Author Archives: admin

Another Unicode omission

Why isn’t the play/pause/stop/record family of icons in Unicode? It includes the four suits on modern playing cards, every mathematical symbol ever used, and a number of now obsolete languages. Shouldn’t it also include what is a ubiquitous set of about eight icons used on everything from 8-tracks to iPods? There’s even a nice spot for them, right next to ⏏ (eject).

This has been discussed at least twice on the unicode mailing list, but no decision was reached either time. It seems that some people think the icons should be included because they would be useful, and others think they should be excluded because it would open the door to including every pictogram and icon in use on every toolbar and consumer electronic in existence. The latter seems like a very flimsy argument to me; the argument for including them stems from their ubiquity, which would prevent every other symbol in use from piggybacking their way into the character set. In fact, the only symbol more ubiquitous is probably the “power” symbol; it should also be included. And most of the symbols already included in the “Miscellaneous Technical” chart are far more obscure.

Update 2007-05-10: The unicode people graciously responded to my email regarding this, and it sounds like it would require an evangelist to encourage the inclusion of these symbols before it happened. It’s so awesome when a standards organization actually responds to the needs of its users.

Anachronistic icons?

There’s an evolving alphabet of pictograms in software design. When presented with an unfamiliar (web or desktop) application, we users expect to read a tool-bar of icons and know what each does. The text editor in WordPress has icons for bold, italic, strikeout, bullet & numbered lists, left, center, and right aligned text, and so on. Firefox has forward, back, stop, reload and home.

It is striking how many of these icons are both ubiquitous and depictions of objects that are so obsolete that the average person may have never seen an example of the object in real life. Consider these, which are extremely obscure:

  • skeleton key (for security, as in older Netscapes)
  • ship steering wheel (remember Netscape’s icon?)
  • hourglass (in older Windows and Mac OS Classic)
  • shield, for security (eg. Windows XP security center)
  • reel-to-reel tape or film spool (in numerous media applications)
  • floppy disk (for save) how long has it been, really, since you’ve seen a floppy disk?
  • polaroid photo (to mean photos) these too are nearly obsolete

It is totally concievable that a younger person might never have seen one of these items in real life, and it’s certainly true that they are extremely rare in everyone’s life today. And there is another set of pictograms that are nearly as rare, although everyone has probably seen them at one point or another:

  • compass (eg. Safari)
  • typewriter (for word processing / keyboard settings)
  • 1960s-1980s style Bell telephone (still easily found in network software)
  • artist’s paint palette (for colors / artwork)
  • life preserver (for help)
  • old-style bell (for alerts or sounds)
  • magnifying glass (for zoom and view)
  • (extremely abstract) loudspeaker (for audio)

How long has it been since you’ve seen one of these items? For me, it’s been very long. There are at least two more which are common enough now but will likely become extremely rare in the next decade or so:

  • incandescent lightbulb
  • film frame with perforations

Do you expect these icons will get replaced with a flourescent lightbulb or some sort of pictogram representing digital photography? Doubtful.

In fact, the only real common pictograms representing real, common things are:

  • document
  • trash can (including its legally sanitized versions “wastebasket” and “recycle bin”)
  • folder
  • book
  • house (for home)
  • hand (for moving and pointing)
  • globe

Of course, every specific application has specific real-world icons, but the set of icons representing really common, everyday things is suprisingly small. I wouldn’t want to leave out the vast number of completely abstract icons:

  • arrows for up, down, back, forward, refresh, and so on
  • the play, pause stop & so on family of media player icons
  • plus
  • minus
  • checkmark
  • x for cancel
  • star (for new or notice me)

And then there’s the wizard’s magic wand, which shows up in artistic applications and in configuration wizards; no-one has ever seen a real magic wand, because they don’t really exist. Which brings us closer to an explanation of why so many of these icons are vanishingly rare: the icons are not drawn from real life. They are drawn from a visual tradition of Western culture, extending back at least as far as the the history of film, at the beginning of the 20th century. Look back again at the first two lists of exceedingly rare items: how hard do you have to think to name a film, or a comic book, or a television show, where you saw each of these items. It’s not hard at all – you could probably find an image of all these things in a single evening of sitcom TV, saturday morning cartoons, or in a handful of comic books. I can name movies off the top of my head with each as well:

  • skeleton key: Any old horror film
  • ship steering wheel: Jason & The Argonauts
  • hourglass: The Princess Bride
  • shield: Roman soldiers in The History of the World
  • reel-to-reel tape or film spool: Pulp fiction
  • floppy disk: Hackers
  • polaroid photo: Amelie
  • compass: Blair Witch Project
  • typewriter: Naked Lunch (how could you forget?)
  • 1960s-1980s style Bell telephone: All The President’s Men
  • artist’s paint palette: The Big Lebowski
  • life preserver: Radiers of the Lost Ark
  • old-style bell: Steamboat Willie
  • magnifying glass: Charlie & The Chocolate Factory
  • loudspeaker: again, Raiders of the Lost Ark

And of course, there’s Harry Potter for the magic wand.

