Posts tagged with “Random Thoughts”
How do you display a list with a huge number of items? Easy: just paginate – split your list into several pages and let the user click through them one by one. Google does it with their search results, every forum software in existence splits a thread after N posts, my Blog only shows 8 entries at most. It's a solved problem.
Some years ago Microsoft had a different idea with MSN Search (now Bing): Infinite Scroll. If you do an image search on Bing and scroll down far enough, more results will be loaded on the fly and appended to the current page. There's no need to click a Next Page link. I don't know if they were the first to do it, but they certainly were the first I remember.
Today, many sites are using Infinite Scroll or the slightly less ambitious Load More button. And it constantly annoys me. It's not so much that most implementations are done very carelessly, but that the idea is inherently broken and really can't be done right.
Take Twitter for example. Say I'm writing a Blog post about how John Gruber was all the rage about X a few days ago. Naturally, I want to have a link to his tweets from said day in my post, so I visit twitter.com/gruber, click the more button two or three times, till I see those tweets and… now what? How do I link to this page? Do I have to link directly to twitter.com/gruber and tell my readers to click more a couple of times? How often? Well, it of course depends on how chatty he's been since I posted my story.
You might say that this issue could be easily fixed by utilizing the Fragment Part of the URL. So after I click more the URL would change to twitter.com/gruber#20, twitter.com/gruber#40, twitter.com/gruber#60 and so on (or better yet, counting from the first tweet). Now, what if I'd want to link to Grubers first 20 tweets? The URL would be twitter.com/gruber#8900 and the page would load nearly 9000 tweets? I don't think that's a good idea.
The non-link-ability is not the only problem of this technique: How do I jump to the end of the list? Or generally, how do I jump to a specific item (e.g. the first unread post in a forum thread)? What if the page becomes so long that my browser struggles to keep up?
It ultimately boils down to what we gain by using a Load More button instead of Next Page. And the only answer I can think of, is a few milliseconds of time I'd otherwise would've spent waiting for a whole new page to load. I also believe that appending items to a page is even more confusing for the user than going to a new page. After you've clicked more a few times, the list becomes so long that you easily get lost in it.
Pagination might not be as cool as all the AJAX stuff, but for navigating a list of “infinite” size I really can't think of a better approach. It doesn't have to be the old school pagination with a Next Page link though – you could build something that utilizes AJAX, caches the next page in advance, makes use of your mouse' scroll wheel etc. Ultimately it just has to be something that says “you are viewing items 340–380 of 920”: Providing a fixed sized, moving window into a set of items, instead of the fixed position, growing window that is Load More.
For the last ten years or so, I used to turn on my PC when I came home from school or work and shut it down again right before I went to bed. So most of the time when my PC is running, I'm awake. I've also been idling in IRC for as long as I had Internet – when my PC is running, so is my IRC client.
I still have all my IRC logs since 2001 lying on my HDD. The log format of mIRC changed slightly over the years, but it's all easily parsable with some basic Regexp. I quickly wrote a PHP script that extracts the Session Start and Sessions Close markers and timestamps from these logs and transfers them into an image.
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As you can see, I tend to stay up late. I also tend to go into a free-running sleep mode when I don't have to get up early every morning. At May 2004, after my A-Level exams and before my apprenticeship started, I “rotated” my sleep cycle three times. This has been even more extreme for the last two years, where we only had few lectures in university but instead worked on a lot of projects. I should really get one of these daylight lamps.
There's so much more interesting information hidden in these IRC logs. Maybe I can bring myself to parse and import all of them into a database, so I can run some simple queries on them. Maybe I can even find my pre-2001 IRC logs on some backup CDs.
Google introduced Chrome Frame today, which is essentially a plugin for Internet Explorer to use Chrome/Webkit as it's rendering engine. This at first may seem like one of Google's Aprils Fool's jokes or an attempt to make Microsoft even more embarrassed of IE. However, when looked at closely, the Idea to bring Chrome to IE is very clever and might actually work!
