papaparse.com is a fantastic jQuery plugin for reading CSV files in #js — perfect for tiny feedback loop live previews of file uploads

#listening to NASA + CC-licensed ambient music youarelistening.to/nasa @ Vísar HQ #spaaace

Recurring post-snowden meme: bunch of guys put up a shiny vaporware site claiming to fix everything if you subscribe to their mailing list.

“Protect your privacy by giving us your email address!”

How about instead you actually build something post news about the stuff you’re building on the web, where I can browse it over Tor without giving you (or more likely a third party) a bunch of information about myself.

Beginning experimentation with tipping UIs: added BTC and DOGE tipping links to homepage with rel-payment and experimental u-x-payment, documented a bunch of tipping UI examples on microformats.org/wiki/payment-examples

The nutrition information given on this packet of delicious Baklawa is a confusing and badly designed signifier. Take the example of someone with Type 1 Diabetes who needs to carb count their meals. They have to look on the back of the box

and peer at a badly printed label with hideous typography and punctuation

only to be rewarded with a value of 49.5g per 100g of serving. Turning the box sideways informs us that there’s approximately 350g total.

Despite the obvious difficulty of accessing the information (especially, say, in low light at a family dinner), there’s a more subtle problem here — that whilst the quantities given are perfectly valid and probably over-precise, the frames of reference and comparison (“per 100g out of a 350g packet”‚ don’t match up in any way to the eater’s mental model of the packet, which looks something like this:

In practice, no-one eats an entire box of Baklawa, so the only unit which is meaningful to the eater is the per-Baklawa carbohydrate count, which could be expressed clearly and concisely on the packet

This could be placed on the front or the back, that’s not important — what is important is making it robustly readable in varied conditions, and matching the user’s cognitive model to minimise effort spent decoding the information.

Because people with diabetes shouldn’t have to do maths as a punishment for enjoying Baklawa.

#design #nutrition #diabetes #udacity #design101

Rather nice detail on fitbit.com profile page editing view, allowing quick mock-changing of audience. UI like this gives people confidence and safety, provided it is truthful.

Exposing protocol-relative URLs is an odd choice — I suspect that is accidental, but would be pleasantly surprised if not.

Availability is more valuable than time. As such it should be respected more, and dealt out/guarded more carefully.

First #indieweb package derived from indiewebify.me code: indieweb/rel-me for consuming the rel-me microformat and verifying silo backlinks. Perfect for implementing an indieauth.com clone in #php…

Managed to get hold of some proper bufala mozzarella from Piccolo Italia — looking forward to trying it out on a pizza!

The Flex’s long battery life, water resistance and sleep tracking allows it to stay on my wrist pretty much constantly, meaning I never forget to put it on. Their web UI is quite nice, and the syncing process is adequate. It’s stupid that the only get at the data on the device is to sync with an iDevice or upload it to their silo and look at (admittedly rather nice) graphs, but that’s a known bug with these devices (which Aaron Parecki has written at length about.)

The Fuelband can be quite painful to put on if the catch pinches skin, its display is nice, and the fact that it doubles up as a watch which automatically syncs timezone with my computer is pretty great. Their web UI is fairly horrible (doesn’t work at all on Firefox due to JS errors), complete with Nike product advertising and confusing comparison charts.

“Nike Fuel” is a singularly useless unit. I’m imagining the reasoning behind it was something like this:

• Our USP is measuring “all kinds of activities” instead of just steps
• Calories would express this just fine, but we can’t trademark something which already exists, or copyright numbers, and database rights (which might not even cover this — ?) only exist in Europe
• Let’s come up with some new unit which is incompatible with our competitors’ products! In order for it to mean anything to anyone, they’ll have to be able to compare their score with other peoples scores, meaning they have to buy Nike products too!

If this is true, I question Nike’s motives — helping people become more active or using vendor lock-in and social manipulation to sell as many devices as possible.

Obviously it’s the second one, but Fitbit exhibit no such problems and seem to be doing okay. Everything is relative.

Both devices are rubbery wrist straps which can make clothing a little bothersome, but presumably that positioning helps them gain more accurate results as opposed to, say, a belt clip.

