Een auto wordt dan beschreven als een verschikkelijk ingewikkelde machine met honderden parameters die toch eenvoudig te bedienen is. Een sterk staaltje in vergelijking met de computer, die veel moeilijker te bedienenen is.

Deze vergelijking is compleet waardeloos, en wel om twee redenen.

Ten eerste is de usability van een auto ronduit slecht te noemen; een beginner kan er zonder hulp gewoonweg niks mee aanvangen. Je hebt bijvoorbeeld drie quasi identieke pedalen die toch heel verschillende effecten hebben.

Ten tweede is de interface van een auto relatief ’simpel’ enkel omdat de taak die je ermee uitvoert zeer eenvoudig is. Want wat wilt de gebruiker van de auto de machine eigenlijk laten doen? Dat zijn maar twee dingen: harder dan wel trager rijden en meer naar links of rechts draaien. Twee parameters dus; da’s alles.

Bij het werken met een computer is de boodschap die de gebruiker moet overbrengen aan de machine heel wat complexer; logisch dus dat dat wat moeilijker gaat.

Al is dat vaak nog altijd onnodig veel moeilijker dan dat het zou kunnen zijn.

I did, and became curious. It seemed worth the try, and after a couple of times of usage it turns out to be a nice shopping bag.

It can store a lot of volume (making it look very funny) and quite some weight (if distributed evenly).

The advantages are definitely that it keeps your arms free, and that it stays small when carrying small things.

It sets you back about 8 Euro if I remember correctly.

And believe me, the sight of people watching in awe when you pack 20 liter of groceries into a flower-themed double-sided stretch condom is truly priceless

Ik wel. Aanvankelijk. Na twee weken werd het me te machtig

Update: een helpdesker van Fortis PC Banking weet meer…

• Firefox bookmark keywords / keyword searches
• Alt+F2 mini-shell command widget on Linux
• Launchy on Windows
• A text replacement tool like Texter

I really liked it because it ‘just works’, and has a lot of potential for extensions. In a way, it’s more of a platform that a tool. However, since platforms tend to get ignored if they have few users, I felt Enso could use some freeing up (of both price and source code) to get the ball rolling.

Seeing it just disable itself after the trial period was a real disappointment, also from a usability point of view.

Luckily, the Humanized team has been thinking in the same direction. From now on, Enso is free (the source code is still closed but this could change in the future).

What’s more, Humanized is joining forces with Mozilla. In terms of building a platform and reaching lots of users, this is a major announcement.

I was thinking about comparing Enso with KDE’s extensible krunner, Katapult or (the Quicksilver-like) Gnome Do, but this announcement indicates that Mozilla might be planning something even broader in scope. I’m looking forward to Firefox 4

I was sad to learn that early versions of ‘THE’ (The Humane Environment) were quite disappointing — not so much in innovation but rather in quality and maturity. It was even more sad to read in in 2005 that Raskin had passed away.

I wondered whether this new direction in human-computer interfaces would die together with its inceptor. Would someone ever build a workable system according to these concepts? Would we ever be able to check whether Raskin’s ideas were right?

It seems so.

Jef’s son, Asa Raskin, recently gave an impressive presentation at Google, which you can watch (of course) at Google Video. It’s called “Away with Applications: the Death of the Desktop“.

Raskin presents Humanized Enso, (currently) as desktop add-on with a ‘humanized’ user interface.

I could elaborate on how this all makes so much sense (and I probably will at a later time), but for now I recommend you to watch the presentation.

Trying out the examples in the book, I was a bit disappointed about the templating system in Rails (called ERB). This is just the same ugly HTML/code/indentation/tag soup mess as one would get with PHP. I’d expected someone would have solved this issue by now, preferably in an elegant, Rails-consistent way.

And lo and behold, via the Riding Rails webblog I notice the existence of Haml, “Markup haiku”. Elegant, readable, indentation-aware — and simple and efficient. Great.

Except for on thing: all code expressions only affect one line, which means that loops and conditionals with markup in them just don’t compile. Which you wouldn’t need anyway if everything is nicely componentized and such, but it still would be handy sometimes. Maybe in a next version?

I had bookmarked gmail’s login page, so that I wouldn’t have to go through all of their redirects. At one point, the field ‘username’ (Dutch: Gebruikersnaam) was replaced with its Norwegian translation, Brukernavn. See also: rule number one.

Electronics outlet Mediamarkt offers its promotion catalog as a PDF file. You can read it online as well with some kind of fancy flash tool.

But, in reality, ‘readable’ is a bit of an overstatement since half of the pages are upside down .

One thing that I’ve not yet read about, but that’s been bothering me nonetheless, is the decreasing usefullness of the scrollbar. These days in the blogosphere, the scrollbar is becoming less and less accurate as an indicator of an article’s length. It used to be like this:

• You arrive at a page via some random URL that you clicked.

• Your read the first paragraphs; it’s looking interesting.

• You check the scrollbar, and it indicates that you’re already 35% along the page. This means you have time to quickly read the rest as well. If it’s way longer, then you either bookmark the page, save it, print it, or leave it altogether.

Nowadays the last step is like this:

• The scrollbar tells you you’ve only advanced 10% trough the page. You suspect that ten to seventy percent of the page consists of (crappy or insightful) comments that you won’t read anyway. So you have to scroll down until you discover where the content ends and the comments begin. Only trough this horribly ineficient method can you decide on your future reading (or, in effect, ignoring) strategy for this particular article.

My recommendations (which I will of course lazily ignore myself until you, dear reader, contribute enough comments here ) :

• Include an indication of content length in every longer article (e.g. ‘this article is 5000+ words long).

• Hide comments by default and show them when the user requests them (e.g. with an ajax-style ‘expand’ click). You could make them magically appear when the user has scrolled all the way down, too.

• Fix the scrollbar so that it can visualise the different content types in your page (e.g. header, content, comments, advertising). This could of course be based on some microformat embedded in XHTML.

• At least have a clear visual distinction between ‘official’ content and user-contributed, unofficial stuff.

How do you like

xesef-disof-gytuf-katof-movif-baxux

compared to

3F2504E0-4F89-11D3-9A0C-0305E82C3301

?