Internet

Gmail Tasks and the Scrollbar

Daniel

[Update 2012.06.20] Yes, it’s been almost three years. It occurred to me some time ago that this sort of thing would be pretty simple with iframes. While it doesn’t explain why Google would allow or even desire something like this, it really makes me feel silly about all the time I spent making these screenshots.

The other day I created a grocery list in Google’s Tasks as it appears inside Gmail.  I resized my browser window briefly and discovered what I thought was a Firefox 3.5 bug — The tasks pane rendering above the horizontal scrollbar:

Click to Embiggen
The Behavior as I First Spotted it, in Firefox 3.5 Mac

Before asking anyone about it, I decided to check if the same phenomenon occurs in other browsers. My research:

Not Just a Firefox Thing
Not Just a Firefox Thing

I thought, maybe this is a Mac OS X issue. I booted into Windows and fired up IE8:

Definitely not Limited to Mac OS X
Definitely not Limited to Mac OS X

Then I wondered, would Google let this slip through in Chrome, too?

Sure Enough
Sure Enough

Finally I booted back into Mac OS X and loaded up Gmail in Opera:

Op ... Wah?
Op ... Wah?

I’m not sure what to conclude about all this. Is this a bug from which all major browsers suffer? I can hardly believe the functionality got into all these browsers accidentally. So is it a Gmail bug? It does get in the way of the horizontal scrollbar.  I guess the moral of the story is this:  When viewing Gmail with Tasks, don’t make your browser window too narrow.

Gmail Tasks and the Scrollbar

Firefox 3.5

Daniel

Just downloaded Firefox 3.5 from Mozilla’s FTP site (yeah, you’re not really supposed to do that). It’s clear that JavaScript runs faster (which is a big deal to me), but I’ll give the latest browser a thumbs up just because of the New Tab button. For years the first thing I do when I install Firefox on a machine is add the New Tab button to the toolbar. Now it’s there in almost the exact same spot.

Firefox 3.5

Dear ESPN.com: Your Article Layout Sucks!

Daniel

Hey, ESPN.com.

We’ve known each other a long time.  We started spending a lot of time together in college.  You’ve gone through several redesigns in that time.  Heck, I even blogged about some of them.  But lately, I’m not feeling it.

Here’s the thing.  Your article layout sucks.  Take a look at what I’m talking about:

Click to Embiggen
Click to Embiggen

See the smallest column, over there on the left?  That’s the text of the article.  The second column is a sidebar.  The third column is a statbox.  The fourth column, which is empty, runs the length of the page but is only occupied near the top, with an advertisement.

Note that on several lines, only two words fit in the first column, and on one line, only a single word fits.  And this is just one screen’s worth of one article.  It’s so painful that it makes the article unreadable.

Here’s my suggestion:  Change the article layout so that it has two columns of equal width.  The first column contains the body of the article, and is untouchable.  Nothing may encroach upon it.  The second column can contain anything else — advertisements, sidebars, statboxes, whatever.

A second option might be to take inspiration from the iPhone version of ESPN.com.  Let’s take a look:

ESPN.com for iPhone Screenshot

We’ve got an ad, the section header, the score header, then hey — what’s this?  It’s a pseudo-tabular nav header.  We could apply this to the main site!  Solve the layout problem by hiding elements (additional analysis, links, stats) until the reader wants to see them.  If we were to scroll down on the iPhone site, we’d see that for the entire length of the article, it occupies the full width of the browser window.  No element encroaches upon the article’s space.  In this respect, the article is easier to read on my phone than it is on my computer.  Not only that, but the layout of the article on my computer — at its narrowest point — is not as wide as the layout of the article on my iPhone.  That’s measured in characters or inches, take your pick.

So, ESPN.com, I still really like you, but you’ve got to work on this stuff.  Or what?  Or else, that’s what.

Dear ESPN.com: Your Article Layout Sucks!

Fav.Premo.Biz

Daniel,

Around the new year, I had some problems with my Netvibes page.  For two days, I couldn’t access my bookmarks.  As a result, I began to build my own bookmark manager.  Then Netvibes answered my support email with a resolution to the problem, and I stopped working on my project.

On the same day Netvibes responded to my email, I was laid off from my job.  After a few weeks of not writing any code, I got the itch, and decided to move forward with the bookmark manager.  For two or three weeks I spent up to five hours a day, five or six days a week, getting the thing up and running.  Once I got it to a feature-complete state, I stared at it for a few days, enabled user registration, and gave the URL to a couple friends.

