Archive for March, 2006
Firefox 2 Alpha, branded Bon Echo, was just released. As usual with Firefox releases, it was announced on a number of big websites before it was officially ready. I downloaded it a day early too, but I knew what I was getting. This is an Alpha release meaning it is for testing, not for most users. It is not near Beta quality as previous Firefox Alpha releases have been so be prepared if you try it.
I know it is an alpha, but the new stuff is a mess and the old stuff isn’t improved much if any. If Mozilla is hoping to get the final 2.0 out before or around the same time IE7 and Vista are released I fear it is going to be pretty rough and not going to stand up to IE7’s advances.
I read a comment that compared this to a version 1.6 Alpha rather than 2.0 Alpha because of the few improvements over 1.5. He was optimistic that by the final release it would be worthy of a .5 version increase. The currently planned features would do it for me, but are they going to be done in time or will features be thrown out to make the release date?
So far it appears to use less memory than FF 1.5 but I haven’t used it heavily. If it does, that is a really good thing since that was a frequent complaint about 1.5. It still uses a lot, but at least it doesn’t go wild eating up whatever free memory it can get.
I thought part of the point of moving Bookmarks and history into an SQLite database with Places was so having a lot of Bookmarks wouldn’t slow down the Bookmarks menu. It is still takes several seconds to display the menu after I click on Bookmarks just as FF 1.5. I have a lot of bookmarks, over 2000 bookmarks which is still more than 600 KB after removing embedded favicons and some other meta data.
But so far Places is very rough, it currently doesn’t even have as much functionality as the old Bookmark system they are replacing. But supposedly it only landed on this branch two weeks ago. For two weeks work it seems pretty good, but that isn’t how things work I am sure. It has surely gone through a lot of development before it landed. I have high hopes for Places though. I liked having my Bookmarks in HTML format, but that just isn’t efficient.
A simplified version of Places should open up in a sidebar by default. Users of IE7 are going to like their Favorites Center dropdown menu that can turn into a sidebar. I have seem several older users that like to have their bookmarks or history sidebar open all or most of the time in both IE and FF.
How about the biggest mistake of all? Close buttons on every tab. There are two major problems with that.
First, you can accidentally close a tab while switching to it. I could live with the close buttons on tabs if the buttons weren’t active when the tab isn’t active. Currently even though the buttons are still active when the tab is not, they are grayed as if they are not active. I know you will be able to undo closing tabs, but you shouldn’t have to. Opera 8.5 does the exact same thing and it is pretty annoying in the little I used Opera. I closed a bunch of tabs by accident while switching. Opera already has the undo function built in as the usual Edit, Undo. That is easily discoverable and something Firefox developers should think about copying. Current FF extensions that provide the undo function I think are too complex for most users. They are great for advanced users, but for most people a whole lot of undo close choices such as window or tab and which ones or all going back several actions is too much.
My other complaint about having close buttons on tabs is because each takes up valuable horizontal real estate. The more windows you have open the worse it will be. Currently the solution is to hide the close button on tabs when you reach a certain number of tabs (or maybe it is by tab width but it doesn’t appear that way). For my setup, after 7 tabs the close buttons hide on inactive tabs. I am sure it is just a bug, but currently when you close the 8th tab they don’t come back though, you have to get back down to 6 tabs. Not considering that, this is an inconsistent interface. Either the close buttons should always be on inactive tabs (which is not a good idea) or they should always be hidden. It is an inconsistent UI feature otherwise.
There is all kinds of discussion on handling tab overflow but there just is no good method. So preventing the overflow condition as long as possible is important. Clearly that is why the inconsistent UI is meant to solve, but a much better solution would be to only show the X on the active tab.
It is hard to believe, but Microsoft does pretty much exactly what I want with tab close buttons in IE7. In addition to them only being shown on the active tab, they stand out less. Firefox’s are big and bright red so along with the favicon the page title is surrounded by graphics. I wonder how many people will make their site’s favicon into FF Xs just to throw people off.
