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It's marvelous! It's educational! It's mildly toxic!

Redesigns everywhere!

posted by CMD on 2008-09-15 at 03:48:34

I've been busy for a while. I'm on this hellish project at work that's been punching me in the face at every turn, and school started up again, so I've been focusing on those things lately. I haven't been chatting much, and I haven't really been on any forums either.

Life marches on without me, however, as it seems August was the month for redesigns. I stopped by a few places this week, and there's a lot of new looks out there. Being a graphics guy, I want to comment on them.

Exhibit 1: Facebook »

Admittedly, this one had a Beta for a while, so I got a taste of it before the re-design became the design-design, but it only recently went live. It'll take some getting used to, and I'm not a big Facebook-er anyway, but overall I like it. It's slim, clean, dynamic, and organized. It's organized differently, which is probably why everyone's having a big fudgy cow over it - I've been sent invitations to both the 5,000,000 against the new version of Facebook and Petition Against the "New Facebook" groups - but I'm quite impressed.

Exhibit 2: jQuery »

On the 29th of August, jQuery took their site design from functional to fantastic. With a new design and a new logo, the jQuery website now looks the part of what jQuery is: a revolutionary, fundamentally different Javascript library. I lubs this new site design.

Exhibit 3: Dictionary.com »

Didn't they just redesign their site like a year ago? Well, it seems they were recently acquired by Ask.com, so now they have to look more like them. It still looks alright, but I preferred the previous skin. This one seems to have more space devoted to advertisements, and left-oriented sidebars are something I've never liked. The tab buttons are too small up there, and they're claustrophobically tucked right up against the top of the browser area. I've never really cared for the design of Ask.com, and to see it take over a site I use on nearly a daily basis is a little embittering. It's not nearly as abjectly ugly as Ask.com - I do quite like the depth effect around the search field area - but it's not as nice as it was.

Exhibit 4: Songbird »

This one took me completely by surprise when I updated this last Thursday to Songbird 0.7. Since Songbird updates are automatic like Firefox and the like, I just let it do its thing, without checking their website or anything. When it started back up, I was expecting this:

Songbird's old UI

I got this:

Songbird's new UI

[Shock]

Gone is the contrastively blinding deep gray + white, gone are the unconvincing rounded edge highlights on the search fields, gone is the blatantly blank white box when no album art is available... Songbird has all at once gone from an amateurish, third-rate iTunes UI knockoff to a well built, consistent, first-rate iTunes UI knockoff!

Add in a WinAmp-esque dynamic Now Playing pane plugin, and I'm happy as a clam:

My Songbird UI

Further, I finally found the "New Subscription" option under the File menu which allows one to subscribe to and download content automatically like iTunes with their Podcast service. Just toss in the URL to the XML feed and tell it how often to update. It's not nearly as fully-fledged as iTunes' podcast manager, but it's a start. Besides, iTunes just upgraded from 7.x - Songbird just reached 0.7.

So there you have it, race fans. Generally good news across the board. I'm glad to see talented designers still at work everywhere, and I'm especially loving the new Songbird.

Have you noticed any new redesigns lately? Join in discussin' below! Now I have to go - Gold and Silver just started.

Posted in: Daily Chat, Designy Chat

3 comments on this article.

Chrome is Shiny

posted by CMD on 2008-09-02 at 22:54:02

It seems I was late, as I didn't hear about Chrome until this morning, but Google's new browser is upon us. I offer my opinion as a web developer, and as a guy with a blog, about what I think after test-driving this baby.

First of all, I'm still on XP, so I don't get the glassy, transparent background, but the UI is still sweet like sweets. Clean, uncluttered, straight to-the-point. I like that in a browser. I'm not a fan of the IE7 style buttonized application menus, but I'm sure it's familiar to enough people to make sense. The pop-up status bar is also pretty pretty - leaving the area free for the page and appearing only when needed.

As far as the techy stuff is concerned, Google basically covered it pretty thoroughly in their web-toon press release, so I'm not going to get too into it. Basically, it's blazing fast. The multi-function URL bar is easy to use, the text-boxes have a built-in spell checker, all that useful stuff, but the most important part of a browser is the rendering accuracy. Well, I'm happy to report that it's WebKit, so it does just fine in that area.

