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  1. Playing with trying to show bus timetable intervals:

    Where the number at the top is the (contrived) bus number, the numbers in pale yellow are the hours between which the bus operates and the numbers in stronger yellow are the intervals at which the bus visits the station. An attempt to improve on the original (not pictured).

  3. I just sent a support email to @github making the following request for better 404 pages:

    Your 404 pages are pretty but useless for actually trying to find stuff which is misspelt, moved or gone. Could you consider implementing some of these improvements?

    • Show the github header on the 404 page for consistency
    • If the path is /real-username/missing-project, show the user’s profile and a list of their repos
    • If the path is /missing-username/*, show a search for “missing-username” or at the very least prefill the search box with that text
    • Keep track of projects which have moved and do HTTP redirects to their new locations

    Thanks for all the great work you’ve done and made possible,
    Barnaby

    Archived here for posterity and public commentary.

  7. One fail I’m seeing more and more is the “we’ve got a different version of this site for your locality! Would you like to go to it?” whole-page overlay on permalink pages. So many problems:

    • Why do you have multiple versions of the same site if the content is equally valuable on either one (e.g. recipe sites)?
    • If language is the reason (I have never seen this) exactly why can’t you internationalize the UI and offer some sort of auto-translation of the content? Or leave the translation to me/my browser whilst having a small, unobtrusive banner letting me know I might be able to find similar content in my native language.
    • If I’ve followed a permalink, I want to see that content. Offering me a redirect to a generic homepage is useless
  8. ↪ Sandeep Shetty: @BarnabyWalters So you have 3 types of tags (from an interface perspective): note body, meta data (visible) & machine tags (invisible)?

    sandeepshetty yep, this is certainly something I need to document on the wiki.

    In fact most of the machine tags were a hack to add schemaless data to my MySQL-managed schema, but as I move to flat files + ad hoc indexes I might migrate some of my machine tags to “real” data — it’s not like they’re doing much good where they are at the moment.

    The main benefit is easy editing — I just use my tag editing UI instead of building another UI for each different bit of data.

  9. Another website “disabling” right click and replacing it with an obnoxious “These photos are copyright” dialog. I know that. Let me right click them.

    In actual fact, in this particular case, I was right clicking to determine the final display size of the image, which was less than half of the 1200x1600px monstrosity requested by the page.

  11. Miyazaki says, "Our job as animators is not only to draw scenes. We must find the minimum necessary and important lines for the specific movement in a given action. The techniques of animation drawing are not the same as those of painting a still picture. Animation is a consequence of the audience's perception of movement created by sequential drawings. For this reason, each drawing in the sequence -- especially the lines -- should not be drawn too detailed; rather, they should be drawn less [detailed] and create an instant pause in the sequential movement.” (source)

    Sounds a lot like UI design to me.

  14. Walked along a nice bit of beach-ish area near my flat. Realised that whilst I’m fairly experienced at creating UIs where the creation of sound is the end result (musical instruments), I’ve never really given much thought to the use of sound in other UIs.

    The house lights across the bay twinkle a lot — perhaps because of the heat. It’s cold outside here, but inside all the buildings is really toasty, thanks to ubiquitous geothermal power.