Interpotential

Google stops offering the free version of their Apps for Businesses service. Bummer. But for those who already use the free version - don't worry, it will still be free:

http://googleenterprise.blogspot.ca/2012/12/changes-to-google-apps-for-businesses.html

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Changes to Google Apps for businesses Thank you for sharing your feedback with the Google Enterprise team. We will respond to open issues addressed in Comments with future posts on this blog. We appreciate your interest in Google Enterprise.

The author of this article (from 1984) makes one wrong assumption, and bases everything else on that. He says that the non-digital desk, with stacks of papers overlapping each other doesn't work efficiently. While in fact it does. It's highly efficient to be able to take a peek at the paper below, without having to file the one on top away.

And based on that one wrong assumption, he writes the whole concept of a windowing system on the computer to doom.

Oh well, I guess this shows how important it is to have your basic facts right before writing and discussing anything.

http://www.nytimes.com/1984/12/25/science/value-of-windowing-is-questioned.html

VALUE OF WINDOWING IS QUESTIONED Does anyone do windows any more? I don't mean the clear panes of glass in our homes, long the object of the punch line of abject-housekeeper jokes, but the on-screen ''Now you can run half a dozen programs at once'' variety. The answer is, not really. Windows, which had been announced as early ...

I like this article and I like this website. Just the small column and distracting teasers and adverts on the side, combined with a somewhat small fontsize, make the layout very much unsuitable for reading larger pieces of text.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/jun/15/happiness-is-being-a-loser-burkeman

Happiness is a glass half empty Be positive, stay focused on success: so goes our modern mantra. But perhaps the true path to contentment is to learn to be a loser, says Oliver Burkeman

How are smaller companies and regular internet users supposed to trust automated copyright systems, when screwups like Microsoft's copyright infringement robots requesting to leave Bing. com out from Google's search results happen?

http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/domains/bing.com/

Copyright Removal Requests – Google Transparency Report Last updated: October 7, 2012.This data represents the information submitted by individuals who make copyright removal requests. It may contain inaccuracies.Learn more

Just got a nice call from 10gen, the company behind MongoDB. Just checking if I had any questions regarding their NoSQL DB engine. So unexpected ;)

Pretty cool, but a few problems:

1) Shoes don't generally have the best view of the sky
2) You want people to look in front of them on the street, not so much down
3) Evil people will know that a potential victim is far from home and be able to use that information.

For improvement, I suggest:

1+) Let the shoe pair with a small gps device which you can be embedded in other accesseries, such as a scarf or the collar of a jacket
2+) Indicate directions by giving off small vibrations inside the shoe
3+) Lose the visual progress bar, perhaps again using haptic feedback instead

http://mashable.com/2012/09/15/gps-shoes/

Follow Your Feet Home With These GPS Shoes Artist and designer Dominic Wilcox embedded a GPS receiver and LED indicators in a pair of shoes, which you can program and follow home from anywhere on earth.

Interesting (as usual) analysis. Though I would like to raise the question to which extent a four digit number is assumed to be a year. Perhaps the timeline would provide that valuable context. Otherwise, my design suggestion could be to display it as a sub-title below the topic, including the word "Year" (or Date in case a month is also relevant).

Tunnel Vision and Selective Attention (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox) Users don't see stuff that's right on the screen. Selective attention makes people overlook things outside their focus of interest.

The World Wide Web project Everything there is online about W3 is linked directly or indirectly to this document, including an executive summary of the project, Mailing lists , Policy , November's W3 news , Frequently Asked Questions .

Gotta love the oatmeal (though when I clicked in I was expecting a comic about the physical shoppingcart used at supermarkets)

How to make your shopping cart suck less - The Oatmeal

Another great article by Jakob Nielsen: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/olympics-ui-vs-ux.html

Official Olympic Website: UI Silver — but UX DQ (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox) Page design itself scores 15% higher than the 2002 Olympics site. But a disjointed overall Internet presence leads to an intolerable overall user experience.

Is it still fun to be a webdev while the EU anti-cookie law is being applied in more and more member states? And many even more restrictive than the EU says. Some examples:

- EU requires opt-out possibility for all cookies. Fair nuff.
- The Netherlands requires opt-in for all cookies not required for the technical functioning of a login system or shopping cart. But opt-in for all advertising, profile gathering and analytics cookies
- Denmark apparently requires a two step process before any cookie is allowed.

And I'm thinking; are the systems we're used to making today even still possible under this new law? When will new patterns start to emerge that capture the request for cookie permission in existing patterns?

That's why producing content for online publication requires an approach quite different to print. And this (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/web-typography.html) is how we can change that.

How Little Do Users Read? (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox) On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.