A couple examples:

In the case of tabular data Veerle Pieters has a couple of excellent tutorials on her methods.

Smashing Magazine just posted a nice showcase of gorgeous web forms. The focus here was contact forms, and I think the examples they picked were mostly terrific executions. Contact forms are easy though. You just have a handful of fields to deal with, so you have a lot of room to work with. You can use a lot of whitespace to add beauty and readability in this case, but what do you do when you have a more complicated form?

While I’ve built dozens of websites and web applications, I still find myself struggling when the data that needs to be presented or input is more than a few fields. My general attack on an information dense page is to try and distill it down to what is most important. That doesn’t always work. Sometimes the client wants more information than seems possible viewable at the same time. Sometimes that’s what the end user wants.

So where does that leave me? Generally unsatisfied. I’ll present as much information as makes sense in tables that are well styled. I’ll rethink the flow of an application to minimize the input you need in each step. That itself is a dangerous tightrope to walk, because if you disassemble something too far, you’re just creating another kind of complexity. I know I’m not the only one who struggles with this. I think it may bother me more than most.

Here are some examples of interfaces that really bother me. I find them difficult to use, but I don’t know the solution for cramming all the information they cover in either.

The Bad

my.ebay.com

There’s a lot of information you can access here. The main area isn’t terrible, but generally presents things I will never care about knowing. There is a good deal more info buried in the left hand menu with descriptions that don’t actually tell me what I am looking for.

myspace.com

Ok, this one everyone knows. I won’t even bother going into detail or posting a screen. Myspace has a truly horrible archaic interface, even the new beta revisions. I don’t even have an account any longer because it’s such a pain.

The Good

Facebook.com

While it’s getting cluttered, and the advent of facebook apps has made the site a lot less desirable, it’s still pretty easy to use and read. It’s not gorgeous, but it’s not ugly.

Blinksale.com

This is an invoicing service. Very straightforward functionality, very easy to use, and very easy on the eyes. I’ve been using them well over a year now, and I’m still very pleased.

So I’m calling for more examples from readers of both the good and the bad of information dense web design. Better yet, do you have any ideas on methods of dealing with it in your own designs? If I get enough responses I’ll do a follow up post and I’d be happy to showcase your work.

Posted a review on newegg where I bought it – immediate response! Just not in any way to me, it was a response to the negative review suggesting I contact them for support…

They list no phone number on their micronet site (I called the sales number for fantomdrives,) there are several reviews now on newegg with similar circumstances, and complaints of them not fulfilling their rebate offers.

It’s one thing to have quality control problems, it’s entirely different to not offer any support or communication channels to your customers. I accept hardware failure, it happens. I don’t except offering warranties you will not honor.

We’ve been expecting an SDK, and a path for getting 3rd party apps on the iPhone and iPod touch for a while now. Even with the expectation there I am blown away. Not only do we have ridiculously cool and high tech hardware, but it looks like they did everything right with the SDK. We are going to see an explosion of creative apps utilizing a lot of untapped power in these devices.

Better yet, Apple is providing all the developers a marketplace they don’t have to maintain that gets their apps in front of every iPhone/iPod user… anywhere in the world.

To top that off Apple’s put aside $100,000,000 to invest in this market. I can’t think of a single time I’ve seen a company create a market so rapidly, and so intelligently. This is what capitalism is all about people. Not only is Apple going to reap huge amounts of money from their innovative technology and thinking here, but thousands of small time developers now have an easy channel to make money on their work, and millions of users are going to benefit from the apps they create.

Wow.

This has been cool, a lot of people from china will talk to me a bit and the cultural differences are really interesting. It inevitably has it’s down side as well. There are often spammers. There are religious spammers, trying to get you to convert to Islam. There are lots of kids that will just try to call, or type without knowing your language. I’ve built up a pretty healthy block list.

Today I got one of the strangest ones yet, I think. Some fellow (at least by profile information,) named houssem-09 sent me the following text. This was his opening volley, mind you.

I’ll confess that younger girls tend to catch my eye more easily. I like girls my age and older as well, but young ones are best, like you.

My first thought was, oh, a spam. I get email spam that’s similarly nonsensical, but there were no links. Now I guess he’s trying to pick up virtual chicks or whatever, but my profile is filled out, marked as male, and even has a picture. So I reply “I’m male, also straight.” There was no response.

Was this just a spambot that forgot to send it’s links? A very lonely and confused man? A kid messing around? Who knows. I’m invisible on skype now. If you need me feel free to send a message, I might be around.

What’s an OpenID? Basically It’s a way of authenticating yourself on sites across the internet. Microsoft tried to do something similar with their passport system, but the only sites that ever utilized it were Microsoft sites. If you use an OpenID, people will know that the comment on that website is actually you, as opposed to someone who just typed your name in. It’s also nice being able to use one unique id across a bunch of sites instead of creating accounts everywhere you go.

My site’s been supporting OpenID for what must be a couple years now. You can comment using it, and I can comment other places and identify as makesitgood.net. It’s pretty cool. With this new surge of people that are now able to use it, I hope to see it take off and become popular.

Admit it, you want one too. Sure it may not be a priority. The price point may push it out of a real goal for you. No matter what reason you don’t have one yet, it’s cool. It’s svelt. It’s high-technology, and heck it’s actually really useful!

Personally I want the google maps functionality. I want to be able to stand on the street near anywhere in the USA, pull up google maps and find where I want to go. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in a city I’m unfamiliar with and wanted to get some nice food. Well there’s no easy way to find a nice place if you don’t have someone to ask. Phonebooks are dead, and impossible to find regardless. I don’t want to spend an hour walking or driving around a city I don’t know unless I have a ton of freetime (hey it’s fun if it’s what you inteded to do.) It’d also be nice to pull up the best route to the airport without having to stop in somewhere to get a map or use

Let’s unlock them!

