My must have Firefox addons

• Australian English dictionary: Hey, I'm in Australia right now, why would I have a New Zealand English dictionary?
• Firebug: For all your web application debugging needs
• FireGestures: Going back and forwards is just a left and right swipe away, and flicking between tabs is as simple as a quick "left mouse click, right mouse click", and vice versa to flick the other way
• GreaseMonkey: When the formatting of a site is nearly "just right" and needs that slight tweaking, or when auto-complete for login fields just doesn't work
  
• Personal Menu: Gives me the option of hiding the menu bar (and quickly making it visible with the alt key)
  
• Session Manager: The ability to restore accidentally closed tabs / windows, and also remember entire browsing sessions (for those times when I need to restart FireFox but don't want to lose all my windows)
• Tabs Open Relative: When opening a link in a new window, opening the tab to the right of the existing tab instead of right at the very end of the tab list
  

What problem are you solving?

I've been following the progress of Stack Overflow since it's announcement on Jeff and Joel's blog, and one of the things that has irked me is that they've decided to provide authentication to Stack Overflow only via Open ID.

So for those who don't know what Open ID is, it's easiest to explain by providing an example. So lets say you want to register for Stack Overflow with Open ID.

The first step would be to pick a provider, i.e. Claim ID, where you register a name, password, email address, etc and at the end of your registeration get an endpoint (i.e. http://claimid.com/fooUser).

You'd then log into Stack Overflow and instead of creating an account you provide your Open ID endpoint (http://claimid.com/fooUser) and Stack Overflow will redirects you to Claim ID where you would log in with your Claim ID name and password and select the "trust Stack Overflow with my details".

Claim ID will then redirected you back to Stack Overflow and that's it, you've created an account on Stack Overflow.

So the advantage is that once you have an Open ID, creating accounts is really easy as all your details are stored on your Open ID provider and all you need to provide is your Open ID endpoint.

It also means that if you should want to log into another site, you'd just navigate to that site, put in your Open ID endpoint and you don't have to type in your user name and password as you're already authenticated with your Open ID provider.

What that essentially means though is that now you have a single name and password to log into all your sites. GREAT!

Wait a minute? Isn't having the exact same name and password for all your sites considered bad practice? And not only that, isn't there already a way to log into sites using the exact same name and password, which is BY CREATING ACCOUNTS USING THE EXACT SAME AND PASSWORD?

The pilgrimage to Mecca

What's a pirate's favourite letter?

"P" of course.  For pirate.  

What else would it be?  

"R"?  

That's so immature.  

Asthetics as a product feature

Found posted by DHH on the 37signals blog

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1247-theres-no-shame-in-looking-good

Aesthetics is a feature in itself. One that I — and most the rest of the human race — is perfectly willing to let trump other functionality.

I think you’ve fundamentally misunderstood why people buy beautiful products, if you think it’s all about projection. While there’s certainly something to that (and I see absolutely no shame in that either!), it’s at the core about people feeling good about that which is pretty. That doesn’t make us shallow, that just makes us human.

While I completely agree with his sentiments, I'd have to say I think it's prominently western cultures which even has the notion that form can be placed on the same level as functionality.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122143317323034023.html

"The iPhone is a difficult phone to use for the Japanese market because there are so many features it doesn't have,"

Being someone of asian descent brought up in a westernised country, I'm sure I don't have to point out the dilemma that the iPhone presents to me :)

Varying degrees of evil

I had to find the following page for a friend today, which is a HOWTO for switching Azureus from the new "Vuze" layout to the old "Classic" layout

http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/The_Azureus_Experience

Classic Azureus:

Vuze:

There's nothing necessarily bad about the Vuze layout. It provides easily searchable content and a way to subscribe and publish to channels which you would ordinarily have to do manually (a boon for noobies).

But for some reason I can't seem to shake the feelings of evil from it. Namely the fact that Azureus no longer does what it was originally designed to do (download torrents) but seems to be providing a whole platform for delivering first rate value added media content to end users.

