Way Too Crowded

Two lines to an entry is too many

waytoocrowded — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 07:28:17 +0000

So many new releases this month that perhaps did meet everyone’s last wish. Firefox 3, your turn.

Not awesome bar

The big gripe. I like minimal interface clutter – consistent fonts, appropriate white space and line-heights, no wasted UI, etc. Doubling up the auto complete entries with varying font sizes makes me cringe. Add to that the fact that I’m more of a URL sort of fella than a title sort of fella and the new location bar becomes a big kick in the groin to my workflow.

The big fix: Oldbar extension. Thank goodness. Now to figure out how to apply the same change to the download manager.

Buttons = clutter

I’m also more of a keyboard shortcut sort of fella than a point and click sort of fella. This makes that star in the location bar an unused eyesore. This seems to be the sort of feature added to make Firefox appealing to a user set still on IE than as a feature added for the benefit of existing users. Either way, one style declaration in userChrome.css removes it:

#star-button {display: none !important;}

Along the same lines, backspace and shift+backspace tend to be much more convenient to me than the browser back button. The new oversized keyhole back button slider-looking thing becomes clutter. Right clicking the toolbar, selecting customize… from the menu and then checking Use Small Icons makes it much more bearable. Though easy color changes with CSS would be nice.

ctrl++ is for text

The first time I tried resizing text in IE7 I thought I broke something when the images enlarged with it. Not what I expected and not what I wanted. Blurring/jagged images don’t make them any easier to see. Until all web graphics are resolution independent, I don’t see the point in full page zoom. Again, likely a bitter old man view of a new feature. It’s easily disabled as a default under the View-Zoom menu.

But I still love you

Minor gripes given the extensibility of the application allows for easy fixing. Some argue an application shouldn’t require these sort of customizations and that it is a sign of poor design. I’m quite happy with it. Sure, it’d be great if everyone saw everything my way from the start but at least the option to have it my way is there. Plus I get to learn a few things in the process.

And I can’t get enough of the new Get Firefox site. So good. Robots, all of them.

In the Moving Crowd

waytoocrowded — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 00:49:11 +0000

Some wonderful looking noise makers.

In the Moving Crowd

waytoocrowded — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 03:12:31 +0000

All this time and all it took to make Gmail not lousy was to switch on the basic version in my user preferences. If only I would have accepted from the start that not all good things require javascript.

In the Moving Crowd

waytoocrowded — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 05:17:26 +0000

I was quite pleased with Wells Fargo’s new ATM UI when I first experienced it a few weeks ago. Nice to get a look into its design process.

Productivitally

waytoocrowded — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 05:50:58 +0000

Something something I should do more work something something.

That is all.

In the Moving Crowd

waytoocrowded — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 02:55:42 +0000

See. Powerpoint isn’t so bad when you get to create your slides online.

In the Moving Crowd

waytoocrowded — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 07:48:14 +0000

Chances are you will like ten of these bands but never get a chance to see them play.

Browser fail

waytoocrowded — Sat, 31 May 2008 20:13:58 +0000

Even though you can use getElementById to return the DOM object of a dynamically created element doesn’t mean Internet Explorer will be able to manipulate it in all cases. Sometimes it just says no.
A lack of a decent debugger in Internet Explorer makes the above even more fun. Firebug Lite reports no more information than the browser itself with regard to error location/cause.
A fixed dimension 200×200px container set to overflow:hidden can be used to crop a 200×300px SWF file to show just the important part unless Firefox on OS X support is required. In this case the overflow:hidden part will be ignored and the SWF will render as an absolutely positioned element breaking the document flow and overlapping any element below it.
Undecided on IE Tester really being an valid IE tester.

In the Moving Crowd

waytoocrowded — Thu, 22 May 2008 05:30:04 +0000

I fail to take photos once a week. Everyday for 18 years? And Polaroids? Neat.

Math fail

waytoocrowded — Wed, 07 May 2008 06:22:16 +0000

Office Space makes me laugh. Rounding errors do not. Even if they could make me rich/send me to jail.

In math class we used a line above a decimal to indicate it was to be a repeating number. The line is known as a vinculum and is used to symbolize a group. Math notation also uses a dot about a number for the same meaning. But are elegant.

Javascript doesn’t seem to have any notation for this. I don’t know of any programming languages that do. Eventually the fraction is going to get rounded in output but if rounding it too early in the process causes too significant of error in the final output the only solution is calculating the sum.

33 + 1⁄3 = 33.3

Gross. Or maybe that means my code is gross in that I’m needing a constant to hold such a value.