Ross's posterous

Here are a few problems I have with my laptop:

Smaller screen resolution

If you do just about any multi-tasking activity - whether it's coding or just organising files and folders - more screen space makes a world of difference. While my laptop has a widescreen-size monitor (resulting in an odd resolution: 1366*768) I need a dual monitor in my day-to-day life.

Flat keyboard

This drawback worries me a lot. Nearly all laptops come with the flat keyboard variety and I think it's killing my wrists. Compared with the traditional keyboard, it's got less 'tactile-feedback' - when you press down a key it doesn't sink in as far as a traditional keyboard; when laptop users are often coming from using a desktop keyboard they're used to having to hit the keys relatively hard to press the key to the bottom - in a laptop keyboard it's far less, which causes users to "punch" the keys with more force. I can't find a source on whether this could be a risk in getting RSI (I'm sure I've read it before somewhere), but I have experienced these effects.

The flatness of the keyboard is also an issue - while I don't have a fancy 'wave'-style keyboard even my G15 steps the keys downwards with each row. There also aren't many keyboard wrist rests for laptops - since the trackpad is usually in the way of where it would sit. The end result is that you end up with your hands parallel to the board which isn't good for your wrists. As I code a lot in my spare time this is a lot of typing in a bad manner.

Ventilation

Laptops get hot! The batteries especially so ;). Personally, I think this is a design flaw - laptops are designed to be placed on the user's lap, yet that's where the laptops' air intake and cooling fans are (not, that there is a better place to put them, realistically). My Dell Studio 15 gets around this by having a large vent on the spine of the laptop, right above the battery (this is really hot) which helps alleviate this a bit.

Resolving

So how to put these problems to rest? The solution to all these problems, where the laptop is staying in one place, is a simple laptop stand. This firstly, reduces the laptop's footprint, allowing more room for a second monitor and a large keyboard. This also has the added advantage of putting the screen at eye-level. As for ventilation, it depends on the stand. Having my laptop's spine-vents in the air, rather than blocked with desk matter, was certainly an improvement, but a solid laptop stand kinda blocks the ventilation on the base of the laptop. I received the stand I'm using right now as a birthday present (what, 18 hours ago?) and it solves this problem easily - the base of the stand is a fan, powered by the laptop's USB. It's the CoolMaster NotePal ErgoStand, and as well as having the USB-powered fan it doubles as a USB hub with an additional 4 ports (3 minus the laptop's port) - something my laptop severely lacks.

While this settles the situation when the laptop is at it's "base station", what about when you're on the move? The stand itself collapses to a thin size - about the same width as the laptop - however it isn't too comfy on the knees. Carrying a full size keyboard around isn't really an option and there aren't really any alternatives that I've found. This is something that laptop designers need to factor in themselves (or perhaps there is a market for an ergo-keyboard that fits over the existing one). Again, lugging a monitor around isn't a solution either (or maybe it is?) - this ends up as a choice for the user when buying a laptop - screen size or portability?

This started as a small example for the file_get_contents documentation page, however I got a little carried away!

The ingenuity of this advertisement struck me:

Feedly is really good at the AJAX I'm so used to with Reader. The magazine view is different to Google's sidebar/panel approach in that you start with a large frontpage of stories and can work through them that way. Opening a story quickly loads it in an AJAX frame which gives you the full screen to read it, rather than two-thirds of it.
It also implements social tools well. I rarely used the star and share features of Reader: I rarely re-read articles I like and if I share something I'm more likely to share it on Twitter.

Feedly renames these functions; annotation becomes share (a thumbs-up icon); star becomes a + icon. I feel I'm more likely to star things if I like them now.

If you need to read things in order the latest page has several views, one of which will give you a long list of all the feeds in reverse chronological order. There's also views for the river style, a picture grid and a fully inlined page if you like. It also follows Reader's great loading procedure: as you scroll down more items are loaded. However you must mark specific items as read to remove them from the list - unless you like refreshing the entire list. Clicking an item opens a short snippet of the article. This is baaaad, I want to read the full piece (which is accessible from the front cover) not a shortened copy. It does however include comments where available which is a definite plus.

The search bar offers suggestions as you type (very speedily) and searches blog titles and posts.

There's lots of social bookmarking tech involved too, with Tweet, Email and share links popping up everywhere.

Feedly has an cross symbol to mark something as read. While reading an article from the frontpage will mark it as read I'm unsure as to whether reading it outside of that does the same job. Otherwise, why would I need an icon?

Images are resized in feedly and this I desperately dislike, take a look at Dinosaur Comics above! Fortunately feedly's preview feature opens an (AJAX) window to the actual page so I can read it. This is still a minor annoyance though.

There's also some innovative stuff implemented in feedly. They offer feeds to advertise where they want in the reader, rather than just sticking advertisements at the end of the feed. There also some suggestion technology involved - this might be directly fed from Reader - it didn't seem to suggest anything for me.

If you're a Ubiquity user you'll probably be interested in the Ubiquity plugins offered. You'll have to upgrade to the 0.2 pre-release of Ubiquity and a newer version of feedly (which doesn't show as updated for me - oh well).

Overall I think this is an excellent product that could do well to be a little less confusing. It took me about 5 minutes to grasp the interface but I'm still a little uncertain about things. I'm going to stick with it for a while to see whether I can transfer from my sidebar/panel mentality.

Learn more about Feedly at Feedly.com.