So the next time you go hunting for the perfect idea for that new toolbar icon, don’t just look around you. Watch some TV, read a comic book, or rent a movie. The visual tradition available to you is much richer that you might imagine.

Programming in GIF

I just got a spam job offer in email. One of the responsibilities was:

7. Programs in all common Web HTML formatting tools such as animated GIF and Java.

Guess I am behind the times with my Python and XSLT ski11z and PNG.

Ooh, and this position is in St. Louis, Missouri. Rad.

Reinventing the sixteen-sided wheel

I found this while Googling for the way to convert an integer to hex in JavaScript. Not only is it basically unreadable code, but it’s stupid: this functionality is built in to the language — just pass the desired base into the toString() method:

i = 255;
i.toString(16); // 'ff'

But who am I to contradict about.com and “Stephen Chapman, your Guide To JavaScript?”

Update 2008-01-20: about.com has updated the page linked above and removed their long, obtuse code, in lieu of our friend toString(). Keep up the good work!

The most surprising thing about the internet

Someone asked me today what I thought the most surprising thing about the internet today was. I was stumped, and the question has been rolling around in my head for hours.

Sure, it’s surprising that projects with poor performance, atrocious user-interface and horrific security records (programs, websites, even operating systems) consistently command more users than vastly superior competitors. But that’s more an unfortunate truth about market inertia.

I couldn’t come up with something surprising about the internet, because nothing has really surprised me for years. I know that sounds terrifically arrogant. Bear with me for a moment. The real surprising thing about the internet today is how slow things are moving. Movies on demand on my computer? Buying a single digital audio track for $1? I talked about that with friends back in ’98 (just not the DRM part). Social networking? Blogging? Can you say sixdegrees and slashdot? Geeks have been doing this stuff for years. An easy to use phone / PDA / music player? It’s about time. Geotagging? Posting photos online? Pervasive wi-fi? Video on webpages? It’s not just me… ask anyone in “the industry” and they’ll roll their eyes and say “Yeah, glad to see someone is finally doing that.”

When I was in junior high, I made a cardboard model of “the home entertainment center of the future” for the school science fair. It was a TV, a VCR, a radio, a phone, answering machine, fax, modem, computer for word processing, and a video game system, all in one. Now I have one, under my desk — the computer part has taken over the functions of everything else. The surprising thing is that it took more than fifteen years.

And the most surprising thing about the internet today is that all these hot new applications took so long to appear.

The question you should be asking is, “ok, what’s the next step, smarty pants?” There are lots. I’m working on one right now, and when I’m done with that I’ll pick one of the eight or so obvious next steps and start again.

Hotmail goes phishing

A friend pointed out that a HTML email my company sent looked completely fucked in Hotmail. After painfully navigating Hotmail’s time-traveling account reactivation process, I found these layout problems was due to a combination of things:

1. Hotmail strips out the <style> tag that we put in our email.

2. Hotmail does not strip out the class=”foo” attributes that we put on HTML tags in the email.

3. The class names that we’re using collide with class names used by Hotmail – at least partly because – wait for it – they’re using tables to lay out their entire site.

This means that parts of the email we send end up looking – and behaving – like Hotmail GUI elements.

This is easy to fix – I’ll just inline the style and stop using classes (unfortunately tripling the size of the email in the process).

. . . but . . .

this means that an attacker could trivially send out an email with malicious links in it that were guaranteed to look like Hotmail UI elements. Have these people even *heard* of phishing? Dumb.

Time traveling with Hotmail

I hadn’t logged in to my Hotmail account in a while. Here’s what I got:

Time travel with Hotmail

Now, look closely, at the bullet points describing why my account has been deactivated. Apparently I either last signed in tomorrow (-1 days ago), or I deleted my account tomorrow (-1 days ago). Guess what happens when I click “Activate Account.” It redirects me about twelve times, and eventually redirects me back to this page.

I can only assume this is the product of time travel experiments at Microsoft Research. Good job guys!