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Have an Apple Mighty Mouse (or regular optical mouse?) Check out this optical illusion and/or Easter Egg…

Filed under Apple, General Computing No Comments »

Just when you think you’ve seen everything, another mind-blowing demo. This could play a huge role in the Mobile Web.

Filed under Cool Stuff, General Computing No Comments »

OK. I’m always reluctant to jump on any anti-Microsoft bandwagon, partly because I worked there for a year and learned that it’s not 50,000 person army of evil - it’s mostly just a bunch of people looking to make cool and useful stuff (with mixed results). So I try to give them the benefit of the doubt. But, then I’m disappointed when the bandwagon seems to be right.

Microsoft recently launched “Tafiti“, a search tool based around their new, ahem, “Flash-killer”, Silverlight.

Clearly what Microsoft was attempting was to demonstrate the Silverlight platform as it could apply to something practical, like search. They obviously aren’t claiming Tafiti is the Search Engine Of The Future.

Wanting to see the glory of Silverlight in action, I actually went ahead and installed it on my MacBook Pro - Yes, Silverlight is cross-platform - assuming your platform is Windows or Mac - and went to Tafiti.com

I was expecting to see beautiful, smooth animation effects - you know, something that would demonstrate why you’d want to build a site with Silverlight instead of Flash (which 98+% of Internet connected computers have installed).

What I saw was jerky animation more associated with mediocre DHTML. Hardly an argument for abandoning DHTML, let alone Flash. As for the search functionality itself… Well, reread this post title.

Filed under Microsoft, Web 2.0 3 Comments »

Here’s a great little personal computing “life hack” I picked up via a colleague. If you’re the type who lets icons pile up on your desktop, then gets annoyed and depressed by your lack of digital organizational skills, try this little trick.

Make your desktop icons REALLY, REALLY big. Like, as big as they can get. Like, 128×128 pixels on the Mac.

I’ve been doing this on the Mac, which is simple to set up, but I believe this is also reasonably doable on Windows Vista.

At first, I thought this was silly, but it really works. And, I think it works for a few reasons:

1. The desktop stops feeling cluttered after about five or six icons, at which point it’s still quite easy to clean up.
2. If, for whatever reason you don’t keep clean, your desktop will completely fill up rather quickly, yet still be fairly easy to clear up.
3. The detail within the icons makes it much easier to determine at a glance what has reason to be there (your drives), and what doesn’t (gobs of PDF’s that Firefox dumped there during a browsing session?)
4. The icons feel more like physical objects. When you clean up, you feel like you’ve performed a real task, rather than just moved some bits around.
5. With the Mac’s beautifully rendered icons, the things that belong there feel like attractive real world desk accesssories, further inspiring you to keep the clutter away. With Vista your mileage may vary

Give it a try. Let me know what you think!

Filed under General Computing 2 Comments »

No matter how much you know about CSS, you can always stumble across something new.

I was pretty much unaware of the “outline” style attribute - which isn’t really a big deal, because in most ways it works the same as the “border” attribute.

Except…

The “outline” attribute is what’s responsible for drawing the little dotted boxes around hyperlinks when they are clicked or navigated (tabbed) to via keyboard (I always thought it was strictly a OS-level effect). Anyway, if they’re a visual blight on your sight, you may be inclined to try this:

a { outline:none }

However, that would make keyboard navigation nearly impossible. Don’t do it. If you just want to avoid them on active (clicked) links, just throw this in your CSS file:

a:hover { outline:none }

And there you go. Huh. Thanks to my pal Matt D. for the tip.

Filed under The User Experience, Web Development 2 Comments »

If you use Boot Camp on a Mac to dual boot between Windows and Mac OS X, you have likely noticed that the clock goes wonky every time you switch between operating systems.  Here’s a quick registry hack for the Windows side that rectifies this problem (I hope… I’m blogging this before I actually reboot to try it out…)

Filed under Apple, General Computing 1 Comment »