The old bait and switch (well, not really switch as there is still a way to get back).

I also can't shake the feeling that this "platform" will soon start to charge money for its use, and that those who have been suckered into either publishing or subscribing to the channels (i.e. have put a lot of effort in) will soon have no choice but to pay the cost.

This model sounds kinda familiar

And familiar again

The beginning of a new meme?

http://isbarackobamamuslin.com/

New Facebook

Contrary to most people I love the new Facebook. They're only 3 things I'm ever concerned with when looking at someone's profile which they've incorporated into the new design:

1. Their wall
2. Their info
3. Their pictures

I also think the links are better labelled, and the layout of the nested tab system is very easy to understand.

Sadly though, it appears the Facebook team isn't as confident in their new redesign as they should be and instead have littered the entirety of their site with tool tips which ordinarily wouldn't be too bad were it not for the way they designed them.

Firstly the tool tips aren't naturally part of the design and they stand out when you first load a page. This detracts from the main content and instead of taking in the new layout, you're busying trying to read all the orange boxes everywhere.

Secondly there is an option to remove the tool tips once you read them, and once you remove them there's no distinguishable way to get them back. This makes the user less likely to remove them and leave the layout in that jumbled mess.

1. If your layout is easy to navigate you shouldn't have to have help scattered everywhere
2. If you need help it should be easily discoverable
   

Product or service?

There's an old joke which goes, you can tell what you're getting (a product or a service) by when you get charged.

If you're getting charged before, you're getting a product (i.e. shoes, iPod, etc). If you're getting charged after, you're getting a service (taxi, plumber, etc).

When do you get charged when you go to McDonald's?

With this in mind, when do you get charged when you use Twitter?

What about Google Maps?

Statistics

The New Zealand Reserve Bank reduced it's OCR the other day by .5% (the 2nd time in rougly the last 2 months).

I wasn't aware that they had dropped the OCR in New Zealand prior to that, but I was aware that about a week ago Australia's Reserve Bank did the same thing, but only by .25%.  

I wonder what impact this has on house prices.  I have no idea how I could sensibly measure this, but being curious I loaded up the charts for both currencies vs the US dollar.  First, New Zealand:

Now Australia:

Afraid the LHC will destroy the earth?

http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/

Also has an RSS feed, and some interesting comments in the source.

Innovations in EFTPOS

The regular way of paying by EFTPOS at the supermarket:

1. Wait for cashier to scan all your goods
2. Swipe your card
3. Cashier asks if you want cash (answer is always no)
4. Cashier asks "is that on savings?" (I don't know why they ask this in Melbourne, I'm completely capable of pushing the button to choose my account)
5. Type in PIN
6. Wait for transaction to process
   
7. Done

Saw this at the Safeway off Chapel Street the other day:

1. While cashier is scanning your goods, swipe your card on the machine
2. Pick either "full amount" or "full amount with cash out"
3. Pick account
4. Wait for cashier to finish scanning goods
5. Amount then pops up on EFTPOS machine
6. Type in your PIN
7. Done

EFTPOS has always been the slower paying option and ideas to speed it up have always been technology related.

It's good to see a solution which involves just a bit of process tweaking, which works just as well as getting faster hardware.

Swipe!

Spotted on 37signals

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1240-swype-keyboard-for-touchscreens

A new input method by one of the creators of the T9 Predictive Text input system.

Brief usage rundown:

• Display graphical keyboard on screen
  
• Instead of punching out individual letters, just put your pen down, drag (roughly) over the letters you want to type
• Lift your pen up
  
• The word automagically appears

Incredibly simple. Not the obvious solution. In my mind, the "logical" progression from T9 on a full keyboard would be the iPhone solution, where you type out the text roughly and then it tries to guess what you type.

I would imagine an input system like this would increase the iPhone's usability infinitely, especially in portrait mode where the keys are incredibly skinny.

Ok I'm back

Lets try this again.