(download)

Click here to download:

A_review_of_Feedly.zip (457 KB)

I recently read this blog by Alison Gianotto and decided to have a bit of a rant! What makes something 'usable' isa subjective topic, but I quite disagreed with a couple of points and thought I better express my opinions here (since it grew out of comment-size).

Link colors MUST be a different color than ANY other text

Well on Snipe.net the link color is nearly the same as the body text (or at least it is for me, but I'm slightly colour blind so it's probably bright red).

Don't use initial icons as the only way to indicate section content

I don't mean to pick on Alison but in the sidebar there's icons for last.fm, Facebook, flickr, Twitter and YouTube that link to various social profiles. I only use three of those services and I still know that two colored dots = flickr and that she's used the audio-scrobbler logo instead of the last.fm logo. I don't use either flickr or last.fm, yet the branding is instantly recognisable.
I believe in encouraging that - graphical recognition is far speedier to process than reading text. Names can be forgotten, images are easy to remember.

Enough with the no-right-click javascript

I haven't encountered this for at least a year - and that was when I was assisting someone who'd just been introduced to FrontPage and had discovered the land of JavaScriptSource. I say bring back the mouse-following analogue clocks!

Stop changing the size of my freaking browser window

This has been an issue for me since I forced all popups to open in the same window as the browser. And then it's only Imageshack that does this. I need to get Adblock to sort that out (but I'm not a fan of depriving certain sites of income using it).

in the Contact section, they had a link to 'about us', a link to 'contact us', and a link to 'submit an editorial' - all going to the exact same place

If they're all on the same page, and are linked to by page anchors, I see nothing wrong with this. It saves having a few extra pages to maintain.

Stop playing audio when I load your website

Here's a handy plugin.

Do we really need 'reset' form buttons anymore?

I can agree with this one, and say that I don't think it was needed in the first place. Double-clicking in an input (or tabbing to it) selects the contents of it anyway.
If they must be included then position them away from the submi, on the other side of the page perhaps; make the submit bold and defined; and the reset less focuesed: closer to the page background colour. A text link (javascript:form.reset()) would be even better. I'm yet to find a goosd usage however.

No offense to Alison at all of course, I'm subscribing to her feed right now, these are just what I'd prefer or sometimes expect from a well designed interface. Interfaces should always be designed for expectations after all.

Some people are thinking that Facebook's statuses could "kill Twitter overnight". I can tell you for sure I wouldn't:

Mr 'RL' friends wouldn't care about what I have to say
This seems a little strange at first but at the end of the day it's true. The people I've met online are the ones interested in a program I'm writing or are able to lend a hand if I tweet a plea for help. Bar a couple of people, the people I know in day-to-day life are not programmers. I don't tweet exclusively on programming but the majority is related to it. It's not that I don't want people to see what I tweet - they just wouldn't be interested.

I don't like Facebook's replies system
Facebook allows users to comment on status updates (since the new version) where Twitter lets you tweet an @reply. While there's not much difference in this I feel that having a reply as a separate update works better. It pulls in followers/friends into the conversation (although FB does notify friends on a reply) and just generally feels more 'inclusive'.

Twitter does need to do two things to the reply system however:

• Find a way to send replies to multiple people. I've been in a situation where I want to reply to two people before - you have to tweet twice or have the second person following you.
• Offer threaded views. There are services available for this but in-built to Twitter would be nice. Twitter Search can do this (thanks to Twitter's acquisition of Summize) but reading back through tweets in reverse order isn't very readable for someone joining the conversation later on.

Twitter's more personal
A Facebook Status Update or a Tweet? I love Twitter's symbolism of thousands of birds chirping out their messages to the flock. Facebook feels like a bland office noticeboard in comparison.

Despite it's early load issues Twitter's still the service for me.

The service is called HTM2PDF and works pretty well. There's a few flaws - this is only useful if you want a quick offline readable copy as the PDFs can span multiple pages (if there's an option in Adobe Reader to minimize page breaks let me know!) which doesn't look great. The best part is it's available from Ubiquity very easily:

It looks like the developers of HTM2PDF are creating a similar tool for images (although it doesn't work in Firefox) - would make a great addition to the convert plugin!

His plan is to force ISPs to offer special plans that only allow 'appropriate' content to be viewed by members of the younger audience. This will probably be based off of filtering technologies - ranging from blacklists of 'no-go' domains to JIT content scanners that give a page a score based on it's content.

The thing to remember is that the internet is not a country. It's an ungoverned anonymous environment. Anyone can join this network and publish their content in as little as a Sunday afternoon as long as they have an ISP to connect them. This is the reason why any sort of filtering except whitelisting (and an approval process) will fail.

A central database of whitelisted sites would have to be created. Each request by a browser would go to the ISP, and then through this database. Site not in the database? Some sort of pre-check would occur and if the site is deemed suitable it'll be tentatively handed over, pending human approval in the meantime.

However once we've got this list set up we have a few more issues. What's to stop new sites paying for addition to this list. How about just for a speedy approval? Sound a little like the net neutrality business yet? How about some big companies get involved, say the RIAA? This sounds like an excellent place to check whether there's any copyright infringement going on; and since the ISPs are already in deep with this (by law) it wouldn't take much for the concerned parties to go and reclaim their losses.

However (and this is just a teency weency little thing) can't content be re-uploaded to be something completely different? Looks like Wikipedia's out of the whitelist then, and in fact every site available. This is going to be a fun process we head down isn't it...