I discovered hitting “Use Current Pages” as Homepage adds all the open tabs. Clearly the button text says that but last time I did it in 1.5 I didn’t have more than one tab open. As currently displayed all on a single line, a user may think FF is adding only the first tab in the window as the homepage. I did and I even knew FF could have multiple homepages.
What is with swapping the Stop and Reload buttons? Neither are likely frequently used when compared to the back button. And if you are putting them in order of most use, I suspect the forward button is used less by common users. But that would clearly be dumb. My point is, don’t swap buttons just for the sake of moving them. Consistency in placement is also important (just look at the huge mistake IE has made with IE7’s toolbars). Every time I go to hit stop now I end up almost hitting Reload. I am currently using large icons which I don’t normally do so that proves to me that my brain looks for the stop button in Firefox as the third button from the right, not the distance and clearly not first looking at the image.
I have also read that the Home button may be on the way out (by default). Maybe that was just discussion or a planned “feature” since it is still here in 2.0 Alpha. Based on usability tests the home button may never get used, but does that really reflect actual usage? I don’t think so. I know there are a lot of people that probably never use it, but a lot of people don’t use Bookmarks/Favorites either and that isn’t being thrown out. When I am using one of my computers I use the Home button pretty frequently. I have a custom homepage with most of the links that I go to frequently. The default homepage is just a Google search page. It is not necessary to go Home to run a search since we have the search box. IE7 hasn’t gotten rid of the Home button though they did move it in their scattering around the toolbar buttons.
The Home page is where a portal site makes sense. When I setup someone’s browser for them, I usually choose Google News or Yahoo News. My Yahoo or Google’s Personalized Home are great choices even if the user doesn’t have an account. The page non logged in users get already have a good selection of information (more so on My Yahoo).
Back to the Bookmarks and History menu, why do we have two options in each that do basically the same thing. Bookmarks has “Search in Bookmarks” and “Organize Bookmarks” which both bring up Places just the same. History does exactly the same with “Search in History” and “View All History.” Not only is this pointless, it takes up space and is are just more menu options you must read through. Even if they are intended to do a slightly different thing eventually it seems a waste to include both. The idea of places is to have everything in one place. Searching and managing. No need for menu items for both.
One reason the wasted space in the Bookmarks menu bothers me is because the overflow scrolling sucks a whole lot. If you have a ton of bookmarks and don’t have them in a well organized hierarchy using the scroll up and down “buttons” is horrible. It is very slow to reach where you want, but too fast to actually see where you are going. Clearly those are contradictory needs, but that is where the problem lies with this implementation. It doesn’t meet either need because it tries to meet both at the same time.
I don’t have a good suggestion how to fix it though. Something like Microsoft’s Personalized Menus would certainly be possible now that Bookmarks and History are in the DB, but I hate that in UIs. A scroll bar would be a bit more usable, but not consistent with what users expect from dropdown menus. K-Meleon uses submenus to deal with this. At the bottom of what Bookmarks could be displayed on the screen it has a [more] “folder” that expands into another row of Bookmark items. It is an easier to use solution than what is currently in Firefox, but it is not a great one.
And a longtime annoyance is the Add Bookmark menu items scroll with the bookmarks. It is a major pain to scroll back up to the top to bookmark a site. I know Ctrl+D bookmarks the page, but I had to look that up, I don’t remember it. Why would I, they letter ‘D’ has nothing to make me think bookmark, favorite, or add. Too bad ‘B’, ‘F’, and ‘A’ already have pretty standard uses.
I have read that Bookmarks/Favorites aren’t used by many people. My observations of others show the same thing. As for myself, I bookmark a lot of stuff but I don’t often go back to them. I bookmark them mostly just in case. Of course, part of the reason I don’t use them is the UI sucks and is slow when handling lots of bookmarks. The other reason is because I built my own custom homepage with most of the links I go to regularly.