The problem is clear: While Microsoft certainly fixed many issues of the now infamous IE 6 in their newer versions, IE 8 still has many many problems and is far behind in terms of standard compatibility, features and speed. This has hindered many sites from using new technologies and ideas and oftentimes forces developers to backpedal in order to still support IE. So how do we get people to switch to a different browser?
Imagine you're visiting a website and are greeted with a message like “Your browser is not supported by this website. Please download one of the following browsers...”. Would you do it?
For the average user, the answer is of course no. There are way to many hurdles to overcome. Many people don't even know what a browser is. For them, IE is the Internet. They won't understand why they need to install a new software and they won't know what to do if they wanted to switch. Even if a user exactly knows what a browser is and how to install software, he'd still have to trust the browser vendor that this new software won't do any harm to his PC and he'd also have to invest some time to get familiar with it. It's just not worth the effort.
Now imagine you're visiting this website and you get the message “You need the plugin XYZ to view this site”. Imagine this plugin was created by Google – a company you know and can be sure of that they won't harm your PC. Installation of this plugin is just one click away. You don't have to download or install anything manually and your browser will look and behave exactly the way it used to.
Google Chrome Frame is just that. It's only a plugin, but for web developers it has the same benefits as if the user switched to another browser. If you're working on a high-end website that you can't possibly get working in IE (like Google itself does with Wave), or that just would work better with a standard compliant rendering engine, then Chrome Frame seems like a very good answer.
Richard Dawkins once urged us to not just be atheist, but militant atheists. I don't want to talk about religion here – after all, everyone already knows that religion is stupid. No, what I want to talk about is the Colemak keyboard layout. Today, I'm a militant Colemak user.
Two years ago I asked myself if there isn't any better keyboard layout for programming than the German keyboard layout. Many keys that are essential for programmers, like curly braces and square brackets, are only reachable through extensive use of the ALT key on the German QWERTZ. This is hardly ideal and makes QWERTZ much less usable for programming than the English QWERTY.
I did consider switching to QWERTY for some time. Sure, I'd miss the German Umlauts (ä, ü, ö) but that was a sacrifice I was willing to make. I asked a German programming board how they are dealing with the cumbersome QWERTZ layout – many of them are using the English QWERTY layout as their default and are happy with it. They also mentioned Dvorak, which I largely ignored, as it seemed incredibly hard to learn and had no apparent benefit.
However, I stumbled over a new, totally different, keyboard layout that sounded promising. It's name: Colemak. Colemak is designed to be efficient and ergonomic. You can type whole sentences with it, without your hands ever leaving the home row. Yet, it is fairly easy to learn. The keys for the widely used shortcuts for undo cut, copy and paste all stay at the same place and the layout of all special characters is identical to the English QWERTY. Furthermore, I can type all the German language specific characters with Colemak and it also adds many special characters like the ellipses, en- and em dashes, typographic quotation marks and many, many more. These would otherwise only be reachable with complicated ALT combinations on Windows (e.g. ALT+0151 for the em dash).
I've been using Colemak for almost two years now, and I can't imagine switching back to QWERTZ. Typing with Colemak feels so much more fluent than it ever did with QWERTZ, especially when programming. I can now keep my 10 fingers on the keyboard at all times, as all the special characters are easy to reach. I don't mind the somewhat more complicated to type Umlauts since I don't write that much German anyway.
Another nice side effect of having Colemak installed on my Windows Desktop PC and my Macbook Air is that it flattens out the differences between their QWERTZ layouts – that's right, Windows and Mac OS have a slightly different Keyboard layout for the German language. Especially annoying is the different positioning of the curly braces, square brackets, the pipe and the at sign – characters you'll need frequently when programming. With Colemak the layout is exactly the same on all systems.
Of course, while the layout itself is close to perfect, switching to Colemak also has it's downsides. For one, if someone wants to use your PC/Mac she'd first have to switch back to QWERTZ or QWERTY. This is not a problem at all on Mac OS, where you can switch the layout with two clicks. On windows however, you can only switch the layout on a per application level, meaning that you'd have to switch the layout for each application that you want to use. Whoever had this idea at Microsoft needs to be slapped with a large trout.
