The web is a pretty integral part of life for most of us these days.
There are a few things that I wish the clever people would change:
[These things could well be fixed already and maybe I just haven’t figured them out yet]
Enough with the auto selection of a page language based on where the computer is plugged in. Some sites are a real pain in the ass to get back to english. Some applications for download even auto select the language to download based on when the IP is. This is a favorite ‘helpful’ feature of a lot of google products now. Listen people: LOOK AT THE OPERATING SYSTEM LANGUAGE and at provide a default based on THAT, not the location of the friggen machine. If that is too hard, at least provide an escape hatch based on the OS language.
Sometimes I find a blog that is an ongoing diary of something such as a trip, building a house, etc etc, and if it looks really interesting, I might want to read it from the beginning in chronological order.
It’s pretty damn hard to do that without clicking backwards, scrolling to the bottom of pages and working upwards. Listen people: PROVIDE A “read this blog in chronological order” BUTTON.
Facebook is becoming a bigger part of many people’s lives. I find it damn annoying how when you click something like “see all friends” you get 3 pages. But when you get to page 3, HELLO, now there are 4 pages. When you get to page 4 HELLO there are 5 pages. Listen people: don’t keep teasing me like that, it’s REALLY annoying. I want to know if I can be bothered to look at them all before I start, not when I realize I need a whole afternoon half way thru.
Page width. A pain, I know, given that monitors are all different sizes. But when I’m on my widescreen, I want to see it wide. When I’m on the little iBook, I don’t want to scroll around.
Ditto on the Facebook thing. Personally, its just such a pain that I don’t look at it unless I get a message in my gmail. I don’t even know how to access most of the stuff on it. Seems very unintuitive to me. But then, I’m a moron who is utterly convinced that Truant’s iphone thingy is quite simply a magical device that has nothing to do with technology.
In fact, I’m of a mind to test him on the ducking stool. It’s not normal.
Get rid of this “page 1, page 2, page 3” shit altogether.
For applications where you want to browse through everything (eg, Google results), use a Javascript scrolling table that loads more results onto the end dynamically when you scroll to the bottom (these exist, I use them).
For applications where you actually want to find a specific thing (hint: this is almost all of them, especially including contact lists), do ajax search instead (a la Google suggest).
Pagination is stupid, fiddly to use, and impossible to program correctly (e.g. in cases like Facebook’s where they can’t efficiently determine how many results there are until they load them all, hence the “magic new pages” phenomenon Truant describes).
Haha. You say that, but I did manage it. Loophole I guess. I had this person ignored before he became a mod, or between spells as a mod, and the ignore stuck. Don’t tell the big guy!
For reviewing large documents, I want a large touchpad that allows me to scroll horizontally, and move the page around. I hate vertical scrolling. and using a mouse for this task for hundreds and hundreds of pages hurts my hand. this is akin to the touchscreen phenomenon.
i like chris’ idea - kinda like how f.com’s imbedded photos magnify when u scroll over.
I’ve said it before. They should have called it the Cheese Cloth. It’s a mesh, not a web! And, since it reaches the entire world, The All Encompassing Cheese Cloth.
[quote=“Jack Burton”]I like chris’ idea - kinda like how f.com’s imbedded photos magnify when u scroll over.[/quote]ohpleasegodno. I hatehatehate that. Not like f.com’s.
Click - magnify - fine.
Rollover - magnify - painintheass. Makes the screen jump around. Keeps me out of the Daily Photos thread. Boooooooooo.
[quote=“Jack Burton”]For reviewing large documents, I want a large touchpad that allows me to scroll horizontally, and move the page around. I hate vertical scrolling. and using a mouse for this task for hundreds and hundreds of pages hurts my hand. this is akin to the touchscreen phenomenon.[/quote]Why don’t you just double-click the mouse wheel so that scrolly circle thing appears and you just have to move the cursor up or down to scroll?
I agree with Brendon about the pages. And I wonder why we aren’t seeing more of those zoomy pannyinterfaces already. I also agree with the good doctor that AECC is a better term for the thing we surf. But these are trivial matters. The main issue in my mind is how to make it easier for people to collect all that Internet money!