I applied twice to Google AdSense, and got shot down both times.  I was waiting to blog about it until I incorporated ads, but now I don’t know if that’ll happen.

The site is fully functional.  Still, there may be bugs, and there may be some obvious features that I missed.  If you register, you’ll get an email, and I set up feedback at fav dot premo dot biz for, well, feedback.

If you sign up, remember: each link can have more than one tag.  For example, I might tag ajc.com with news and atlanta, I might tag espn.com with news and sports, and might tag atlantafalcons.com with sports and atlanta.

Oh — the URL: fav.premo.biz.

Fav.Premo.Biz

Safari 4 Beta

Daniel, , , ,

Wow, Safari 4 includes built-in functionality extremely similar to a Firefox extension I use almost daily — Firebug.  It’s accessible through Safari’s Developer menu, which is hidden by default.  I wonder if technology like this being built into browsers will become the norm.  I seem to recall that Mozilla had decided to strip the console or DOM inspector out of future versions of Firefox, but a couple minutes on Google and Wikipedia leave me with no evidence of this.

The conclusion here is that competition is good for the consumer, and developers aren’t often thought of as consumers.  It’s also interesting that Safari, which lacks Firefox’s robust extension architecture, now has built-in functionality similar to my favorite Firefox extension.  This reminds me of the progression of Mac OS (and perhaps Windows) — imitate popular third party applications, and include them with the OS.  Think of iTunes: MP3 player, CD ripper, podcast manager.  Many popular (free) third party applications have faded into obscurity because people don’t need them anymore.

Safari 4 Beta

Laid Off

Daniel1 Comment

Well, I got laid off on Tuesday.  January 6.  It’s made it to the Internet at least twice.  I worked at SpringWidgets, which was part of part of MySpace, or part of Fox Interactive Media.  MySpace is part of FIM, but our place on the big corporate family tree varied at times.  Our entire office of 13 people was shut down.

Additionally, sometime in the near future all of our servers are set to be shut down.  So, the things I worked on over the last 22 months will either disappear completely or break.  I suppose for my resume as much as anything else, I’ve decided to post some photos of my last big project at SpringWidgets:  The SpringWidgets RSS Reader application is, at the time of this writing, still available on MySpace.  Here are the screenshots I uploaded to Flickr.

Laid Off

AnswerTips: No Longer Just for NYT.com

Daniel, , ,

Over a year ago, I wrote about a feature on the New York Times website.  The feature works as follows: the reader double-clicks on a word, and a new window opens with a dictionary lookup of that word.  I called it a killer feature.

Today I find that the same feature, powered by the same company (Answers.com) is present on CBSNews.com.  Not bad.

AnswerTips: No Longer Just for NYT.com

I Can’t Get to My Gmail

Daniel, ,

I’ve been getting a 502 error on my Gmail account for almost four hours now:

Temporary Error (502)

We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is currently experiencing errors. You won’t be able to use your account while these errors last, but don’t worry, your account data and messages are safe. Our engineers are working to resolve this issue.

Please try accessing your account again in a few minutes.

I just got an email from them (sent to my Yahoo! account, as I specified in an error report/support request):

Hello,

Thank you for your report.

We are aware of this problem, and our engineers are working diligently to find a solution. We apologize for any inconvenience this issue may have caused.

Sincerely,

The Google Team

Anyone else having problems?

[Update 2008.08.07 11:16AM] When my alarm went off this morning I had access to my email.  I went to bed last night around 1AM and it was still unavailable.  So I was without Gmail for somewhere between 12 and 18.5 hours.

I Can’t Get to My Gmail

RIT Alum Email Address

Daniel, , , ,

So I’m pretty anal.

I didn’t sign up for Facebook until about a year ago. I had long since graduated from RIT. Facebook started out as a social network for Harvard students, then it expanded to other colleges. For a while registration required a .edu email address. Even now, in order to identify yourself to others as a student or former student of a particular educational institution, you need to verify ownership of an email address from that school’s domain.

I’m sure I’ve written posts in the past about my RIT email address. I couldn’t wait for it to be turned off. But now that I’m on Facebook, I want that address just so I can identify myself as an RIT alum. Enter: solution.

I think saw a link that pointed to this in Gmail, but I forget, and it’s unimportant. I feel like this is way under-advertised. If you go to https://www.alumniconnections.com/olc/pub/RIT/, you can get yourself an email address @alum.rit.edu. Get it hooked up, go into Facebook, identify yourself as an RIT student, bam.

RIT Alum Email Address