I often find, since you’re asking, that when life is getting a bit sluggish and you can’t get motivated to write or learn anything new, the best solution is to add a bit of functionality to your website. So since I’ve gotten the comment spam under control (I feel like I’m head to toe in oilskin waterproofs walking round a field of t-shirt clad campers in a thunderstorm being all smug, and I will share my methodology soon, honest) I figured I’d add comments to the linklog.
On the sidebar of the main page they’re indicated by a number in [square brackets]. On the RSS feed it’ll be a little more obvious.
It’ll be quite selective, so watch out for them. The idea is to have comments on those links I think might generate an interesting conversation or am curious to hear from you about.
The page what holds the comments is a relatively new design, so if it’s borked in your browser, do let me know.
Any reason why there is no comments option on the last two entry (Fitts Law)?
Like I said, it’s selective. When I post somenthing I think “is this worthy of discussion? Do I want to discuss this? Is there an implicit question in this link? Do I think anyone can add something to my comment?” and most importantly “is the discussion already going on there?” In the case of the Fitts Law post (the link, for archival purposes, being this) it’s a blog post with comments (admitedly TypeKey only but thems the breaks), and I don’t really understand it myself, so I figured anyone wanting to discuss it can do so there. I’m just the messenger.
Maybe one day I’ll open them all up but I’d rather keep it selective for now.
Make sense?
Yes indeed! I was actually hoping you could help exlain how Apple menus are 5 times faster than Windows! That seems a bit of a stretch to me!
That’s where my ignorance kicks in. I can grasp that they probably are (navigating around Win XP always seems to take forever and the bottom left corner just seems wrong – but you can put this down to me being a Mac guy) but have no idea why that is or anything. Best go ask the Mind Hacks guys.
(Great book, btw. I got Lucy and Jeff a copy for Xmas)
I misunderstood. I think the reasons Apple menus are quicker than Windows menus is because in OSX the menu is always at the top of the screen so File and Edit are constantly where you expect them to be, while in Windows the menu is part of the application window and thus moves around with that window. This might explain why Windows users tend to have everything at full screen while, browser and other apps that benfit from full screen excepted, Mac types don’t.
(Maybe I should have put comments on that link after all…)
Pete, you’re right, that is how Fitt’s law is applied to this situation. Bruce Tognazzini is able to bang about this kind of thing for hours. Unfortunately, the whole mneu-position-as-UI-Holy-Grail starts to fall down a bit as menus get more and more complicated (cascading submenus etc), when applications start adding toolbars, and most importantly, when people abandon their mice are starting using keystroke combinations.