User Interface Blues

With every passing day here, I am getting more and more convinced that designing a good interface is alien to most programmers. The biggest hurdle I feel is the reluctance of people to accept that a simple and neat UI can also be eye catching, besides scoring high on usability scales.

All people seem to want for their next-killer-application is an interface that is snazzy, loaded with tons of pictures and lots and lots of icons (never realizing that icons without labels, are the biggest nuisance in most cases.) You give them this and you're a cool designer. You come up with something simple and neat, and you're just a useless hiring!

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Gmail Chat Disabled

The fact that it happened does not surprise me but that it took so long for our network administrators to figure it out does. And if you are wondering how do you disable Gmail's chat features on your network, you only need locking DNS lookups to chatenabled.mail.google.com , by returning 127.0.0.1 .

Firefox Extension for coComment!

I have put up the Firefox Extension for coComment! I and a few friends have been using it for a day now and it seems to work fine! Download coComment! for Firefox coComment! for Firefox allows you to coComment! from the right-click context menu and is of great help especially when commenting in a pop-up window where you can't access your bookmarks. Also, with this extension you will not have to move from the comment area to your bookmarks to click the 'bookmarklet' and then back, before you click the submit button on the blog. With this extension, you can directly move on to the submit button after writing the comment and merely hit the right click 'activating' coComment before submitting the post. Simple Fitts' law and it makes your browsing experience a great deal better and faster. Let me know what you think of it!

The Winner is Cricket

"Nothing gets the nation going like Cricket does." A few days ago, I would have thought twice before saying this, but the recent exploits of our Men in Blue in the European continent have ensured that we fans have converted back to our first religion of choice- Cricket! They went to Ireland down and out- written off, forgotten by their fans, away from the radar of the media. And then, all it took was a 2-1 drubbing of the Proteas in Belfast and the "Team India" was on its road to recovery- the road to fame again. Then came England and by this time, the media had got excited- again, the newspapers and Television were discussing cricket- again, and "expectation" was back- again. The Mighty Four were on their last full tour to England and all of a sudden, none wanted to miss the spectacle. Cricket was back, forgotten for just a while, but back in all its glory; much like one of its own disciples whom we all know as Dada. The nation was believing again, so ...

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