate to label the scooter itself useful, I think any technology that can maintain an adult human upgright on two wheels with the apparent ease that this one does, and that is supposedly rugged enough to take extended real-world use, is awesome in the original sense of the word. The applications that immediately come to my mind are gaming and (related) training. Imagine a full-scale, full-immersion first-person shooter where you can finely control your movement in the landscape by simply shifting your weight! Better yet, imagine the possible applications in aviation -- a craft that automatically maintains itself within a range of 'proper' angles of attack, preventing stalls or unacceptable aerodynamic load, for example? This could be a step towards consumer-grade personal aviation vehicles -- finally safe enough for the average guy to use. OK, so I think it's kinda cool... so sue me!