If you have a creative block use this to pick a font. Don’t use it if you’re creating a competitor to the app you chose from though.
Instafonts
November 14th, 2006What do you want in HTML?
November 9th, 2006Have your say about the future of HTML.
What I’d want:
– Better form controls. But only if they follow other computer conventions.
– Application markup. We already have most things for marking documents.
It’s hard thinking about this since what I want should really be written on small papers, put on a desk and then sorted into structure (HTML), presentation (CSS) and behaviour (JavaScript). But I don’t really have time for this. Do you?
Update: Another reason for the lack of ideas might be that I just learned to work with the limitations. They’re so built into my brain that I’d have to go check some of the pages I made to see where I might have been exploiting the current standard..
Online communities
November 9th, 2006Spletne urice #34 served its audience with a nice talk about what online communities are and a quick reality check that hardware or software are not key components to the success of a specific community. Some of the more advanced visitors were a bit disappointed since the talk did not serve any points one could really work upon or any numbers or more direct lessons to be learned from studying them.
I was fascinated at how Jure has shown us that even a geek crowd can engage in a more active conversation with the person giving the talk – not only with mumbling and nodding. His way of delivering information is really amazing – it shows he has a lot of practice at Faculty of Economics in Ljubljana (which recently got Equis accreditation) where he recently graduated and is also a demonstrator there.
At the same time Tim Berners-Lee seems to have discovered that internet has grown out of the computer science and needs some more formal research done.
After the talk we also had a short talk from mozdev admin and Mozilla developer Brian King about the new Firefox 2.0 features. Since he spoke about most of the important features Marko just quickly reviewed the ones that developers should know best. The Firefox launch party then moved to a nearby pub where we continued with pizza and beer.
Retrieving forgot passwords
November 8th, 2006You know how you allow your browser to save passwords and then forget the master password and can’t see the passwords anymore? Or you own IE6 where you can’t even see what the darn thing saved?
When I was in a situation like this I wrote a simple favelet/bookmarklet that lets you steal your own passwords that are autofilled by the browser.
When run, the favelet will go through all the input fields that have type set to password (the ones you can’t see, cause the browser will mask the content to * or dots) and alert their name and value.
This kind of script, combined with XHR can be a powerful attack tool since you can use it to steal passwords of other people if you can slip it in the page they’re looking at. More about it on ajaxian. Don’t use this script for anything like that!
Being ill
November 8th, 2006It’s funny how most people will assume you’re an idiot when you’re over clothed – e.g. wearing a hat, scarf and coat in the office. Nobody will think that just maybe you’re cold cause you’re about to become ill and you just want to add an out of office reply, send that report you promised and delegate all your work to your colleagues.
I’m not that ill anymore, I’m quite ok. The only problem is that I can’t spend 8 hours at work since after about 4 my energy plunges and I can barely sit anymore. It’s a hint to go home and lie down and have a midday nap. Funny how you can loose all the power you had in just a few days. Fighting illness seems to be quite a difficult task. Almost like weightlifting.
Web mashups – LIFFe
October 30th, 2006A few days ago the local film festival LIFFe launched its programme. Again it was not an exceptional work of IA or UX. You can access the whole list of movies that leads to individual movie pages that contain details and the showing times. You can also check the schedule by individual date that unfortunately contains almost no details about the movie – just the title. Sections of the festival do not have a page where you can see all the movies that compete in that section.
So I decided to create a quick mashup of all scripts that have been lying around my disk for some time now. This proved to be a quite difficult task because of a lot of reasons. The first one was that the code behind the page is incredibly ugly – table layouts in table layouts without ids, classes or almost anything you can use to find your way around it. The next problem was the encoding and my use of php that is not too friendly to windows-1250 encoding used on the source page. Eventually I did it in a bit less than a day – it’s not perfect, but I think it shows that it can be done better and it does not take more time.
I have some stuff to add but since the festival is getting closer and closer I present Program 17. LIFFe festivala.
The page uses some AJAX (XHR to be exact), DOM parsing of the source data and SortedTable to present the data.