The Details Are Everything

(from washingtonpost.com)

What does “Navigate Now” actually mean, to the speaker of English? Why must one travel through both Time and Space to achieve Sports? It is difficult to discern what this advertisement is compelling the user to do, and this one is too tired to guess.

Due to what must have been some drunken rampage through the internet, my email address has become the recipient of occasional mailing by the Simple shoes company. They make alright products, but I don’t buy enough shoes to care. See the video for what happens when one tries to unsubscribe from their mailings. “Thank you for Subscribing!” indeed.

This is a common affliction with web mailings. Developers and senders spend many hours and dollars on their email campaigns, getting every little sentence and pixel just so. When it comes time for a user to leave, though? Fuck ‘em. Imagine if the (now sentient/magic) Apple Store sensed that you didn’t buy anything, so it turned your walk out the door into a walk through a filthy sewer.

Think of how fun that might be, and how likely you’d be to go back there.

jQuery is my favorite of the javascript frameworks, due to it’s simplicity, speed, and easy-to-read syntax. There are some things it doesn’t need to be used for, though, and direct links to files of one of them. This screenshot from the official jQuery website shows a bit of Javascript gone too far: I can’t right-click to save the file to my hard drive, which breaks decades of expected web browser behavior. Why? Your guess is as good as mine.

This is the first of a 4 part Longplay video series for the 1992 Sunsoft NES game “Gimmick!”, whose details are exquisite. The number of interactions that are possible between the player, the game’s enemies, and it’s world are staggering for an 8-bit game, and trounces some 16 and 32-bit era games, as well.

At one point the player steals the ostrich and enemy is riding, knocks the crown off his enemy head, and then forces him to fall into a river, all the span of a few seconds. Glorious.

from 241pizza.com

The problems with 241pizza’s “shopping cart” are primarily space-based, though the typography could use some work.

There is the small issue of the extra, dangling, comma, at the end of the list of pizza toppings and wing selection. Also troubling is the use of the right angle quote character to denote a list item, which was prevalent in the early web (because it looks neat), but is pretty bad form.

The left indent on the “Whole,” and “10 Wings” should probably be equal, and I’m not exactly sure why Whole is both boldedand underlined, while the 10 Wings is not. Generally, either bold or underline will work just fine, though the former is still used for the most part to denote links.

The control buttons (the + and - under the Quantity heading) and the Edit, Add, Remove should be centered in their respective boxes, and probably a little bit bigger. I can’t imagine trying to use this on a small screen, such as an iPhone. The Edit and Remove buttons are grayed out, here, which may or may not be due to their being disabled. If not, they should be fixed to a less “you can’t do this”-looking color.

from 241pizza.com

There are obvious real problems with this, and some quibbles.

The biggest problem is the buttons, and it should be obvious to anyone who speaks and writes english relatively well: The question asked doesn’t match the either of the “answer” choices given. “How many pizzas would you like? Yes.” is nonsensical. Of secondary concern are the choices themselves, which are three “radio” buttons, but they could just as easily be a drop-drop menu. It’s a stylistic choice, and to be honest, I’m not necessarily against the radio button approach. The redundancy of having to print “pizzas” after each choice is also a bit lazy, but, they do at least make logical sense.

Perhaps a better way to tackle this might be a two-mode interface, which first asks the user “do you want up to 3 pizzas?” and then, once they click “yes,” ask them how many. It is more involved, and I am not sure it would be worth the “extra” click for users who do, in fact, want pizza(s).