Feeling nostalgic for old-school Flying Toasters today I went looking for screen savers for OS X and found a faithful re-creation of the original.

Takes me back to the After Dark days when I had my old Mac LCII and IIsi.

Too bad the originals haven’t been open-sourced by Berkeley yet.

For something with a new-school twist I also found this pack of x11 savers that have been ported to OS X.

My favorite out of the bunch so far is the barcode module which generates random words and displays the corresponding barcode for each.

Took a few minutes out of the day today to tweak the design of this blog.

Theming Typo was quick and painless…Now at least the UI fits in with our home page a little better…

I was really glad when Firefox came out. It was a blessing to finally be free from the grips of IE for day-to-day browsing tasks.

I was even more glad when a nice set of web development debugging tools came out for it.

Firefox helped make my transition to from Windows XP to OS X more smooth. I didn’t have to switch browsers or use Safari. Firefox ran on OS X.

But why must Firefox lock up on me at least twice daily while I’m browsing the web? It’s not even a full on crash. Firefox just simply stops responding and refuses to load pages until I force quit it.

I understand browsers have a lot of moving parts that all must work in unison, but damn, you’d think someone could get the browser right.

IE has its numerous faults and security flaws. Safari has shit for debugging tools, and I refuse to run Opera since older versions of it couldn’t even float an iFrame over another div.

Please, someone fix this.

Just a sneak peak….work is continuing as planned. If you haven’t signed up for the announcement list yet, you might want to.

Here’s a spy photo of the Estimate Creation and Customer Preview screens open at the same time.

Did I mention everyone who signs up will have first crack at the Alpha release?

The iPhone looks like a wonderful device. Beautiful, stunning, simple, elegant design. I’m even considering picking one up.

But don’t get it twisted… My major problem with the design of this (and all large-touch screen input devices) is that keeping it clean and looking nice is going to be a major pain in the ass.

I’m a current owner of a Treo 680. I’ve owned pretty much every Treo model in existence since they were created, and a lot of Palm/Handspring devices before that.

My main problem besides trying to keep dust out from underneath the screen is keeping the screen oil-free from my fingers and my face. Not that I’m a particularly oily person, I’d consider myself normal…at least in that respect.

It’s a constant struggle to keep the screen clear of such mess, and after awhile it builds up and even the best cleaning won’t remove accumulated scratches, smudges and streaks.

I can’t imagine keeping a screen clean where it’s the primary source of input. At least on the modern-day Treos you can enter pretty much anything via the keyboard and the 5-way input button.

I’m interested to try out the iPhone, like everyone else. I’m sure Apple is going to make a killing selling the thing, but I think there’s real money to be made selling cleaning products for it.

Who’s with me? All my people with OCD stand up.

Following up my post on Adobe’s icon mess, here’s a look at the process of choosing new icons for Debian’s IceWeasel, IceApe, and IceDove programs.

For those of you not familiar with the suite of programs (as I wasn’t) here’s a blurb from Wikipedia:

IceWeasel is the name of two currently independent Mozilla Firefox rebranding projects. One is part of the Gnuzilla project, a GNU project to provide versions of Mozilla programs which are made of entirely free software. The other is a rebranded build prepared by Debian in order to satisfy a demand from Mozilla that they either drop the Firefox name or comply with other terms that Debian policies find unacceptable.

IceDove is a rebadged ThunderBird, and IceApe a rebadged SeaMonkey. My favorites are currently from Unicko…check these out.

The ones for IceWeasel aren’t as nice, but at least some people are having fun with the process.

Makes you wonder what Adobe threw out in the process of rebranding of their suite of programs.

During my daily reading I ran across this piece over on the Rails blog discussing how a large political blog is considering three web languages/frameworks for redoing their site.

The comments within are fairly interesting for what they are, but this thread in particular caught my attention.

The age-old debate

Every UI job I’ve taken always runs into this discussion. Regardless of the setting there’s always some programmer or marketing type who thinks that proficiency in their field leads them to be an expert in yours as well.

If you’re not familiar with it, it goes something like this…

“Why can’t we make the text just run the entire length of the page? I don’t like scrolling, and all that white space is just wasting room on my nice big monitor.”

Sometimes, just to rub salt in the wound they like to add this one as well…

“I think that would make the site much more usable.”

...Please just put me out of my misery now.

Why long lines of text suck

Line length, leading (rhymes with heading), and word spacing all contribute to the readability of text on the printed page or screen.

One of my favorite books sums it up the best…

The lines should be long enough to get complete thoughts into them and there ought to be enough space between them to allow readers to finish reading a line before their eye gets distracted by the next.

If you make lines the entire length of the browser window it’s extremely difficult to move your eye to the beginning of the next line after you finish with the previous one.

But print and screen design are different!

Of course they are. In the web world we have to deal with liquid layouts, multiple font sizes and screen resolutions.

I’m a fan of constraining text width to fixed pixel columns, or small percentages.

A lot has been written on the subject, but I find these resources helpful:

• Online Readability
• That Darned Content
• Typography: Line Length

Now if only I never had to explain this concept again…

I found this interesting screen while trying to add a feed to my Bloglines account this afternoon.

Nice spin on the “request is taking too long” angle. Shows a bit of personality, and lets you know that something has gone wrong.

Hahaha…I love GooTube.

I ran across Adobe’s new icons today while sifting through my blog reader.

My first thought is that this image was a joke…My second, that the design exercise was a complete disaster.

Why do Flash and Acrobat get specialized icons, while Illustrator and Photoshop get slapped with the periodic-table treatment? Ugly ugly ugly…oh did I mention non-functional?

What’s with the seemingly arbitrary color selection? None of this makes any sense to me at all. I fully expect someone to come up with a key or decoder of some sort to figure all of this mess out.

Isn’t the whole idea behind an icon to represent something visually, so you don’t have to read? How the designers responsible thought two letter abbreviations == icons beats me.

A lot has already been said on the topic, so I’ll just link to it and let you read for yourself instead of waxing on.