user interfaces

Social Fixer – improved Facebook experience

Enhance Facebook And Remove Annoyances!

Social Fixer for Facebook plugs into your browser and improves the existing Facebook.com web site. You get to pick which features you want to use:

Filter your news feed by keyword, author, and more
Tabbed news feed organizes posts by games, apps, etc
Hide parts of the page you don’t want to see
Don’t show posts you’ve already read
Auto-switch to the Most Recent news feed
Add some style with custom themes
And much more! See the List of Features.

WordPress 3.8 plans responsive redesign of admin area

WordPress 3.8 beta 1 has been announced a couple of days ago. As always, lots of fixes and improvements are making their way to the new version. But for me personally, the major change is the planned redesign of the admin area with responsive layout and support for mobile:

The new admin design, especially the responsive aspect of it. Try it out on different devices and browsers, see how it goes, especially the more complex pages like widgets or seldom-looked-at-places like Press This. Color schemes, which you can change on your profile, have also been spruced up.

Why is this so important? – you might wonder. After all, there are native WordPress apps for both iOS and Android. The thing here is that some WordPress themes and plugins modify the admin interface, and these changes aren’t supported by the mobile apps. For example, when writing a new post, post formats might be different between what’s supported by the web admin interface and mobile interface. With a responsive web design of admin interface, I’ll be able to use the web interface on my mobile and thus have the same options. It’s possible to do it now with a table – where the screen is slightly larger, but using it on the mobile currently is the pain in the back. So, that’s why I’m looking forward to WordPress 3.8.

Google pushing Mobile First

I’ve heard “Mobile First!” a gadzillion times by now, but I’ve never took it too literally, and I don’t remember seeing anyone else who did. Google Operating System blog however suggest that Google does.

A few years ago, many people complained that mobile sites and mobile apps are too limited. They couldn’t include all the features from their desktop counterparts and some thought that was a bad thing.

Fast forward today and you’ll notice that Google’s desktop sites look more and more like Google’s mobile apps. Most Google redesigns are all about taking mobile interfaces and adding them to the desktop. That’s one of the reasons why many Google services drop advanced features and opt for simplified interfaces. This way, everything looks consistent and users can quickly switch from the mobile apps to the desktop apps.

There are also specific examples listed – Google Maps, Google Play, Google+ and others.

GitHub error pages

I’ve praised GitHub many a time in posts on this blog and in numerous conversations over a pint. Today, I found yet another reason to do so – GitHub error pages. We’ve all seen a parallax 404 by now, right?

Today was the first time I looked into the source code of the page. It greets one with the following words right under the HTML 5 Doctype definition:

Hello future GitHubber! I bet you’re here to remove those nasty inline styles,
DRY up these templates and make ’em nice and re-usable, right?

Please, don’t. https://github.com/styleguide/templates/2.0

The link provides even more goodness. The list of other (all?) GitHub error templates is provided with explanation of which one fires when, as well as an insightful list of rules that GitHub uses for building error pages. Have a look:

If you’re visiting from the internet, feel free to learn from our style. This is a guide we use for our own apps internally at GitHub. We encourage you to set up one that works for your own team.

Error pages should be built such that they require zero scripting, zero javascript, and zero dependency on anything whatsoever. That means static HTML with inline CSS and base64-encoded images.

The following are banned from every error page:

All <script> tags with an src attribute.

All JavaScript that loads external data.

All <link> tags.

All <img> tags with an src pointing to a URL.

It’s things like that that keep me coming back and looking for more web development elegance all around GitHub.

On keyboards

Jeff Atwood shares a few of his thoughts on keyboards:

Now, I’ve grown to begrudgingly accept the fact that touchscreen keyboards are here to stay, largely because the average person just doesn’t need to produce much written communication in a given day. So the on-screen keyboard, along with a generous dollop of autocomplete and autofix, suffices.

But I’m not an average person. You aren’t an average person. We aren’t average people. We know how to use the most powerful tool on the web –words. Strip away the images and gradients and vectors from even the fanciest web page, and you’ll find that the web is mostly words. If you believe, as I do, in the power of words, then keyboards have to be one of the most amazing tools mankind has ever created. Nothing lets you get your thoughts out of your brain and into words faster and more efficiently than a well made keyboard. It’s the most subversive thing we’ve invented since the pen and the printing press, and probably will remain so until we perfect direct brain interfaces.

I think this is pretty much spot on. It was hard for me to get around the wide acceptance of the touch keyboards, but then I too figured out that I’m just not average in this regard.