8:10 PM

One of the worst ways to make something easier to use is to just claim it is easy to use. Not living to expectations sucks. Just getting rid of the manual and/or help files doesn't automatically make the product easier to use.

On EULAs and terms of service

How unreadable and complex EULAs (End User Licence Agreements) and terms of service have become, that when just clicking on the Accept button without actually reading the text, the user is prompted to 'scroll to the bottom' of the text, instead of actually reading it.

Note about CSS3 transition animations

If your animation doesn't seem to work, check the units used in the property that is not animating. For example: the width won't animate if the previous value is specified in pixels and the new value is in percentages.

This happened to me in RockMelt (version 0.9.68.1362, build 887eaf8). Mozilla's FireFox (7.0.1) seems to cope better with this situation and still do the animation.

For example, if you have something like this:

<style>#testAnim {
display: block;
-webkit-transition-duration: 1.7s;
-moz-transition-duration: 1.7s;
-o-transition-duration: 1.7s;
-ms-transition-duration: 1.7s;
transition-duration: 1.7s;
-webkit-transition-delay: 0.5s;
-moz-transition-delay: 0.5s;
-o-transition-delay: 0.5s;
-ms-transition-delay: 0.5s;
transition-delay: 0.5s;
-webkit-transition-property: border-radius;
-moz-transition-property: border-radius;
-o-transition-property: border-radius;
-ms-transition-property: border-radius;
transition-property: border-radius;
border-radius: 4px; padding: 25px; border: 1px solid red;
}
#testAnim:hover {border-radius: 50%}
#testAnim:focus {border-radius: 33px}
</style><a id="testAnim" href="#">Test by hovering</a>

Test by hovering and by tab'ing into this link. On some browsers the :hover won't animate but the :focus will

The CSS Transitions Module Level 3 spec doesn't seem to mention these kinds of situations

Whatever it may mean

Back in the day when I was a kid me and my friends played a lot of video games. We didn't speak English at the time (counting to 10 in that language was a big deal), so videogame-English was its own language that we deciphered and defined on our own.

Game Over did not mean the game ended, it meant the asshole hogging the controller had to back off and let someone else play. Game Over meant Game Beginning.

My browser is not your billboard

Since the review of Apple’s Macbook Air by ArsTechnica a lot of people have expressed support for the notion that installing Flash directly reduces the duration of its battery. Here’s the relevant part:

We did find (quite by accident) that Apple may have more reasons behind not installing Flash by default other than the stated reason of ensuring that users always have the most up-to-date version. Having Flash installed can cut battery runtime considerably—as much as 33 percent in our testing. With a handful of websites loaded in Safari, Flash-based ads kept the CPU running far more than seemed necessary, and the best time I recorded with Flash installed was just 4 hours. After deleting Flash, however, the MacBook Air ran for 6:02—with the exact same set of websites reloaded in Safari, and with static ads replacing the CPU-sucking Flash versions.

A lot of comments like Josh MacDonald’s, “this [is] a devastating proof of Steve Jobs claims about Flash” or “Two hours of battery life, just by keeping Flash Player uninstalled” directly blame flash being installed for the reduction of battery life. No one seems to bother to direct the attention to what is displayed by flash. Consider reading the quote this way (emphasis mine):

ads kept the CPU running far more than seemed necessary.

It comes down to user activity dictating battery life. In the ‘before’ test the user is running animated ads, in the ‘after’ he’s not. Battery life is dependant on what kind of content the user is viewing. (And calling the ads ‘content’ is stretching it, a lot. Let‘s call it uncontent, or scumtent, from now on). Unfortunately the user has not much choice on what kinds of ads are being shown to him. That’s what should be talked about, not what underlying technology is being used to show them. A lot of the advertisements lately are based on importuning and badgering the person who ends up watching the ads, and wasting their resources such as processor and memory capacity and network bandwidth.

What happens when advertisers get savvy and start using html5 and canvas and css3 and whatever new fun technologies come to replace flash? Sure, we should be asking from Adobe to add controls to Flash so we as users can control what url’s we don’t want to open, how long animations should run, etc. But we should also be asking that from browser developers.

Flash should be pointed at for wasting battery, not because of its mere existence, but because it indiscriminately downloads and plays content that the user can’t avoid or opt out of. Let’s talk about how Flash should empower the user, and how browsers and other kinds of ‘user agents’ should too.

We the users need to be able to configure a time-out after which the animated ad or whatever stops animating and, thus, wasting cpu cycles and power/battery. We the users need to be able to configure a maximum size that this scumtent can occupy on our screen. We the users need a way to remove stuff from a webpage I don’t want there, call it click2unflash (or click2unimage, or click2unmusic). We the users need an easy way to blacklist websites that won’t be loaded, via flash or another plugin or html5 or whatnot.

Let’s start getting ready for that bridge, and not reach it unprepared and then just pay whatever the guy in the toll booth wants to let us cross it.

9:02 AM

So the new iPod nano has multitouch input. What's the point of that when one finger covers 1 fourth of the entire screen?

Batteries do explode

Today while walking to the office I heard a pop coming from the stack of things I was carrying with me. I couldn't tell where it came from. Once I got to my cubicle I took my media player out to find out that its battery had swollen and burst out of the device. I don't know if the PMC still works, I'll have to wait 'till I get back home to test it with the charger. The battery I don't want to try, as you can see from the picture. Now I need to figure out how to deal with the popcorn'd battery.