RasterWeb!

As I spoke to the guy at the dealership, I could almost feel the money being drained from my bank account.

I’m not the only one who can say I hate cars…

Over on the Windows box I’m forced to use, I’ve made the switch, and am now using Firebird for browsing and Thunderbird for mail and news, and so far, things are working out quite well.

I’m guessing if I launch Mozilla sometime next week I’ll make some comment about how it seems slow and bloated…

I really don’t have any complaints so far, Firebird is basically a leaner Mozilla, cleaned up and presentable to your folks, and Thunderbird comes across as the Mail & News portion of Mozilla decoupled and out on it’s own. And that’s how it should be.

Meanwhile, what has IE or Outlook done for you lately?

I should mention the fine work and send a thanks out to Brad Choate for his work on Textile and to John Gruber for his work on Smartypants.

I’ve implemented both of these into a CMS I’ve been writing and the process has been pretty smooth and seamless. I’ve now got people with almost no knowledge of HTML creating nice clean, typographically correct markup… without even knowing it.

Thanks guys…

Today on Martha Stewart Living Doing Time

• Dressing up those drab prison uniforms
• Beautiful, decorative shivs
• A prison yard garden

A must read for UI designers, Tog’s A Quiz Designed to Give You Fitts.

Some of the questions I was familiar with, other I could guess, but the one with the most impact for me was Question 6 regarding the bottleneck in hierarchical menus. I had to do a few tests using the Mac and the Windows box on my desk to see the effect that Tog was referring to. It was one of those ‘Aha!’ moments. See, for years I’ve known that I could do many things much faster on my Mac than I could in Windows, and I usually chalked it up to experience, but lo and behold, it goes much deeper, and we learn that indeed the thinking that went into how hierarchical menus in the Mac OS work versus how they were implemented elsewhere is quite different.

My testing was actually a bit difficult, but perhaps more revealing, since the Windows apps I use most are actually not exactly native, one being Mozilla, which uses it’s own UI stuff to some degree, and the other being jEdit, which is a Java-based app. Now, both of these apps exist for Mac OS X, and they both do the right thing in regards to hierarchical menus. To some degree, I think when people wonder why you might pay more to own a Mac, it’s because of key differences and attention to detail like this – things you don’t even realize, which is how it should be.

I’ve been applying some of his tips to things I’ve built in the past, but it’s probably worth paying closer attention to in the future.