eightpence

Firefox 3 UI mocks for branding by shape

philc — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 23:44:36 +0000

Here’s a fantastic post by Alex Faaborg with UI mocks of identity branding Firefox’s UI based on shape. Great discussion and some good comment posts, especially about the problem of reload and stop being a single button (as it is in safari).

P.S. There’s some talk there of just using stock icons on linux, but I think that’s stupid. If the icons FF is using are clean and are different for a good reason (subtle identity, and better UE in this case) they should use their own icons, not stock.

Dilbert on security

philc — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 22:08:32 +0000

Mordac is awesome.

“Once, he changed Dilbert’s password to the entire text of The Da Vinci Code, excluding the
parts he did not believe. He also configured Alice’s screensaver to log her
out after two seconds of inactivity”

VMware Fusion’s Unity feature

philc — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 09:42:40 +0000

VMWare Fusion lets you run Windows on your mac using hardware emulation virtualization (i.e., it’s fast) similar to Parallels. Parallels has been giving me grief lately, so I’ve been checking out the competition. I stumbled upon this video of VMware Fusion’s unity feature — it allows you to run windows apps as single windows on your mac. Parallels has a similar feature called Coherence mode, but it’s a terrible hack (it can’t even render non-square windows). Here’s a video of the Fusion feature –

MyWish - making wishes on facebook

philc — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 20:34:21 +0000

I love making whimsical wishes — “I wish I could drive a camel to work.” David Renie and I have just completed a new facebook app called MyWish that helps you do just that. With it you can make wishes like “I wish I could live in New Zealand for a year” or “I wish I had a pet giraffe.” Your wishes are customizable with millions of gorgeous photos from Flickr, and you can then stick them on your profile. They’re beautiful. Friends can comment on your wishes too.

My first wish of the day? “I wish I was at the beach *right now*”, with my friends back home in MD.

You can see it in action on my profile, or you can install it here.

Give it a try, and don’t hesitate to invite all your friends. You should. In fact if you don’t I will de-friend you.

Alright, I won’t do that… but you might get a malevolent wish directed your way!

How to answer your phone

philc — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 09:19:57 +0000

Couldn’t resist. This is a clever way to answer your phone — implement this strategy and telemarketers will rue the day they dialed your number.

Windows/Linux-like alt-tabbing for OS X

philc — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 06:41:22 +0000

One of the biggest gripes I have with OS X is that when you hit cmd-tab (equivalent of alt-tab) to switch to another application, *all* of that application’s windows come forward and cover everything else that’s open. So if you’re using a text editor and Firefox to develop a website, when you cmd-tab from the editor to the browser, the editor can get hidden because all of your browser windows will come forward. Really annoying.

The solution is to use another window-switching app. Liteswitch (shareware, what I use) or Witch (free) can do the job — it can do alt-tab on a window-by-window basis. If there are other good ones, please let me know. One problem is that OS X greedily hogs the keyboard shortcut cmd-tab, so you can’t bind something like Witch to it.

But that’s not entirely true — you can use the cmd-tab shortcut with a little work. This application enhancer called Pulltab will wrest the cmd-tab keyboard combination from the OS, so now apps like Witch can use it.

This is just one step closer to keyboard nirvana.

Google analytics from way back

philc — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 08:07:07 +0000

I came across this early screenshot of Google Analytics, before it got the fancy flash graphs:

Give me MB or give me death!

philc — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 11:01:04 +0000

It’s been a bittersweet experience moving from coast to coast, but one thing I don’t miss is the broadband I had in the country (satellite, with a max download of 120K/s). Here’s a screenshot of the download rate from my office:

Dang, that’s fast! Brings a tear to my eye.

Ninjawords in PC Magazine

philc — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 01:03:28 +0000

Ninjawords gets some print press! It was mentioned in the article Top 100 Undiscovered sites.

Image resizing from siggraph 07

philc — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 07:00:59 +0000

Here’s a video from a talk at siggraph 07. It’s a technique for resizing an image in one dimension (horizontally or vertically) without scaling the image — it intelligently removes pixels from the image as it get smaller. It’s outstanding and looks dang cool; watch the whole thing, because at the end they demo removing an entire person from a picture with just a few clicks.

Thanks for the pointer Michael.