Category Archives: blurb

Links (& blurbs about them)

Google Chrome

Google makes it really difficult for me to to keep thinking of them as the new evil empire when they release things like Google Chrome, and say things like “we need the internet to be a fair, smart, safe place.”

A browser with a “privacy mode” where “nothing that ever occurs in that window is ever logged onto your computer?” Where do I sign up? I’m ready to throw away my separate Firefox profile just for guests and browsing XSS-vulnerable sites like MySpace.

One question: do Firefox employees still get to ride the Google bus to work for free? I hope so.

Cyrillic gone wild! or at least gone all speculative-fiction.

Experiments in typographic alternate history have produced Елброкан (Ælbrocan), an excellent Cyrillic Fraktur by Guifa (inspired by the discussion about my very own Shark, wow) and Калоян (Kaloyan), an awesome Cyrillic Uncial. Move over, boring old Устав (Ustav).

San Francisco Walkability and other infographics

This map of San Francisco’s “Walkability” by Lee Byron uses a similar blobby algorithm to The Neighborhood Project.

I want one of his Centerclocks for my wall. He’s also got a nifty Rivers of the World map, and he’s the guy behind the NY Times’ Olympic Medals Cartogram and Presidential Polling graphic (which thankfully shows Obama in the lead in a majority of the polls).

Calling out Jakob Nielsen’s site design

Hank Williams busts out the brutal honesty: UI Guru Jakob Nielsen’s site is unreadable. And John Gruber concurs. Every time I end up there, I wonder idly why I’ve never gotten around to reading through what looks like great content. And after a few moments I close the window because the colors are so awful.

And why doesn’t his 10 Best Application UIs of 2008 awards announcement actually link to the winner’s sites? Seven of them are web applications, but if I want to know about any of them, I have to copy the product name, open a new tab, and look it up in Google. There’s a reason it was called “hypertext,” and the ability to have yellow and teal backgrounds isn’t it.