I’m not very familiar with Firefox design conventions, but I admit I fell for this. And you know that’s always a bad sign for usability, me failing in tasks. Har har.
When presented with the “Firefox Add-on Updates” little window on a Windows machine (hence, no strong highlight in pre-selected buttons as below, in Mac OS X), I accidentally clicked on “Skip”.
Somewhere, somehow, my mind has decided that on the right is the way to confirm and finish a job. The place for the “OK, get done with it and let me be” button.
I would swallow on my mistake, if I hadn’t realised that on the next screen, when the add-on update has been successfully applied, Firefox features a “Continue” button – this time on the right.
Pardon me, for I am confused. What goes on the right? OK or Cancel? Papa Nielsen, get me out!
firefox, ok, cancel
Panic announced the 1.5 version of Coda yesterday, making a (kinda) huge leap from 1.1. The new version is full of good stuff for your favourite sexy powerhouse editor, including:
- Built-in version control. Yeah, you read that right. Commit, update and checkout to your heart’s content, all through Coda.
- Local multi-file search & replace. Amen.
- Custom books. Now you can add your own resources, complete with book cover image and all.
- Improved clips. You can now organize your clips in groups, as well as import and export them.
- You can now identify between local and remote copies of the same file at a glance, using the relevant icons.
- The almighty Sites are now sortable.
- A new action has been added, named “Reverse publish”, which allows you to download remote files to your local copy.
After hours I managed to set up version control with Coda, but mainly because I never sat down to do it properly, plus I had some permissions issues (as always).
The changes Coda 1.5 brings are all more than welcome, refreshing my idea of it quite a bit. Go Panic!
coda, panic, coda 1.5
It’s quite a long time that I’ve read Designing the Obvious by Robert Hoekman, Jr., but I never managed to write a proper review for this little gem of web design books. I think now is the time for proper credit.
DtO is a very pleasant and easy to read and use web design book, while at the same time is tons useful. The writing is simple and very pleasant, enriched with proper screenshots and relative images to avoid eye strain. The very size of the book is quite small – it’s not meant to be a bible, more of a handbook full of good advice.
It explores real-life web applications and sites to give you solid advice on information architecture, feature creep and simplicity in design. The book is relatively new and the examples are very current – so no stress there.
The author also establishes what I like to call the GTD methodology of design, calling it 5S. The 5S stands for five Japanese words starting from S, which are… Uhm, I think I shouldn’t spoil your fun.
What I really enjoyed were the Interface Surgery sections, where real-life problems met their solutions in a deductive way. Very useful indeed.
All in all, it’s a no-nonsense book that does everything that’s supposed to – and maybe a little more. I think it deserves a place somewhere in your web design / development shelf. It’s well worth its money.
designing the obvious, robert hoekman jr