They also badly need to get Native Theme Rendering done. FF menus just look horrible on Windows other than those using the Luna theme on XP. It is listed as one of the “Nice to Have” features of 2.0. Meaning we still probably won’t see it till 3.0 if ever.
I also decided to give a Trunk build with Cairo a try (Trunk is where work on the road to Firefox 3.0 is done). Cairo is much better than I imagined. I figured it would still be pretty slow but it wasn’t bad. There are display bugs with it, but my main concern was the speed. Don’t know about slow machines, but it runs fine on my laptop which isn’t the fastest anymore. Other than Cairo there aren’t many visible differences from the Firefox 2 Alpha.
Update: Mike Beltzner, user experience lead for Mozilla, posted a bunch of info on the direction they are planning for Firefox 2. This comes from open discussion with users in their newsgroups. This is a very good sign and I like most of what is planned. But we will see how much actually makes it into Firefox 2.
March 22nd, 2006
Several months ago I decided it was finally time to buy a good digital camera. I have been wanting a good one for years but was never really happy with the ones anywhere near my price range. Previously the best I had was a 1.2 megapixel “keychain” camera. Anything would be a huge improvement, but I wanted a huge zoom and lots of megapixels. After lots of shopping and reading reviews, I finally chose the Canon Powershot S2 IS. I am really glad I did.
There wasn’t (and still isn’t) a lot of choice in the super zoom category and I knew I didn’t want to go all the way up to a D-SLR (too big and expensive plus no live LCD preview). The main part of my shopping involved testing out display models to see which ones I could actually get good pictures out of. Since no store has all brands and models, this took several days and a lot of driving. Best Buy turned out to have the best selection to look at. Circuit City would be second best. Both had cameras the other didn’t. Get a feel for them this way was also important, some that looked good online were just awkward to hold.
I had borrowed a friend’s Kodak a few times and much of the time I had blurry images. I just wasn’t keeping the camera still enough when I clicked the shutter. Being used to film cameras and higher ISOs, that was never a problem before. The last part of the name of my S2 is IS, which stands for Image Stabilization and it works really well. Except in low light, I almost never have that problem. That was the biggest selling point for me, I wanted a camera that I could actually use.
Thousands of shots later I still love this camera. There are some limitations like a max 400 ISO (which gets pretty grainy/noisy), its size, and it uses AA batteries. The AA battery limitation turns out out be a big plus for many users, me included now. You can buy your own rechargeable batteries (I bought two sets) and if you run out you can always buy some AAs almost anywhere to keep you going till you can recharge. That convenience is pretty good since there is little warning before the batteries run out. You get only a few more shots once the battery indicator comes on. But two sets of good rechargeable batteries and a charger adds a bit to the price which I didn’t really take into account originally.
I wish it was a little smaller. It has a nice size for fitting in you hand when you are shooting and it isn’t really heavy, but it stands no chance of fitting in your pocket. The lens of course takes up a good bit, you just can’t squeeze a 12x optical zoom into nothing. Having to choose between super zoom and pocket size I choose zoom and still would today. I am not sure how much I would like a tiny thin camera anyway. Hitting the buttons and just holding it would be awkward I think. But being able to put it in my pocket might make up for that.
Most reviews will complain that the lens cap comes off too easy. I agree. But it seems to be on purpose. When you turn it on with the cap on, the strap would put pressure on the lens motor which can’t be good. Of course a simple solution to that would be make the strap a tiny bit longer. It doesn’t come off just from gravity or shaking, it actually has to brush against something. I have gotten used to it and it stays on most of the time.
The other common review complaint is the plastic threads for a tripod. It holds just fine, but I guess the fear is they could be stripped easily if you use a tripod often. Mine has only been on one a few times so for me it is not a problem I worry about.
