Picture of a swan in Hagaparken
Closer look of the same swan
Went for a walk in Hagaparken and met some swans. When I came home I decided to develop them in Adobe Lightroom instead of Apple Aperture, but found the software quite confusing. Lightroom really doesn’t fit the workflow I’m used to, but some of the features seem great.
My job is really varied. Some days I spend nine hours hunting down bugs in complex computer code. Some days I draw crates.
(This one contains the same objects as the briefcase in Pulp fiction)
Today Itunes 9 was released. Of course the new “big” features wasn’t what caught my eye, but rather that nice looking Bob Dylan page. Too bad my Itunes 9 is not as pretty as Apples (US?) apparently are:
The Bob Dylan page as Apple shows it
The Bob Dylan page in my european Itunes
A while back I was linked to a site called Ajaxload.info. Quite a nice site, very creative. With a few simple steps it lets you create your own customized ajax loader animated gif, just as the ones you’ve seen in numerous sites and applications.
This is definitely a service I have use for, but it also got me thinking. Is this really such a good idea? Why are we so obsessed by a progress bar that perhaps even is counter-intuitive?
In Windows, this is how a typical progress bar looks like:
Now, we all know that Windows is terribly bad at guessing how long time a certain action will take. The above progress bar might go to 90% in 5 seconds, and then spend 2 minutes more doing the last 10%.
Mac OS X got a similar one (with a fancy little candy stripe animation that gives the illusion of the progress moving faster than it is):
It’s not as inaccurate as Windows, but pretty close.
It doesn’t matter. What they both are doing is filling an important role as to tell you that the computer is working, it has not hung, and it’s has a goal of completing the action. The standard ajax loader on the other hand, is just a gif animation. It does not continuously get fed information about the progress. It will spin and rotate forever and ever until someone decides to hide it, and it might happen, it might not.
In the beginning of this post I said that the ajax loaders might even be counter-intuitive. What I mean by that is that you are tricked into believing that this animation has any idea of what’s going on backend wise, when it has not. You could actually improve the process by exchanging the loader to a dancing banana instead. It would be exactly the same function, but hey, it’s a dancing banana! You wouldn’t wait five extra minutes because the banana is still dancing before you realize that the task will never complete.
Here’s a typical ajax loader gif animation:
Are you waiting for something?
Yesterday I suggested that one of my most frequently visited sites, Stormrage Server Progression, added RSS feeds. It took Kalroth about 12 hours from I suggested it in the site forums until he had it implemented. And not only the feed I asked for, but a couple of other feeds that were even better than what I asked for.
Over one year ago I signed up for a site called Shelfari which is a book reading community. It lets you add books you’re reading and rate and discuss and collect books you’ve already read. This information would be a nice addition to the “life stream” on my site. Imagine my surprise when I found out they doesn’t have RSS feeds! At the same time I joined, we added a request in their forums, and it even got replied to a couple of times by developers. Still, a year later, Shelfari doesn’t offer any kind of RSS feeds.
This is the love/hate thing about Internet and developers. I love that a person on his spare time creates a site like Server Progression, which basically is a World of Warcraft site that tracks down which guilds have killed which bosses on a particular server, and I love that he can be more friendly, more service minded and keep a better product than Shelfari. At the same time I hate that Shelfari, which is an Amazon acquired commercial site, fails to deliver simple features like feeds, which is one of the core functionalities of the web today.
So I’ve used Readernaut (still in beta) for tracking what books I read. It’s not as pretty, but it works as it should.