A great article on writing microcopy. The subtitle gives you the best idea of what follows:
The fastest way to improve your interface is to improve your copy-writing.
I couldn’t agree more. Subtle word prompts in the UI can be a great way to hint things.
A well-illustrated set of anti-patterns for designing Log-in and Registration areas (via James Wragg)
Plenty, plenty on Safari 4’s changes from John Gruber.
I’m super excited to be heading to SXSW Interactive in just over a weeks time. It’s the first time I’ll have been to SXSW, Austin or Texas - hell, it’s the first time in six years that I won’t have been to California when visiting the USA - however there’s one perennial thorn in my side with this trip: building a calendar for a different timezone. For Macworld 2008, Mike Rose and I attempted to build a common calendar (using Google Calendar) that would show everything we needed to cover for TUAW. However we instantly ran into mind-boggling, timezone-baffling, confusion.
See, in order to keep my borderline-OCD-for-keeping-things-proper happy, I set the timezone of this new (specific) calendar to Pacific time. I then proceeded to add events to the calendar. Of course, I added them at the time they would take place at in Pacific time, but was entering them using my own Google account: one that was set to use my timezone (GMT). We later discovered this meant that any events I added to Google Calendar were stored on the PST-zoned calendar as occurring 8 hours prior to the time I’d entered.
However, before realising this, Mike (based in New York, and on EST) would log into Google Calendar, see that the events were appearing 5 hours earlier than expected, and change their times to be the ones we’d agreed over email. I’d log in, and of course event times would be five hours later than I’d entered. In short, it was a disaster. I don’t at all mind the maths involved in calculating different event times, however when you’re wanting to quickly add an event to a calendar, it can well and truly shaft your planning.
The same is happening in my attempts to plan for SXSW. The not entirely great my.SXSW site (I’m here) provides a CalDAV link for you to subscribe to - and rightly applies a CST timezone (GMT-6) as that’s where the events will be. However when I’m talking to people via email and wanting to look at my schedule to fix up things for the week, it’s nothing short of infuriating to have the events displayed at the time they would be happening, were I in Brighton.
I fully understand that timezones for calendars are fantastic when you want to avoid doing timezone maths and co-ordinate meetings. But for me to plan a week in Austin, the lack of timezone-agnostic calendars - because, ultimately, I need it to be simply 1600 on Friday 13th March, not 1600CST on Friday 13th - is a complete pain in the arse.
When Mac OS X Leopard finally arrived on the scene, the inline-display of PDFs without the need to install Adobe’s ghastly Acrobat Reader was one of my instant-favourite features. However, it’s not perfect.
At the day-job we provide all our documentation in PDF form right now (debate away: we’re always listening) and it never ceases to amaze me, when talking to customers, that this Safari feature actually confuses and misleads them. You’re probably chortling away at how silly that may sound, but think, for a second, of what you’re presented with: a large grey area where nothing happens for a few moments (or minutes if you’re on a highly-contended broadband connection). It’s not as if there’s no feedback given: there’s the address bar’s progress bar, and perhaps the status bar below the Safari window if you’ve enabled it, that show exactly what’s going on. But I couldn’t help finding it curious that users’ attention is so vividly drawn by the main browser view, and the fact that it’s quite common for people to miss the fact that PDFs are, in fact, loading.
It’s worth pointing out that Acrobat Reader - for all its many sins - at least provides an indeterminate spinner to show that something is going on. I can’t help but feel that Apple could at least match that.
© Nik Fletcher 2007-2011 ~ Contact