The price was a bit more than I wanted to pay, but it was worth it and it has come down since I bought it. Canon recently announced the S3 IS which I am already a big fan of. There aren’t a lot of changes, but more megapixels and double the ISO are big selling points for me. I am a little worried about the 100 gram weight increase, currently I don’t think it is heavy, but it would be nice if the new one weighed less, not more.
And to prove banner ads actually do make a difference sometimes, I clicked on a Sony camera ad and found this really nice camera. The Sony Cybershot DSC-R1 makes the S3 look pathetic, but it also costs a whole lot more. It is a bit less than a D-SLR and you don’t need to add more for a good lens since it is built in. Interchangeable lenses are of course a must for some people, but even on my Dad’s old film SLR I usually used only one lens (with amazing zoom). It was big and heavy, but I love zoom. The one downside of the Sony camera is the zoom is only 5x optical zoom compared to the 12x of the Canon S2 and S3.
I also looked at some of the competition for the Sony DSC-R1. Canon has a camera up in that price range too with a body similar to my current S2. The zoom is better than the Sony, but only 7x so still not as good as the S2/S3. I just wonder if the higher megapixels make up for that in ability to crop photos later. I like some of its features, but it is more of a pro camera than I want.
While I am looking forward to the S3, if you want to save some money on a super zoom camera, the S2 is a still a good camera and the S3 so far doesn’t seem to be a great deal better. Once the S3 is out the S2’s price should drop even more though not necessarily in stores. When I was shopping for the S2 the S1 was still pretty high priced. Try online but be careful where you buy from.
March 21st, 2006
If you ever needed to pull a practical joke on a techie, this would be a good one. It takes some setup time, but seems well worth it. We all know keyboards can collect a lot of dirt. What if when your victim returns they find plants growing from between the keys? Johannes gives an account of how he did it using the small and fast growing plant, cress commonly used in plant research.
Found via Crazy Hacks.
March 20th, 2006
plastk:net is a blog run by a guy researching multi-monitor game interfaces and notification systems. Looks like a lot of fun. He currently has Quake 3 going on 24 monitors at a resolution of 10240×3072.
Even if you aren’t a gamer, that would be awesome to play. I play games some, but usually suck. My brother though plays games pretty much 24/7. He probably won’t see this post because he never reads his email and doesn’t even know this blog exists. The best way to contact him lately is in game. It is very satisfying to kill him but pretty rare. I am just happy when I can keep the ratio of kills to about 1:5 against me.
My brother’s latest addiction is Warcraft though and I don’t play that so even finding him online isn’t that easy anymore. I liked Ultima IV for the NES many years ago which has some similarities, but have not played Warcraft. No way I would be able to kill him in it anyway so not as much incentive.
March 19th, 2006
Don’t know exactly what happened, but when I checked on my linux box today hoping the KDE 3.5 compile was finally done, I saw bootup stuff on the screen. Something had caused it to reset (could have something to do with the 100% disk usage).
/var/log/emerge.log says I got up to 106 of 277 of the kde-meta package (which was kde-base/kopete) and then the file ends with a *** terminating. message. It took 28 hours to get less than 40% through the meta packages so I am now going to give up and just get 3.4 base. All I really want is an up to date Konqueror. Its times like these that I wonder why I am still using Gentoo.
March 17th, 2006
In my earlier post I talked about all kinds of Operating System stuff. One of those being my Gentoo upgrade. On one hand, upgrading Gentoo is really simple. You just emerge -U world. But then you get the notice at the end that there are some config files that need updating. That is where it becomes annoying. Handling actual changes I am fine with. I would kind of rather do it myself than have an automated upgrade go bad. But when the only difference between the files is the Gentoo file info header comments, why do I need to get involved? I had about 150 ._cfg0000_* files to go through. Many of those were only different in their header comments. And most of the other files I had never modified either. Is there a simple way to deal with this I just don’t know about?
