This is a pretty excellent way of communicating a lot of detail about a new product: by comic book.
Google Chrome looks great, and since it’s using WebKit to render pages, web designers and developers don’t need to worry (much) about compatibility.
The announcement came after one of its planes was detained at Glasgow Airport for non-payment of air traffic control charges.
Meanwhile passengers on a flight from Cardiff were told to get off their Zoom plane, which was then impounded.
Airlines don’t just go out of business these days, they implode.
Point for discussion: when browsing items in your favourite RSS feed reader, does it not make more sense for the reader to present the oldest new items first?
It’s a continuity thing: if I’m catching up with a blog that has a few unread posts, I want to see the oldest items first so that if newer items reference them, I get the reference. I use the “next unread item” command in NetNewsWire all the time, but by default both the Mac edition and iPhone/iPod touch edition put newest items first, so the order of reading always feels backwards to me. (I’m only talking within one particular blog or site: I don’t care that much which order I read the different blogs themselves.)
There doesn’t seem to be any preference to control this in either edition of NetNewsWire.
There is a disease endemic to open-source software projects. Almost all of them have web sites that fail to accomplish the fundamental task that every web site should accomplish: explaining what the damn thing is.
I’m sorry to pick on fish, but it’s as good an example as any, and it’s one I stumbled on today courtesy of the ever-useful Mac OS X Hints. fish is a “user friendly” command-line shell, built to replace the likes of traditional shells like bash and csh. (Mac OS X uses bash by default.) Sounds good so far.
Except nowhere on the home page does it explain what fish does. Shouldn’t this be the most obvious thing on the page? There is a link to a mostly-empty wiki, and there is of course the ubiquitous “list of recent changes”, which no open-source project can live without.
There are screenshots, but, um, this is a command-line shell. On the screenshots page, they even say, “Since fish is a text based program, it is not very well suited for screenshots.” Yeah.
In order to find out what fish is, the web site actually recommends reading an article on some other web site.
Open-source programmers of the world, hear this! Tell me what your software does before you bother telling me about what’s changed in every single version. If I’ve never used the software, why would I care how it’s changed?
It isn’t that hard to write a bulleted list of features or a couple of sentences summarizing the point of the software.
End of rant.
