Posted on Sunday, May 4th, 2008 at 4:54pm by Rob Wilkerson
Part of my conversation with the guys from Wesabe (now going on two weeks ago because I haven’t been feeling the urge to write much lately) revolved around their search feature. There’s been much ado about search in the Wesabe groups lately and rightfully so. It’s one of the mistakes that I think they made.
The gist of the aforementioned ado was that the search box simply didn’t work. The search box existed in the site header which I understood to mean that I could search the entire site, or at least the site’s public data and my own private data. No matter what I tried to search for, though, no results were ever found. And, to be clear, I wasn’t searching for “portuguese fur trade” or “yachting”. I was searching for content that I knew existed.
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user interface, wesabe
Posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 9:54am by Rob Wilkerson
I’ve been using Firefox 3 beta 4 on two different Macs – one at work and one at home – and have noticed a couple of things:
1. The Good
I really like the new Remember This Password implementation. I don’t know if this is new to beta 4, but I just noticed it a few days ago. Instead of the modal prompt that used to pause the form submission until the prompt was acknowledged, the new implementation uses the “activity bar” at the top of the page that’s become so familiar for other interactions.
What makes the new implementation so nice is that it doesn’t halt the submission process. That means that I can wait to find out whether my credentials actually worked before making a decision about whether to save them. If they don’t, I can click Not Now and try again.
It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a very nice convenience feature.
2. The Curiously Bad
One of the Macs with beta 4 installed was upgraded from beta 3. The other is a new install of beta 4. What’s curious and unpleasant about this is that the chrome is different. The toolbar of the new beta 4 install includes the conspicuously IE7-inspired, Jurassic-sized Back button.
I’m not a fan. I much prefer the toolbar that was part of my beta 3 install (and was retained during the upgrade).
Update 4/3/2008: Bill Mill set me straight in his comment below. Although I still don’t like the tumescent Back button, it’s easily reversed. To do so, right click on the Firefox toolbar and select Customize…. Then just check the option to Use Small Icons and the Back button will return to a reasonable size.
Although beta 5 was released today, I haven’t upgraded. The response I’ve heard has been mixed (good UI, but crash prone) so I think I may sit out this release cycle.
user interface, firefox
Posted on Saturday, March 15th, 2008 at 4:47pm by Rob Wilkerson
I’m just saying.
(credits: ffffound.com via Paint the Tiger, Carve the Swan)
design, user interface, humor
Posted on Saturday, March 1st, 2008 at 7:13am by Rob Wilkerson
I’ve been using Firefox 3 for a few weeks now, beginning with the second beta. For the most part, I’ve been pretty pleased with the b3 release. Its CPU usage still increases somewhat alarmingly over time, but I’m crossing my fingers that the developers will get that worked out before the final release. The one thing I haven’t gotten used to is the new placement of the Home button.
Since approximately the dawn of time, the Home button has lived on the Navigation Toolbar, but for some reason the Firefox developers decided to get fancy and move it to the Bookmarks Toolbar. Even though it was different, I can understand the logic behind the thinking so I decided to roll with it for a while. After a few weeks, though, I’ve decided that it’s not a change I’m capable of embracing. I just can’t get used to it. Plus, it takes up room on my meticulously organized Bookmarks Toolbar.
Although moving the Home button back to its rightful location on the Navigation Toolbar is an easy change to make, it’s not an obvious one. To move the Home button:
- Right-click on the button in the Bookmarks Toolbar
- Click the Customize option (this is the only button which has that option, which is why the process is not at all obvious)
- Ignore the panel that is displayed and simply drag the Home button to its desired location on the Navigation Toolbar. For me, that location is immediately to the left of the address bar.
It’ll be nice to no longer have to think about where to click in order to load my homepage.
firefox, user interface