I can still type on QWERTZ/QWERTY, albeit a bit slower than I used to. The one thing I'm incredibly lost at, is when I want to type program code on a friends MacBook since I never learned the Mac OS specific QWERTZ layout. However, this is a problem I'd also have if I'd still use the Windows specific QWERTZ.
If you're already using the English QWERTY layout, there's probably not that much benefit in switching to Colemak. QWERTY is already nice enough for programming and the layout is identical on Mac and PC. For everyone else who is programing a lot on the German, French, Czech or Swedish layout, Colemak sure is a very nice alternative.
The nice thing of having a minimalist layout is that you can change the complete look of your site with relatively little effort. Still, this redesign took a while. I spent most of the time to come up with something I liked and then some more to throw it away and start over again.
One of my goals for this redesign was to improve readability. Since most of this Blog’s content is text – not images or videos – it didn’t really make sense to have a dark background like the old design in the first place. The result probably won’t win any awards for creativity, but it’s functional.
I learned a lot about typography and classical grid layouts in last few months, so I tried to apply some of it here (I'm still at the “I don't need InDesign; I can build my print layouts in Pages!” stage). The most obvious change is probably the font size. I'm now using a huge 16px base font that really isn’t that huge. I also switched to Helvetica/Arial which looks so much nicer on the headlines than Trebuchet-MS did.
There were also some bugs and quirks under the hood that were in desperate need of getting fixed. It should be all working now. If you still find something that looks odd, please let me know.
As of today, Picturelicious – the PHP Script that drives lowbird.com (an old version) and pr0gramm.com (nsfw; an even older version) – is now for sale. This is the first time I’m really trying to sell some of my stuff as software, so let’s see how this works out.
Packaging up something for a public release always means work, lots and lots of work. Asaph was no different and I was not even selling it. This time I had to be even more thorough. $700 is a lot of money, so I made sure I’d have a proper readme, all configuration variables are documented, the code is cleaned up and the script is really worth what you’re paying for.
I implemented a Paypal button to receive payments for Picturelicious; it really made me wish for an App Store. I do have the feeling that I will complain a lot about the App Store once I try to sell Yuckfu for the iPhone, but for now, Paypal sucks. It’s unbelievably complicated for the vendor and the customer. It tries to please everyone, but ultimately only confuses with too many options. Luckily, the software I’m selling only appeals to people who probably know how to use Paypal. But let’s not blame Paypal; let’s blame the W3C or whoever was to lazy to work out how the 402 HTTP status could be put to use.
Yesterday Google announced Chrome – Google’s very own web browser. It has numerous very interesting concepts – like the complete process separation of different tabs or the Javascript VM – however, one little seemingly unimportant detail stood out to me: Google Chrome places the tab bar above the address bar and the history buttons. Opera did it this way ever since, while Firefox, Safari and IE7 place the tab-bar beneath the address-bar.
The way Opera and Google Chrome do it certainly makes more sense when you think about to which element the address bar and page controls belong to. When you switch the tab, you also switch the contents of the address bar (the URL) as well as what the history back and forward buttons do. Every tab has its own URL, so it is perfectly logical that every tab should have its own address bar. Likewise, when you press the history forward or back buttons, you are navigating the history for the current tab only. These are not functions that apply globally to the whole browser, so every tab should also have its own page control buttons.
With all that said, Opera’s tab bar placement was the single most important reason why I rather migrated from IE6 (Avant to be precise) to a buggy Firefox Beta instead of to a faster and stable Opera several years ago. Of course my decision was influenced by the fact that I was accustomed to having the address bar on top, but ultimately I really believe placing the tab bar above the address bar is a bad decision from a usability standpoint. I mainly have two reasons for that.
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You can already read in numerous articles why code signing sucks, so let me just join the choir. The main reasons mentioned are lack freedom and overall complication – and it was indeed easier and free to get your iPhone application up and running on a jailbroke iPhone, than it is now with the SDK. I have gone through all the hassle of code signing yesterday, just to be able to test an application on actual hardware.
While other companies (Microsoft, Sun…) are opening up more and more, Apple denies itself from this movement and makes things more complicated for all of us. A very sad decision, and also one they can’t and won’t revert.
Update: Also, Fucking NDA.
