sugarenia.com

You missed WGSS didn’t you? You didn’t? Nice.

‘Cause it’s here again. I couldn’t let this roam free in the ‘nets.

For those not understanding greek or those that refuse to reopen the above page in a tab, it’s an online advertising firm or something, offering marketing solutions even to bloggers. Would you let those people near your blog? I wouldn’t even let them touch my laptop bag.

So without further ado, let’s count the ways this little gem here sucks:

• All the text in this site - and I mean all - is an image. With a hover effect. That makes the text more pale on hovering.

  

• If you look a bit at the code, you see that everything is probably generated by Macromedia Dreamweaver. Which is bad, bad, bad. DW is a great editor and can be a pretty nice WYSIWYG application, but Christ, no.

  

• You cannot really say what’s linkable and what’s not on navigation. Everything is white - no underline or difference in colour or size.
• There’s a strange effect: if you click on the text of a page, it automatically redirects you to the next one. Pure class.
• <td colspan="16" rowspan="14">. ‘Nuff said.

Well, as you see, somewhere along the way these guys messed it up. This is usually the moment when I advise people to just switch off the PC and head for a walk, or paint, or learn chinese.

I do that to myself too, all the time.

wgss, greek, sites, suck, ad-network

A call to web designers out there: noticed any differences in your sites between Firefox 2 and Firefox 3?

Personally, I’ve only seen the infamous outline bug. For those that haven’t experienced it, check Google pagination when clicking a link:

You can fix it though, piece of cake. Just add an a { outline: none; } rule. You’ll find yourself defining outlines more often than ever with Firefox 3.

The other bug is trickier: the new version of Firefox doesn’t seem to like background images. I admit I haven’t researched it much, but it’s a really annoying bug, as it blurs background images for no reason. Others have noticed as well.

To fully understand what I mean, check out the display of the background image live:

…and compare it with the actual image (seen here by right click > view background image):

Really, really annoying bug that one. It seems that Firefox has a problem rendering background images with background rules that also specify positioning. So it does not render well backgrounds defined with something like body { background: url("img/img.jpg") no-repeat top center; }.

It’s minor but irritating. Surely though I can’t go around breaking up my rules in two just because of this hiccup. I guess I’ll have to wait for 3.0.1.

firefox 3, css, link, outline, dot, bug, background, blur

We all love Flickr. It’s a mostly simple and beautifully designed site that really works. Thing is, over the years it evolved into something much more than a photo sharing community: new features were added, others were polished, some were dropped. That’s a good thing; evolution is the core of success of every service, after all.

The other day I found myself looking at the Flickr footer, marvelling at how well, undistinct it all was. It’s a set of links that looks kinda thrown together in lines, with a reduced font-size and not enough white space to boot. So I thought, hey, can this be done differently?

This is what I came up with, after 10 mins or so:

Some explanations:

• I dropped the table Flickr uses, I don’t see its use anyway, even in its current form, it can easily be done without it. I used an unordered list containing a level 6 header and another unordered list with the links.
• I removed the Activity section - it was too vague and the only thing that I check anyway is my comments, a link that I have moved to “You” column, since it sounds more appropriate.
• I dropped the “Order Prints” link - I understand Flickr and its need to get some money, but let’s be frank here, who’s gonna use a footer link to order prints? Highly unlikely.
• I also dropped the “Last 7 days” link, since its content is contained in the “Last Month”  section anyway.
• I moved the unlabeled series of links to a separate column called “Flickr”.

I don’t know if it’s better, but in my eye, it’s more evident. You can clearly identify the different link blocks, and use of white space eased the procedure of scanning and finding a particular link. Sure, it takes more space than the previous one and it’s probably not suitable for every page, but this is a matter of IA, a whole different matter.

flickr, redesign, footer

Hello there, Squared5.

Thanks for the work you put in making MPEG Streamclip for Mac OS and giving it to us for free! You’re cool.

You know what’s not cool though? This:

I mean come on. There must be at least half a dozen ways to make this window more usable.

I’ll be frank: I don’t really like video editing apps. In fact, I hate them. I fiddled with MPEG Streamclip for about half an hour, trying to find how on earth I can cut a segment of my clip. For the record, I failed. A friend told me how, the next day.

Le sigh.

mpeg streamclip, squared5

OK, now, if someone came right up to you and asked you…

“if you were lost (pun intended) on a deserted island, which three presentations would you take with you, in the form of a nicely put together .pdf file?”

…what would you reply?

I’d say, without a doubt:

1. Grids are Good by Khoi Vinh, the one that started it all.
2. Interface Design Juggling by Dan Cederholm, the one that’s fun and mixes all the cool stuff together.
3. (a recent favourite) Details Make the Difference by Dan Rubin, because it analyzes properly why your design sucks and theirs doesn’t.

Release Candidate: Steve Smith’s GBC07 presentation. Hey Steve! *waves*

khoi vinh, dan cederholm, dan rubin