Last fall I posted a blog entry titled “Serving Notice” about the inadequacies of OS X notifications compared to their OS <=9 predecessors, and about my hope that Apple would look to cool projects like Growl for interface ideas. Well, Apple is holding out on me, but good work on Growl continues and the list of applications using it is growing.
One of my favorites is the unassuming NetGrowler, a faceless app which uses Growl to display information about changes in your network connection.
I have to admit that I carry big shield of skepticism when I circulate exhibit halls. Luckily a fellow attendee tipped me off to OpenLaszlo, an extremely spiffy system for server-side, declarative generation of Flash content. What this means for somebody like me – someone who, despite a lot of background in visual design, would really prefer to work directly with code – is that very sweet Flash-based interfaces can be constructed via XML.
I recently encountered an amazingly stupid outsourced Adobe.com “how was your support experience” survey. I got to the end of the survey and there was a single button with text above it saying something like, “Click the button below to submit your survey and close this window.”
I looked at the page source – the button does not submit the survey, which is already complete; it’s just a Javascript action to close the window.