Agreed. I just started up a new YouTube channel, and trying to figure out how to switch between my regular persona and my YouTube Channel’s persona across various google properties is a pain in the ASS.
Yea I totally agree. I have to use pretty much every single one of their products - their developer tools are a spaghetti junction of functionality. Weirdest UI and menu systems I’ve ever seen. And don’t get me started on Google Docs/Drive - designed by a masochist.
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Yeah. Everything has to have either a link to where you can read the rest, or to the corresponding BBS discussion thread if there is no rest.
Posted in full on the homepage > BBS thread
Homepage excerpt > Full content > BBS thread
These links are at the end of the excerpt/post, in blue, as “DISCUSS” or “READ THE REST”
However, there is also an additional complicator that I’m not sure is good usability, which I think you might be referring to: the entire post (including headlines) is “buttonized” with javascript, meaning you can tap or click anywhere in the post to achieve the above result. But maybe headlines should always go to the permalink.
I actually prefer it when links are linked and plain copy is left as selectable, unlinked, copyable content. But I am a bit old-fashioned.
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Ahhh, Trim(). How much pain you’d save, if only people remembered you.
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Edited: Sorry misunderstood, discarded, thought you meant the post title link, the labelled button links at the bottom are fine, as they’re labelled!
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The next design revision is likely to simplify things further. Predictable, trustworthy UI is going to be very important to sites that want to avoid being sucked into the Facebook event horizon.
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Ah, you are mistaken sir. Facebook has gone from suck, to blow.
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Yes, less is more! The biggest challenge with a site like this is maintaining that philosophy whilst including ads.
I say just rip-off Medium (or Quartz actually, might be more appropriate for your content - although some of their recent changes have added some unfortunately confusion to the homepage/dashboard), inject ads between posts, job done.
No such thing as an original idea, stand on the shoulders of giants and all that.
Old man yells at cloud computing.
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Awww, somebody needs a hug.
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If you use Chrome, create different “People” for each persona. I do this to keep my work and personal email accounts (both on Google) separate.
Is now a good time to bitch about the design change at boingboing? I’m still going to /page/1 I hope that doesn’t go away before the next design change.
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“They say it’s arrogant for developers to limit features or ignore feature requests. They say software should always be as flexible as possible. We think that’s bullshit.”
Did Basecamp personnel previously get locked in a shiny basement working for Steve Jobs akin to the Scientology Hole for five years or something?
I empathize with the broad spectrum of absurd feature requests that any designer/programmer is bound to receive, but nothing says arrogance quite like telling other people that they don’t know what they want and you can tell them what they want or they should go away.
That’s actually a good idea, and one that never occurred to me since I’ve never really needed it before. Is switching between “people” reasonably fluid in Chrome?
Basically each “person” gets their own window. This can get confusing if you regularly have 10 browser windows open, but there’s an identifier in the upper right corner that tells you which person owns this window.
It also puts a menu item that lets you pop between them. On OSX it’s reasonably simple to add a cmd-{something} shortcut to that. There’s probably a way to do that in Windows, but I’ve never done it.
Is this a good place to complain about all the new web sites designed for two-inch-wide screens that are now showing up, vastly enlarged, on my two-foot-wide screen? Giant photo at the top, one column of absurdly large text, and a row of three big icons under that. Everything else white. Please.
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Mobile websites to start with need to DIAF. Usually missing important features that end up driving you to the full desktop version of the site to begin with.
God help you if that version of the site doesn’t work with mobile, because then it’s time to either break out the laptop, or the remote into your desktop at home, and spend a few minutes futzing with that awkwardly.
My most recent gripe is word processors…
I wanted to make a simple graphic with a few images and plain line boxes, and duplicate that several times on a page in a nicely lined up grid. Simple, no?
Apple Pages lets me do all that, except they REMOVED the “snap to” function, and even entering number values for position isn’t accurate enough, plus it’s mega-tedious. Why remove such an immensely useful feature?
NeoOffice lets me do all that, except you CAN’T GROUP IMAGES! So I’d have to manually position 50 some images by hand with pixel accuracy. Tedious.
Microsoft Word for Mac 2008 lets me do all that, EXCEPT you can’t just add a simple shape like a square with thin black lines. Nope, you get one with a gradient fill, thick colored lines and a drop shadow. So I have to control-click the square, select “format shape”, select “no fill”, select black color for the outline, select minimum thickness, and … oh, you can’t remove the drop shadow. Hmm, let’s do a Google search on that…
Here’s a tip page… just get to the format window, select the shadow option and … wait a minute, there IS NO option for that.
Well, let’s poke around… a drop shadow gives sort of a 3D effect, so let’s try the 3-D settings… here’s one to turn 3-D on or off. Click it and my square turns into what looks like a solid rectangular block, so I guess 3D was off in the first place. Well, turn it back off and what’s this? The drop shadow is gone, Hallelujah! But what a stupid way to have to do that.
Now I need to nudge the images just a little bit, and I know I used to be able to do that in Word, but nope, that feature is gone. Back to Google…
Okay, the Word graphic engine broke when Microsoft updated the software, but apparently if I turn the grid off, that will fix it, except it doesn’t.
Oh, because that work around only works if the document was saved in the old Word2004 .doc format, not the brilliant new .docx format that Word2008 and beyond uses.
So I re-save my document as a .doc file, open that file, and low and behold I can now nudge the graphic pixel by pixel to my heart’s content, it only took an 11 year old file format to be able to do that simple operation.
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Do no evil?
shrug MVC is a developers friend. APIs for content, APIs for layout–if you are a lazy Dev assemble on the browser. If not assemble on a cache server before your load balancers. If you have authed users, only cache content that is user agnostic and still assemble before your LBs.
Also, trunk your SSL from your CDN (with sane SSL resumption times), and life is good. Yes, that does mean handing over private keys to your CDN, but if you can’t trust them… Then get akamai >:)
