Untropy

A lot has been going on the past few weeks, and that hasn't left much time for writing substantial content here. But, here's an attempt to catch up. I have been working on Cocoa stuff, the project, (some games), and more stuff on the site. This is, of course, in the midst of normal work and life stuff. How much can I get done during my vacation? We'll see. Read more for details.

Now, I admit bias against this browser, mostly because my mac-loving ways don't allow me to easily use it just yet. I don't know Chrome well enough to judge it. So, I will be kind. However, I can't help but wonder why so many are so excited/afraid/enamored with this new webkit-based browser. Can it be that compelling or that evil?

Aza Raskin & co. at Mozilla have released a preview interface for their new experiment, called Ubiquity. The goal is to come up with a quicksilver-like interface for the browser to aid in completing tasks. This is different from how web interaction works now; today, it is information-based. A user finds disparate bits of information, and combines them manually. With Ubiquity, the goal is to specify the task, and let the software figure out the information needed to complete the task. But, can they do it?

Aza Raskin & co. at Mozilla have released a preview interface for their new experiment, called Ubiquity. The goal is to come up with a quicksilver-like interface for the browser to aid in completing tasks. This is different from how web interaction works now; today, it is information-based. A user finds disparate bits of information, and combines them manually. With Ubiquity, the goal is to specify the task, and let the software figure out the information needed to complete the task. But, can they do it?

When you are writing things that no one will see (backend stuff, daemons, etc.), the focus goes to providing the proper functionality and safeguards. Care is also given to reporting status and error messages. These do not require much interaction with users, so the focus should understandably go to other areas of operation. And, more importantly, its behavior is well-defined.

When working on a project that many users will see, there is a different focus. People make mistakes, so the application should work in a sensible way for the users, and handle informing them of its operation as it progresses. Also, it has to be palatable to the users. While the actual functionality is able to be defined fairly clearly, the interface is mostly subjective.

Occasionally, I receive an email from someone that they didn't intend to send to me. Seems like a rather innocuous thing, but when it happens so often, one would wonder why?

In my office, it is an almost weekly occurrence that someone will accidentally reply to everyone some email they only meant to send to one or a few people. This happens because of a subtle difference in how Notes implements replying feature.

I am a big fan of John. DaringFireball has some great articles on Usability, and I read one of the better ones there today. So, I thought I would share.

• http://daringfireball.net/2004/04/spray_on_usability - Ronco Spray On Usability

Here, he talks about some of the problems with the Open Source community and usability. Yea yea, this article is a bit old (April, 2004), but It's still good. Give it a read.

So, they have added some more features to googles language translation tool

http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlanguage/

Looks nice. Then again, this basically obseletes my little neglected translation project... Unless, I just remove the stuff I translated myself, and make it plug directly into Google :~)

GREAT SUCCESS. I'm betting I will get blocked, though...

Keep an eye out for this (and for my new themes, whenever I get a chance for that.).