Today I was checking out Apple’s website to see if they had any info about the upcoming iPhone and its browser. Apparently they are releasing documentation when the phone itself launches, so my search was a bust. Perhaps more interestingly, I noticed that the home page no longer links to the Apple Developer site at all. In previous designs, the developer site has had a decent spot in the top navigation, but no longer. The home page doesn’t have the word “developer” on it anywhere, so you need to visit the Mac product page or the Site Map to find…
flow|state has a great pair of articles that summarize well the problems a web application will face with too many obstacles for new users. First, in Hurdles at the entrance to a site: It’s not unusual for a site to position a long sequence of hurdles just inside their entrance. Someone walking in the door might have to clear some or all of these hurdles before they can even try out the site… The list that follows isn’t much of an exaggeration. So many sites require signup and verification before you can figure out what they do, let alone start…
Tonight we had a completely different type of client launch: The all-new “Yahoo! Messenger for the Web” let’s people use Yahoo! Messenger without any client download. Instead, it’s implemented in Flash, so from any browser just visit the site and login. It’s not as full-featured as the regular client, but is really fast and has some UI elements that are different but very cool. By avoiding the big (12MB) client download, this should be a good alternative for logging into Messenger wherever you are. We even have a nice shortcut that’s easy to remember: http://web.im Check out the Messenger site…
Matthew Skyrm from the Yahoo! Messenger product team appeared on John Dvorak’s Cranky Geeks video show tonight. Check it out to see Matthew in action, including an obscure Monica Lewinsky reference.
Update: Bookpool.com is no longer in business. I’m so used to HTML newsletters being useless without images enabled, I was pleasantly surprised today to receive the latest from Bookpool. What’s different here? No images, no scripts, no web beacons, and instantly viewable in my email client! They do have tracking codes embedded in the outgoing links, but they’re written in a safe way that doesn’t trigger Thunderbird’s phishing filters. Bookpool has created a clean design that relies online on styling contained in the message itself. I’d love to see more newsletters like this, but I suppose it would be hard…