Design Archive
These posts are all in this one category.
The screenshot to the right is from a brand new Lenovo N100 laptop (formally IBM) .
Why do hardware manufactures ship machines with such abuse of the Start Menu?
"Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded."
- New Yorker, 1943
I hope Windows Vista gets a major overhaul in this area, and not just a way to search this mess. Companies should be disciplined for littering our Start Menus like this.
Who says all the cool new web stuff has to happen in the San Francisco area? Tomorrow evening I'll be attending DC 2.0, our own local unconference on the next generation web.
Some local companies that will be represented:
Time and place:
Mar. 15, 2006
7 to 10 PMMintz Levin
12010 Sunset Hills Rd
Reston, Virginia 20190
Google Map
I'm trying to help a friend who is a student teacher purchase an affordable computer. We decided to go with Dell because they have some great discounts.
I've built computers for the last 10 years and I'm overwhelmed with all the choices on Dell's "Desktops starting at $299!" web site.
What does it say about a novice trying to pick out a computer when somebody highly technical like me can't figure out what to get?
Some things wrong with their web site:
- Pop-in ads for the page I'm already on.
- Huge ads on the top and side for the page I'm already on and discounts that have nothing to do with what the offers I'm currently looking at.
- Too much fine print about rebates, credit cards, and discounts.
- Too much technical details such as processor FSB speed (800), RAM bus speed (400 MHz), hard drive RPM (7200), and model numbers of monitors (E193FP)
- Too many links to apply for a dell credit card - over 50 links on that one page!
What Dell needs to do to fix it:
- Offer three choices: Cheap, Good, and Powerful.
- Ask the users what's most important to them. Maybe they can only spend $600, and are willing to get smaller hard drive in order to get a larger monitor.
- Stop trying to up sell so hard. The $299 Dell Desktop has thousands of dollars in extra up sell, from high end monitors to software, services, and even USB thumb drives. Is somebody buying a $299 computer going to add a monitor that costs more than the machine? Are they going to add a $150 printer when there isn't even a picture of the printer to help them decide?
The offending page: http://www1.us.dell.com/content/topics/segtopic.aspx/odg_special49?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs
I downloaded Skype when Scoble first blogged about it on September 12, 2003. I didn't use it because I was afraid - it came from the same team that brought us the spyware/adware hell called Kazaa.
At Gnomedex I was one of a few people that didn't use Skype. Arieanna Foley of Blogaholics and BloggingHelp said she gets all of consulting jobs through Skype. KK+ of Bryght asked me what my Skype address was. That was it. I finally installed it.
My user account is dylan_greene.
Then things went bad... I was going to have it import my Outlook 2003 contacts, but instead I got this fun error:
Access violation at address 00BD3F80 in module 'Skype.exe'. Read of address 049BC000.
What does that mean? What am I supposed to do?
I'm going to try this (conflict with DEP - Data Execution Prevention - the only match on Skype's suppot site), but it requires a reboot, which I don't feel like doing. I already rebooted once this quarter.
Skype (or Windows, not sure who is really responsible for the error message) - can you make your error text a tad more understandable? Thanks!
There's probably tools there you didn't know existed. The author seems to have a Yahoo bias, and MSN probably should have been included in the mix as well, but this is a good start.
Why don't control panel programs and property sheets show up in the taskbar?
This one of my many Windows peeves.
In my brain, if it gets a Window, it should be on the taskbar. I don't care how it was coded.
Will Wright got his start with SimCity and is now most widely known for The Sims.
Forget everything you love or hate about The Sims and watch Will Wright's Game Developer's Conference demo of his next game in progress, Spore. This demo is actual game play, not amazing pre-rendered graphics with no game play (*cough* PS3 *cough*).
You start with a micro-organism in a pool of water and build it up to a sentient civilization that spans galaxies. You "evolve" your organisms with a Lego-simplistic interface that could be a game in itself.
It's an hour long, and the premise is how to let gamers create their own content.
Here are some clips from the video:
VIDEO: http://www.pqhp.com/cmp/gdctv/
The video requires "registration" but you just need to give a realistic-looking email address.
Source: GamingSteve.com (More about Spore)
From OhGizmo!:
Leave it to Ideationdesigns.com to come up with an improvement on the thumbtack. Not only does it look good, but it can do two things the old thumbtacks couldn’t.
First, it prevents whatever paper you’re tacking from swivelling in the wind, since it has two needles.
Second, you can thread strings or wires through them for countless creative uses.
Google requires employees spend 20% of their time on something unrelated to their real work, but that will still benefit the company. It's created some great new projects, such as Orkut and Google Suggest.
Atlassian, the company behind the awesome bug-tracking tool JIRA, adapted this strategy as well. Here's a great blog entry of what was created using 20% time.
I don't use their software, but this makes me want to.
Joe Beda, who left Microsoft's Windows team to join Google, has a great post about 20% time as well as a follow up.
The best web and graphic designer I know, and the only one I talk to on a regular basis, got an interesting call from Microsoft.
FoO's work is like the fine meals in an upscale trendy downtown restaurant - it's usually experimental, sometimes controversial, constantly cutting edge, and always damn impressive.
Damn... I finally added tag clouds to my site and now Zeldman says they're the new mullets.
I'm not sure I like Amazon's new look.
BTW, that's a shameless link to my mom's book, the New Jewish Holiday Cookbook, just in time for Passover.
If you click on a photo caption my site brings you to photo album and jumps you to the image for that caption, scrolling the page to the right image if necessary. (Example)
The disappointing problem is that you can't see that particular image until Internet Explorer or Firefox download all images on the page that happen to be in the HTML before that image. This happens even though all of the images before the image you are trying to look at are off the screen. This means that you have to sit there and wait for all preceding images to load before you get to see the one right on your screen.
The fix seems simple: IE and Firefox should load images that are viewable to the user first, and then load off-screen images.
I can probably fix this via some fancy JavaScript, but it seems like more work than should be necessary.
Longhorn, the next major revision of Windows, will replace or augment TrueType with OpenType, and it's got some cool new features.
Here's a couple:
Filipe Fortes, a Program Manager at Microsoft on Longhorn, is blogging the cool new features.
Update:
Thanks to TNL, I now have an account and 100 invites to give away.
My 360 page: http://360.yahoo.com/dylangreene
Leave a comment here if you'd like an invite.
Original Message:
I don't have any Yahoo 360 invites to give away just yet, but while you are waiting, I suggest checking out dhteumeuleu.com the witness some of the coolest interactive DHTML demos I've ever seen. I strongly recommend you visit using Internet Explorer since Firefox is unable to render some of his coolest effects. All of the demos include access to his elegantly simplistic source code. Flash and Java were not used for any of the demos.
One of my favorite demos is a DHTML PowerPoint-like slide show built as a ZUI (zooming user interface) - each slide zooms into view while the next slide approaches from the distance.
Meanwhile, Yahoo 360 mini-reviews have appeared from Steve Rubel and Tristan Louis, and some info from well-known Yahoo bloggers Russell Beattie and Jeremy Zawodny have good things to say.
So.... is Yahoo 360 what started the XBOX 360 rumor? That would be pretty funny.