And, like any browser should, it has a DOM explorer and Javascript console for us nerdy-geeks. This one is more similar to Opera's Dragonfly or IE's "Developer Toolbar", in that it can't as of yet edit the DOM model or CSS attributes and update the in-browser page in real-time as Firefox's Firebug and Web Developer extensions can, but it's a decent start.

There are a few features that don't seem to be in there at this stage, one of the most prominant being an integrated RSS reader. I do hope that it's a planned feature, as RSS is a large part of my online experience, and I like to handle all of that in-browser. Also, the DOM Inspector tool has a "Dock to Window" button that doesn't actually do anything yet.

All went pretty well - I downloaded the application during some down-time at the office at 2:19pm today, and importing my bookmarks and history from Firefox was both quick and complete. So I starting dinking around on teh Interwebs, putting it through its paces. I of course looked at my own sites first, then, since I was at the office, started looking at my company's sites to "ensure compatibility" or something like that. Then I went to a third-party site to continue browsing, and I noticed something.

There are ads on these pages...

At that moment, a question struck me - will Google, a company funded largely by the sales of targeted ad placement services, allow a feature in a browser that they control which would block those ads from being displayed? IE has the IEPro extension which includes ad-blocking, Opera has it built-in, Firefox has the peerless Ad Block Plus extension, but to my knowledge, none of these companies have any real stake in ads being displayed.

If no ad-blocking support is planned, it will be an absolute deal-breaker for me, regardless of the unique and innovative technology behind the browser. It's my computer, my browser window, my web experience, and I will be the soverign controller of what content is and is not displayed during my browsing experience.

So yeah, time will tell I suppose. For now, the Google Chrome Beta is a fantastically impressive piece of Kit, and I look forward to seeing where it goes.

Posted in: Techy Chat

3 comments on this article.

On RSS and Firefox extensions

posted by CMD on 2008-08-31 at 21:42:31

I was chatting with a coworker the other day, and he made a passing mention on how he wished Firefox would alert you when you got a new RSS feed so you didn't have to keep checking the Live Bookmark folder in the Bookmarks menu - remembering which one was the last one you read to determine if there are any new messages to view, that sort of thing. So I told him about the extension I used for RSS subscription notification - Brief - and he has now become my second convert. [Evil]

However, this got me thinking - is the Firefox way really the best way?

I've been in countless discussions with people of different browser persuasions who criticise Firefox for being the open canvas that it is - basically with Firefox, you get the base level of competency for web features, with an endless repository of extensions to flesh out your browser experience the way you think it best. Other browsers - this argument most often comes from followers of Opera - are complete out-of-the-box, with built in and fully-featured integrated components for these web technologies.

Me, I'm a hunter. I like to search out, try a bunch of options - I tried both Sage and Beatnik before I settled on Brief - then decide which one fits the way I like things to be done, which makes the Firefox way perfect for me. Not everyone is like this, though. That coworker of mine? - He's a professional web developer and a PHP genius, he just never looked through the extension repository for something to make his RSS experience better. If a professional web guy can miss an enhancement to his browser of choice, how much more so can the non-technical user?

Firefox is customizable beyond belief, and I think they've taken a few good steps toward making add-ons more accessible, what with the new integrated add-on browser they introduced with FF3, but I still think awareness needs to be raised further.

The main problem, I think, is extensions need to be marketed as necessities, because some of them are. People are used to most add-ons being just frivolous extras - with things like the Mac OS, Opera, Vista, Google Desktop et cetera all having fun little widgets, 80% of which are practically useless. With Firefox, add-ons are like patches - adding real, useful features for an enhanced browsing experience.

For example: a fellow student shared with me last week an add-on for Firefox he'd found called Zotero. It's basically an integrated Internet research collation tool that allows you to save, organize, search, and cite online sources for research paper writing right there in your browser as you're doing the research. As a college student, this extension could prove invaluable in the future - I haven't had to write any papers since this tool was introduced to me, but I look forward to trying it out.

Compared to the glut of widgets out there, Firefox extensions are masterpieces. People just need to be made aware that they're there. If anyone should feel their Firefox experience lacking in some respect, Just Search It. Odds are, there'll be at least three things in there to change it three different ways, whichever you'd prefer.

On the subject of RSS, the Dictionary.com Word of the Day RSS feed is awesome. I found my new favorite word through it earlier this month: vituperate - to overwhelm with wordy abuse. [Wink]

Thanks for reading.

Posted in: Daily Chat, Techy Chat

1 comment on this article.

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