Update: Well, turns out there is a simple way to do it. Sam just told me about etc-update and dispatch-conf. I am still compiling KDE 3.5 so will give them a shot when that finishes sometime soon I hope. It would be nice if the emerge message that tells you about updating the files gave you some hint these tools existed.
March 16th, 2006
I haven’t used WordPress much, but so far so good (mostly). The install page mentioned “the Famous 5-minute install.” I didn’t time it, but I bet it was pretty close to that. I am pretty amazed at how easy it was to setup. And the options and customizability is great, far better than blogger.
I was very surprised by the number of plugins available. I knew WP had plugins, but you can find one for just about anything. The only problem is many are not up to date with the latest release just like Firefox’s extensions. But unlike Firefox extensions, nothing blocks the install of non-working extensions except the PHP errors you will get when you try to use it.
I am finding the “rich” post editor a bit annoying. In Firefox the cursor is a bit jumpy sometimes. I am used to writing post HTML by hand so I have switched to the non-rich mode. In rich mode I keep having troubles with extra tags or not enough tags and constantly have to edit the raw HTML to fix it.
I already mentioned what I think of the default WP themes in my second post. Since there is only one decent default theme it is way overused by bloggers so it gets boring. And I wonder why the Dashboard skin is nicer than the default blog skin anyway. I like the simple blue theme of the admin pages.
And where is the spell checker? I was pretty surprised to not be able to find the spell check button when I first started using WP. I figured it must be there somewhere. How could they release it without one? My spelling isn’t that good and I would prefer not to look like an idiot who can’t spell when I post. Firefox not having a spell checker I can understand (but in 2.0 they are supposedly adding one), but this is like Thunderbird not having a spell checker. That would be insane. It probably isn’t as critical to spell correctly on your blog as it is in business emails, but still any publishing tool should have a spell checker installed by default.
As I said before, there are lots of plugins for WP so now I have Live Spell Checker. It also works on comments which is pretty nice. But it doesn’t work quite right with the rich editor. It was about the only one I found that said it worked with WP 2.0. It uses Google for spell checking so the spell check interface is very similar to Gmail. But it wrapped lines and caused the raw HTML to display in a box above the rich text editor. At least the comment checker part doesn’t even work right on the author’s webpage (with Firefox). It does work ok with non-rich mode though.
March 15th, 2006
I don’t use Linux much (I used to use it more than Windows at the labs at school) but rather than just install a pre-setup desktop distro, I decided to go with Gentoo for my own box. I have learned a lot about Linux this way. There is no better way to learn about it than to setup things mostly manually. Sometimes it is a major pain though.
I don’t use the Gentoo box directly often, but I have Samba and SSH setup and store some files on the machine so I can access them from anywhere. Amazingly (coming from Windows) I have had the machine running for 175 days without reboot. Windows XP I can sometimes keep going for around 30 days before it gets really unstable.
A while back I upgraded KDE and it stopped working. But since I mostly used command line I didn’t care much. So recently I decided to upgrade stuff again and see if I could get the new KDE 3.5 to work. Well, it turns out that the reason I couldn’t solve the problem was I had no mouse plugged in so now I actually have 3.2 working. I needed the mouse on a different computer for a bit and never reconnected it though it was sitting there. I am not sure if that was the original problem. I hope not, that seems too dumb not to figure out when it says something like mouse not found.
Then I found that KDE 3.5 is not ready on Gentoo yet, it is masked. Not being satisfied with not having the latest version, I went in search of how to force it to install. So after some package.keywords magic and cleaning up some other problems I got the compile started. Well, somewhere along the way the compile failed. So I gave in started emerging KDE 3.4. This was not a fast machine back in 2003 when it was new, its an Via EPIA M9000 Mini-ITX, so compiling takes a while. I didn’t write down the 3.5 error, but this one died too with something that looks a bit familiar. It seems to be a gcc upgrade issue. Hopefully it is fixed now. I am going to give 3.5 another shot.
