Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering’s analysis of what makes Amazon’s ‘Was this review helpful to you?’ so brilliant.
What really makes it brilliant for me is its simplicity. No complicated ratings of five or more stars — you simply need to check with yourself if it was helpful or not.
A directory I’ve had lying around for far too long.
Of particular joy for me is the Mighty Morfin Power Rangers Theme (MP3).
TechCrunch’s is one of the most widely[ ]heard voices in technology reporting. This should be considered an embarrassment to our industry.
I stopped reading TechCrunch shortly after I started; I found that the signal to noise ratio was incredibly low. I hear it has not got any better.
I’m a Dropbox user. (That link is a referral link, which will earn me 250 MB of additional space if you register.) Not a power user, and I currently only use .9% of my 2GB free plan, but a user nonetheless.
I have, however, found a very useful use case for the service. In my Documents folder, I have a Writings/DRAFTS folder. This is where I store drafts for posts on Simply Jonathan.
Now, Dropbox works this way: you have a folder called “My Dropbox”. You can choose the location of this for yourself, but the default location on Mac OS X is ~/Dropbox.
The important thing to notice is that these are not identical. And only stuff you put in your Dropbox gets synced.
Not to worry, though, because a little UNIX style magic is all it takes. Using the power of symbolic links (symlink), I was a able to achieve exactly what I wanted: having Dropbox sync an out-of-scope folder or file.
Now, symlinks are nothing new, and this was not a matter of whether a symlink could live in the Dropbox — it was merely a pleasant discovery that it also synced the contents of it.
How come I end up where I started? How come I end up where I went wrong?
How come no browser in the history of humanity has had an ‘open in this window’–button? Because they assume people don’t use target="_blank"? They do.
And it’s obviously not to keep buttons out of the interface — when tabs came to browsers, they implemented ‘open in new tab’. So what is it?
(Yes, I know this can be achieved with user scripts, I just wonder about why it has never been built into the browser.)
Forever awake he lies shaking and starving Praying for someone to turn off the light
I’ve actually only seen four of these (‘2001’, ‘Memento’, ‘Mullholland Dr.’, and ‘Donnie Darko’). I’d argue that Fight Club would merit a place on this list, as I find it is — in the respects relevant to this list — similar to Memento.
(Via Daring Fireball.)
The name really says it all. I need to employ these techniques much more often.
Interesting. Scary, but interesting.
(Via Jens Alfke.)
This is Simply Jonathan, a blog written by Jonathan Holst. It's mostly about technical topics (and mainly the Web at that), but an occasional post on clothing, sports, and general personal life topics can be found.
Jonathan Holst is a programmer, language enthusiast, sports fan, and appreciator of good design, living in Copenhagen, Denmark, Europe. He is also someone pretentious enough to call himself the 'author' of a blog. And talk about himself in the third person.