Posts tagged: DESIGN

Seen on Flickr: this huge collection of Web 2.0 company logos. You can argue with the taxonomy but it’s still fun to look at.

The title of this post is a joke, but one you’re only likely to get if you actually use one of these services: in the attention economy of link-sharing, titles that pit one thing against another tend to rise higher. (Maybe this validates the old Wired Magazine guideline of “no conflict, no story” – or maybe it proves the easiest way to get attention is to antagonize.)

Over the past few months I’ve played with both Digg and Reddit as ways to discover new and interesting stuff, and wanted to post some notes for the hypothetical reader who is even farther behind this particular curve than I am.

I’m not a big gamer, but I can get behind this:

We want to COLLECT BANANAS FROM MAGIC CASTLES not earn respect from fictional gang leaders! We want to stun enemies with BOUNCE ATTACKS, not shoot them in unrealistic and shoddy drive-bys!

Of course, I’m old, so my idea of the Platonic gaming ideal is Asteroids.

Last week I got a Palm TX, a new model released in October. You can check the Palm site for full specs, but for those familiar with preceding models the highlights are: 320x480 screen, non-collapsing case, built-in WiFi, and a $299 suggested retail price.

Some context: I’ve owned about a half-dozen Palm devices, and these comments are aimed at long-term users like me; the TX is replacing a Tungsten T, so this is also my first exposure to the 320x480 screen; I bought now rather than waiting for the elusive Cobalt because my T was at the end of its useful life.

This is amateur science at its best. Peter Klausler, an aficionado of the Dvorak keyboard layout, decided to see if there were better permutations of keys yet unrealized:

…I constructed a complicated function that measures the amount of “work” needed to touch-type a given text with a given layout.

Very good. But where does the primordial soup of keyboard layouts come from?

…4096 keyboard layouts compete with each other. The layouts in the initial pool are entirely random. In each generation, they all race to “type” a word list, and their per-word times are multiplied by the word frequencies in the input sample. After the race, the fastest half are kept. The pool is then repopulated by generating a single mutation for each survivor.

It’s become a user interface meme: the Big Green Download Button. I like it. (I’m surprised Django doesn’t have one yet!)

Download.com – the original?

CodeZoo

OpenOffice.org

Firefox (not quite compliant – no arrow)

Sourceforge (mentioned earlier)

Netscape (green-ish)

Opera

NewsGator Feedstation

You can’t possibly consider yourself an expert wielder of HTML and CSS unless you’ve read this excellent history, explication, and analysis of CSS hacks. Even master practitioners of Wilbur need to read it. Especially master practitioners of Wilbur.

I was intrigued by the suggestion that hacks are supposed to look ugly to discourage you from using them. Bit of an ex post facto rationalization, I think!

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Paul commented on Tue Sep 26 09:21:46 2006: