sugarenia.com

Nothing better than a truly beautiful site to rest your eyes on after a full Monday.

AliFelski.com was redesigned (or rather, realigned, as the owner says) and it’s all for the best.

I love the clever use of Flash, the way the different style for different weather was integrated, the whole haunted feeling, the colours, the clever footer.

It’s up to you to discover what you like most about this lovely design.

While working or chilling at home, I collect all sorts of interesting links. I bet you do the same too.

And because the Internet could not do without more linked lists (pun intended), I decided to share some random inspiration with you on this lovely Friday:

• Steve Smith and co. launch Sidebar Workshops – even the sound of it sends inspirational chills down my spine. Steve is a great designer and a lovely fellow, I assure you. He and the awesome people behind Sidebar Creative will surely do their best to teach you lucky attendees the best they know about their trade.
• Nettuts does Django – these fellas must read my mind or something. Everything I let my mind wander to, they blog about. Damn you! *shakes fist*
• Extra talented mr. Jon Hicks joins the Opera team with a single aim: better looking Web for all of us!
• These jugs from suck.uk.com may not be latest news, but they look fun enough to stir up this perfect latte (in my case, macchiato) of yours while kick starting a new, exciting project. Now that autumn is here, creativity (and caffeine) strike in.
• Who knew? That Droid Sans Mono font may be just the font you need for coding. I don’t see me leaving Consolas anytime soon, though.
• Mr. Gregory Wood shares a fun little technique for a totally common mini-problem while coding layouts. May give it a whirl in the next project.

And with that, just another tiring week reaches its end. Time for relaxation, long walks and hanging out.

Yeah.

That.

I usually never ever check out products competitive to one I’ve bought myself – I’m sensible enough to understand that user experience varies widly and that, for example, not every “iPhone killer” around will replace my iPhone in terms of user satisfaction.

But with the release of the Android phone and the persistent efforts of a dying company to produce high quality phones, I noticed something, for some users (like me) important, for some others totally trivial.

One thing that these phones copy is the horizontal usage mode that iPhone and many many cellphones before it have. However, I only see this as dry repetition, as it was not copied well, in my humble opinion.

A simple thing was not taken in mind: buttons & orientation.

On the iPhone, we meet one simple round key. You hold the phone up, sideways, upside down, and the orientation and form of the key does not change, it always looks the same.

Check out the Nokia 5800, though. It has three horizontal bars for keys. Simple enough. But turn it around and you have, ehm, three vertical bars, one under another?

Even worse for the G1, which also sports some icons on its main keys, namely a home icon, a return (or looks like it) icon and two call related buttons. With the exception of the call related buttons, which can be interpreted almost the same at any orientation, the other buttons look mightly awkward when in horizontal mode:

It may look totally trivial, but as these functional keys will be used in both modes, it’s not actually that trivial.

I’m one of those people that have trouble with space and actions when changing orientation on a machine and I’m sure I’m not the only one. I imagine it’d be highly awkward (awkward, not difficult per se) to handle these keys in horizontal mode.

That’s one point off, for me.