Long ago I had Windows XP on this box. I didn’t want XP on my main machine because I was being stuborn and sticking with Windows 2000. It ran XP ok, but I hardly ever used it since all my stuff was on my 2000 machine.
I like to play with Linux and I like a lot of the utilities (UnixUtils for Windows), but I am too addicted to Windows to actually switch yet. Speaking of switching, I am pretty interested in the new Intel Macs. They sound great from reviews and those that use Macs. But the couple times I have tried a Mac I get rather confused. The UI is so different from what I am used to with Windows. I would like to have one to try out though. The only problem is they aren’t free and I can’t really justify buying something that expensive if I likely won’t use it any more than my Linux machine. Anyway, I think I will wait till the second generation of Intel Macs to decide. Either they will work out some bugs or maybe I can find one of the first gen ones a bit cheaper.
My other problem with deciding to getting a Mac would be do I want a Mac mini, an iMac, or a MacBook Pro? There are major price differences between them. If I turn out to like it and use it a lot, the laptops would be great. But if not, that is a lot of wasted money. Though, I guess Ebay would be a solution.
With Windows Vista coming, maybe it is time to move on from Windows as my main OS. I will certainly give Vista a try, it looks so pretty. But I think they are hurting usability all over the place and it certainly is going to take a powerful machine
March 15th, 2006
Rob Cockerham decided to see what would happen if he tore up a new credit card application, taped it back together, filled it out, changed his address, entered a cell phone number, and sent it back. Assuming you accidentally tore your application into 16 pieces, he has good news for you. Chase will happily send you a card. But assuming you tear up applications you don’t want and throw them away, this is good news for identity thieves.
Even better news is that Chase says they did the right thing in an interview with MSNBC. It seems there is nothing suspicious about a taped up application using a different address. Admittedly the address was his parents house which was a former address of his, but isn’t that worse? If you move and your mail isn’t forwarded, the new occupant of your former residence will now have your credit card application (not torn up) and your former address. Sounds bad to me.
I have been the victim of credit card fraud (I don’t consider mine identify theft), thankfully it was a small charge. But because it was small (less than $10) it was not caught by the credit card company. I only noticed it because of the really odd company name on my credit card statement.
My brother recently got it a lot worse. Someone got his number and started charging hundreds of dollars worth on the other side of the country. Luckily in this case, the company called to ask if they were legit charges. They have even called a few other times on bigger than usual purchases he actually did make.
Clearly they are working to combat credit card fraud, but it appears they are not doing enough to prevent identity theft in the first place.
March 15th, 2006
Is anyone else tired of the default WordPress theme “based on the famous Kubrick?” I can’t stand it anymore. Its not that it is a bad design, it is that so many blogs use it. It gets boring after a while. There are lots and lots of themes available to choose from. But the only other choice by default is even more boring (not just from over use), it is now known as WordPress Classic and was the default on older versions. The default install should at least throw in a couple other nice skins for variety.
I noticed MediaWiki has a similar problem. They have several skins to choose from in the default install, but the other choices are all very plain. And there is a pretty obvious bug in the only other half usable skin, Cologne Blue, it says “The Free Encyclopedia” at the top. Not that it matters though, almost everyone that uses MediaWiki uses the default skin, MonoBook. That bugs me too, MediaWiki is getting so common and most everyone’s wiki look just like Wikipedia. Is that by choice or because there is no real choice?
I understand why projects don’t want to include many skin choices. Once you include a skin, users are going to expect it to continue to be in future versions. POPFile has a bunch of skins installed by default ranging from very nice to hardly usable. All but one skin author has abandoned their skins. That skin author happens to be me and that has evolved into a larger role as a developer which includes keeping the other skins up to date. In the next version though, we are finally going to drop some of the least popular skins. That should make the project look more professional and make maintenance easier.
March 15th, 2006
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