I’ve recently been working with the awesome Really Simple History javascript library to make Ajax loaded pages bookmarkable, it’s a bit confusing at times, but really not too hard. But it’s amazing when you work on something like that, how much it makes you notice when other websites don’t execute the little things well. For […]

I regularly get asked about what I think about Windows Vista, I run it on my laptop (a Toshiba R400 Tablet) and this far I’m very happy with it. It definitely isn’t a massive step up from XP (Service Pack 2) it is a major improvement and in my opinion in the right direction. I […]

I have been busily working on the DOM Inspector, apart from bug 221934 I have also been working on a prototype to increase the usability of the CSS Style rules pane. I have opened bug 368783 to cover the work on it. I have also built an initial prototype which doesn’t have all of the […]

It is the most annoying interface at the best of times and I’m not sure anyone who wrote the software has ever used it. Notwithstanding, the fact that windows in MYOB Premier don’t remember how big they were last time you opened one, let alone last time you ran the program is possibly the most […]

I like a lot of things with Google Talk, it’s openness, it’s integration and it’s interface. But the one thing that really gets on my goat - when you ALT+Tab back to a conversation, you can’t start typing straight away. Sometimes you can press tab for the input box to get the focus and sometimes […]

One of the basic tenents of a good user-interface is learnability or discoverabilty (I’m sure that’s a made-up word.) Everything should be laid out in an easy to learn way. The problem with the keyboard shortcuts in Gmail is exactly this. Every time I want to try and use the keyboard to do something, I […]

It’s not something I have read alot about, but I’m sure somewhere there are best practices regarding where is best to place a menu item. It’s pretty clear to me, that moving a menu’s order should be avoided, however I have just noticed an instance where the menu should have been reordered.
In Firefox and IE […]

There is a huge problem with every RAID array management interface I have ever used, they don’t provide many hints as to what’s actually going on. For example, today I was trying to mirror an existing drive on an IBM server we have here. When I went into the management interface, it would have let […]

Creating the interface (UI and implementation) for a date is a tricky process. The tradeoff between ease of use and speed is hard. The airline websites often use a dropdown calendar, however that doesn’t work if the form is being used for data entry. Alternatively, a text box that may have some help text doesn’t […]

The one thing that gets on my nerves the most about gmail is that it doesn’t remember which email address of yours was participating in the conversation. I have my work and personal address attached to gmail and my work is the default one, but if I reply to someone that sent me an email […]