Month: August 2002

Usability Applied to Life

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

From the WebWord mailing list, usability guy Chad Lundgren writes about usability principles appled to real life. For instance:

3. For a long time, I keep my wallet and keys in my back pockets. This added to pick-pocket paranoid in crowded places,and made fast food drive-thrus arduous.

I read an article mentioning that European men tend not to use their back pockets, more for vanity than practicality, but I started using my front pockets only, and I’ve never looked back. So to speak.

I’ve considered that approach (wallet in front pocket), but I just don’t have the pockets to spare :(. With my mobile phone and my keys in my front-right pocket, and my Palm V and my uni-ball in my front-left pocket, I have no where but my back pockets for my wallet :-/.

And, I disagree with Chad’s #8, where he advocates absolute paths for web pages. The problem with using absolute paths is that it makes changing the “elevation” of the site (as a whole) impossible. For instance, relative paths would allow for the change from “sitename.com” to “sitename.com/directory/” without much trouble (but absolute paths would not).

And, for what it’s worth, my favorite line was “ […] they are keys, from one point of view”. ;)

Quintessential Player

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

I'm not sure if I've mentioned it previously, but my current CD/Ogg/MP3 player of choice is Quintessential Player. I was never much a fan of Winamp — if only because its fixed-pixel interface becomes concerningly small at 1600x1200. But, don’t worry, Quintessential Player still supports skinz.

I used to use FreeAmp, but its interface always had little quirks to it. And, at the moment, I can’t even get its webpage to resolve (I hope it”s not dead).

Of course, I prefer the sound quality of CDs for everyday listening, but Quintessential Player suits my needs when I have an Ogg to play. And, it’s also freeware (I don't deal with shareware anymore, these days).

New FileZilla Beta

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

I see that a new beta (2.0b5) of FileZilla is available. FileZilla is an open source (GPL) ftp client for Windows (no relation to Mozilla).

In that past, I previously used SmartFTP. And, it was a decent program, but I prefer FileZilla’s interface. That, and I prefer to use open source programs if I can (though SmartFTP is freeware, so I didn’t feel entirely guilty about using it).

In this latest version of FileZilla, it has the option to “Preserve date/time of downloaded files”. And, just for my own sanity, I appreciate that feature. Now, if only they'd give that option for uploaded files as well (or would that feature be dependent on the ftp daemon on the other end?).