Mondays are always the best candidates for random inspiring links. A tiring weekend, too much to do and a harsh week start have contributed to that, I assure you.
So without further ado, I present you today’s list, hot from my Backpack inbox:
- Bowtie starts to excite me – mucho. Check out this extra excellent theme from Jverzier: oh come on, this is too sexee for a desktop.
- If you’re like me, you like to browse design ’stuff’ casually sometime in the day. If you’re like me, dfckr.com is for you. Pleasant design (I love the way they integrated those pesky Google ads in there) and an ambiguous name reek of design from miles afar.
- There goes me, another entry in my ever-expanding “THINGS TO BUY ASAP” linked list: Icon plushies! Make your sofa look like your Dock! Too prosh to just ignore.
- I’m thinking of getting this book to improve my user interaction patterns skills – but then again, I’ll break the “no books till you finish the current ones” pact that I’ve signed with myself.
- This looks promising: The Invoice Machine is an elegant invoicing solution, which also supports Basecamp import. What’s more, there’s a killer free plan, if you freelance just a bit like me.
I hope you all have a good week, people.
You may noticed I’m kinda offline these days, due to the recent change from our family OTE phone and DSL line to some double play greek provider. Which sucks.
I won’t go into speeds and bitrates and whatnot, I’m happy with my ‘net if it’s stable and relatively fast for browsing. What I can’t tolerate though is lack of proper documentation, awful interfaces that just don’t work and lack of proper support.
I’ve spent my first night as a Tellas Zisto customer trying to get my Internet to work, following the instructions on their leaflet obsessively, talking on the phone for half an hour trying to figure out what’s wrong. It turns out, nothing was wrong with my line. It was just that their leaflet had the wrong settings from my area, the modem they provided me with was wrongly set up, and the Siemens Speedstream stupid interface couldn’t work on the Mac, neither on Safari nor on the Firefox.
I’ve never seen something like this. Since the modem was pre-set up, I couldn’t select a different username than ‘admin’, which I had to choose from an one-choice select box. When I tried filling up the password and logging in, this nice interface would inform me that it needs a username. But, I just selected one.
Long story short, I managed to make it work through Windows.
Needless to say, the same settings just refuse to work with my (lovely) Linksys WAG200G. Complete fail. I’ll try again tomorrow with a different router to see if the problem is mine, but for now I’ve had to share my Ethernet through Airport throughout the house. And since the Windows machines around here have problems recognizing WEP passwords coming from the iMac, I had to leave my WiFi unsecured.
So now you know. If you happen to be around my house, hey, drop by! Free WiFi.
I hate it when things don’t work at once.
P.S. I think that most technical people that work on phone support talk in a very different manner to men and women. No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t get them to understand I’m not the usual clueless user, so they should spare me the shit and go on. Story of my life.
No, no. You didn’t get me straight. I hate debugging perfectly working websites in Internet Explorer 6 as much as the next web designer, but I can’t help but comment on the recent trend of not-IE6 pride.
As web designers, we shouldn’t be proud to exclude a portion (however small) of visitors from our websites. We shouldn’t just use conditional comments to show a big fat “GET A PROPER BROWSER N00B” at IE6 users. We shouldn’t wear our non-IE6 compliancy as a banner, beaming at ourselves. Even big games like Google and 37Signals didn’t do that.
We should try to use the above conditional comments to show a proper, however limited, version of the site to our visitors. Inform them subtly that they use an outdated browser and point them to all the good directions to replace it. Finally, say sorry if they’re not able to change their browser, but they’ll have to cope with a light-edition version of the service.
Then be proud. No need at all to confuse and annoy users just because they use an outdated browser.
And that comes from me, a well filled with user-related rantings and complaints.