I’ve been unable to adequately compare the accuracy of either product. The Fuelband seems to think I’ve done far fewer steps than the Flex, but as I can’t get numbers off the Flex quickly it’s difficult to compare the two. One way would be to actually count how many steps I do one day, and see which device is closer.

I’m looking forward to continuing to use both devices, hopefully beginning to follow in Aaron’s footsteps (no pun intended) and pull the data in to my own site.

#qs #fitbit #fuelband

Renaming “Chrome” to “That browser with Flash”

The medium with which you choose to express a message shapes that message — be careful it doesn’t contradict it.

Case in point: A Rational Web Platform (via @brucel)

• hosted on google silo
• long complex ugly URL
• presentation tied to paged dead-tree media with ugly results:
• no author URL, just corporate silo email, and email != web
• javascript required
• no microformats2 or even semantic HTML article markup — even js-generated markup is predictably disgusting
• Redirecting to different (non-canonical? difficult to tell due to ugliness) URL due to large amounts of traffic, likely indicative of infrastructural problems or incorrect medium
• Broken on mobile devices:
  

Everything about this is anti-web, practically screaming “ignore me”.

Improvements:

• Host on personal site or project commons with CC license
• Short, consistent, readable URI
• Static semantic HTML with microformats2 h-entry for easy citations, archival and replying, no JS required — this would also solve infrastructural problems as HTML is pretty easy to serve and much faster than JS-rendered DOM-heavy “documents”applications
• Author attributed by name+personal (non-silo) URL, with profile photo/logo for quick human association

Signed up for brid.gy. If your site accepts webmentions it is a no-brainer; if not then you’re missing out! Implement today: indiewebcamp.com/webmention

An excellent implementation of a indiewebcamp.com/backfeed service, ≈2 years after I drafted that wiki page. fantastic work by snarfed.org!

#webmention #bridgy #indieweb #backfeed

Mac OS 10.6 spaces vs 10.9 full-screen apps/desktops — switching gestures a welcome addition, but muscle memory persistent “physical” location lost, replaced by ambiguous time-based UI which does exactly what you mean half of the time, and causes flow-breaking confusion+excise the rest of the time

#ui #ux #mac #spaces

Celebrating oneoldernessday at the office by finding my Icelandic name – it’s either Bjarndal (bear dale) or Bjarnhéðinn (bear skin, pronounced byarn-hey-thinn).

The ever-awesome @briansuda and Ninja got me a copy of berglondon.com/products/svk — loving the affordances of having ink you can choose not to see, also pondering the possibilities of additive fanfiction where you add your own internal monologue/headcanon/background details in-place over the canonical storyline.

Compilation of some sub-optimal gauge design I’ve come across recently. First up is BBC iPlayer’s speed tester+comparison tool:

Ignoring the questionable pyramid chartjunk, there are a bunch of issues here — the use of arc length and exceedingly inconsistent scale on the skeuomorphic gauge, the strange choice of colouring on the comparison bars (is green good and red bad? or better/worse than my connection?) and the totally useless “status” column add up to a confusing graphic.

The next is this set of dials from pool.dogechain.info — again the use of arc length is unnecessary, and very few comparisons are possible. At first, the scales look fairly sensible — perhaps the maximums are pool maximums, or averages or something?

Uh, apparently not.

These dials are always half full. They use up hundreds of pixels of colour and drop shadow, taunting you into thinking you’re getting some sort of useful comparison, when actually they’re informing you that two times twenty three is forty six. Astonishing.

Simply erasing the colour creates a much cleaner graphic

which can be further improved by clearing some of the resultant whitespace

The addition of time-series data might make a genuinely useful contribution, as could some comparisons or proportions allowing your rate to be compared to the pool average or total.

Another welcome, and obvious addition would be “how much do I make per second/minute”, “how much have I made so far”, “how does that compare to other miners” and “how much is that in real money” — these are the questions that I as a miner actually want answered when looking at a dashboard, but the few relevant statistics which are shown are relegated to a small corner.