So
I absolutely agree with this article in the Guardian on how long load times drive away customers and create ill will. In fact, I gave up after about six seconds waiting for the linked site to open. I further agree with their assessment of moronic sites that require Flash for no good reason at all (which in itself sucks down the performance of a site):
Of course, speed isn't the only thing that matters: it helps if your Web designer isn't an idiot, like whoever created the Akamai Web site. This site requires users to have Flash installed in order to read a simple press release, which is the sort of thing the Web could well do without.
So
I came across this fascinating article that indicates that the brain structure of people with depression is structurally different that the brains of people who don't experience depression. It seems that depressive people have an area of the brain which handles negative emotions that were 20 percent larger than normal.
Makes me curious where they go with this observation. Is this something that can be screened for an monitored appropriately? How strong an indicator is this of depression (after all, there were only 49 people in the study)? How will this influence future treatment of this condition? More to come, I'm sure.
So
Check out this video from TED where Jeff Han demonstrates an intuitive interface-free touch screen device and several applications that make use of it. The photography lightbox and the NASA mapping application are absolutely stunning. Now this is some real innovation in computing.
So
I started using LookLater last year, before del.icio.us introduced private bookmarks. I used LookLater primarily as a scratch pad that I could tuck away URLs that I wanted to revisit in more detail later on.
Well, it appears that over the weekend, looklater has just stopped working. Specifically, you can submit bookmarks to it and not receive any errors from it, but you can't retrieve any URLs submitted after October 12th (or at least I can't). The help forums for looklater have been taken down and I have not received a response from the email link that is in its place.
I guess this is the 'price' of free software and services on the web. Here today and gone tomorrow — then you are stuck with spending time trying to find a suitable replacement. Some of them turn out to be really useful (like searchfox) and to a lesser extent looklater. When searchfox went away, I tried out Rojo for a while. But after Rojo's nearly week long outage and absolute lack of comprehension of testing and change control that rendered it largely unusable, I fled to NewsAlloy. NewsAlloy was an passable online reader, but the developers seemed to focus more on whiz-bang AJAX visual cruft than performance and reliability.
Luckily for me, as I was reaching my pain threshold with NewAlloy, the new release of Google Reader came out and I was able to move my OPML file to reader and have been a (largely) happy puppy since then. Now, I need to find a replacement for looklater that is hopefully going to be around longer. Maybe its time to take another look at Diigo to see if it will meet my needs. Another possibility is working more with Google Notebook, but that never felt like a good fit.
Time will tell. I'll probably leave some notes here when I get further along with my tire kicking.
One front they are moving on is the widget arena, with their new WidSets site. This site allows you to configure widgets on the site and then send them to your mobile. More on widsets as I get a chance to play with them.
Update: Unfortunately, I won't be able to find out anything more about widsets. Running the client on my Nokia 6620 causes it to lock up solid — I have to pull the battery out to regain control of the device. Apparently older phones may have problems with the Java client that widsets makes use of. Ah, yet another excuse to upgrade phones...