The primary gripe people seem to have after cost, is the fact Apple has chosen to lock their iPhones to one provider. I can understand that gripe on some levels, and I understand Apple’s decision on other levels.

People don’t want to switch cell providers. The main reason for this is that the providers have everyone locked in a nasty contract, usually 2 years. Cancellation presents a hefty fee, and you just have to enter into another contract afterwards. Some people are loyal due to good service–we all know that’s few and far between. Mainly people don’t want to switch due to the costs incurred.

So to avoid switching, people want to unlock an iPhone. To do this you have to use some third party software that’s still being developed. It seems to work pretty well so far, but it’s kind of a gamble. Once unlocked you can use a sim card from another provider (assuming they use sim cards.) That means you can use… TMobile.

There’s only one other US gsm cell provider that uses SIM cards

Most people don’t care about the provider lock in

There’s a lot of noise about the provider lock, but it’s really a non-issue. Just look at the sales. It really comes down to people that want to run third party programs, or use some iPhone features for free. People want to use their own custom ringtones without buying them. People want to access non-apple applications natively on their iPhones. Ok, I sympathize here. I understand that desire, and really I’m for people being able to do so. I think it should void the warranty and support, but not be fought against. If you want to muck with your gizmo, I say go for it.

Verizon phones are all locked by default. They don’t have sim cards. Switching providers requires work from your provider–it’s not something you can do on your own. You can unlock Verizon phones to use features like custom ringtones, but Verizon will no longer service the phone. This seems to be the model Apple should be following

Aggressive Response

With the latest software update to iPhones, if you’ve unlocked yours you’ll end up with an expensive paperweight. It’s not clear if this is intentional, or just the way the software works and Apple hasn’t taken the time to work out a way to accomodate both types of phones. From the press releases, it seems like the former might be the case. It’s a pretty strong response, and seems against the customer. Of course it’s a tiny minority of the customers, but that doesn’t make it alright.

There’s over 1 million iPhones being used in the US now. That’s a huge amount for them being available for so short a time. The media response to these issues–locking and bricking–has been immense, which doesn’t make sense considering the number of people involved. So what gives? Smear campaign? Apple buzz backfiring? All press is good press? I don’t know. I find it very interesting considering there’s just two providers you could realistically use an iPhone on right now. I find it very interesting considering how few third party programs exist as of yet.

I don’t think Apple should be bricking iPhones intentionally, but I do think their focus should be on the customers using the device as it was designed and intended. They shouldn’t waste resources accomodating people using it in other ways, but they shouldn’t target them for punishment either. I’m interested to see how it plays out over the next few months, and what changes may be in place for iPhone version 2.0 should it come along. I haven’t picked up one yet, but as the price has come down it’s getitng more and more attractive.

The file in Microsoft excel format is 5 megabytes.

I was curious so I saved it as CSV, no formatting, just the fields and their values. The file is 328kb.

I got more curious so I saved it as the primary competitor to the Microsoft Format, Open Document Format. This format kept all the formatting and formulas so functionally it does everything the excel format does. The files was 720kb.

I’m not sure why Microsoft feels it necessary to insert greater than 400% more data into our file. If I was a conspiracy theorist I would wonder about agreements with hard drive manufacturers.

This morning I was trying to make it a bit easier on the eyes so I scrolled through some user themes (colour sets for code highlighting really.) I came across one that not only looks nice, but is clever in it’s naming and intention.

BB&CP by Joe Zobkiw

Download: http://www.zobkiw.com/textmate/bbcp.zip

Colors meant to be easy on the eyes. Shown using BitstreamVeraSansMono-Roman 10pt. Colors came first then the name. BB&CP = Blueberries (Blue), Bubblegum (Pink) & Circus Peanuts (Orange)

Thanks Joe!

So the colour names made me laugh, and they’re actually good choices. I don’t need a huge variation in colour to be able to differentiate things at a glance. These work together, have high contrast, and it’s not too busy as to be confusing. There are much prettier sets out there, and of course you can make sets entirely your own, but my main concern is being easy to see at a glance. This fits the bill.

My sister was supposed to arrive at 7pm last night, but because of weather I had her reschedule her flight to Monday for a 5pm arrival. I think even if she hadn’t it may have taken us until then to get to the airport form here. I am not afraid to drive on snow and ice, but I am afraid of other Texans doing so at the same time I’m on the road. This isn’t common here and most natives do not know how to handle it.

My iMac is sick. I think it’s jealous of all the time I’ve been spending with it’s little brother the MacBook. This is the first problem I’ve had with it in 2 years (or at all for that matter.) I’m not exactly sure what has happened, but I’m thinking I let one of my photoshop plugins run away with itself on a batch causing some overheating. This is one of the G5 17″ G5 models that always ran hot to begin with. I’m troubleshooting now. I did this convenient hardware test that’s built in and I had no idea about. The deeper I dig into this the more it seems like I may have done it to myself by accident. Right now it’s looking like I’ve installed something that runs automatically on login and is hanging. Whoopsy daisies. I’ll update this once I have it sorted.

Today will be a mostly lazy day. I plan to stay in from the cold as much as Duncan will let me, maybe play some video games, and do a bit of computer work.

*Update* my iMac is diagnosed. What follows is a recipe for crispy fried ram:

Install beta software to load on startup. Leave hot iMac in high performance mode. Leave unattended. With a little luck that beta software will go nuts, keep respawning and in doing so keep your cpu maxed out, putting out the highest heat possible. This in turn fries the ram stick closest to the cpu.

Ok, so no more beta software for me in a situation where it’s always running. I’m going to contact my ram maker as they claim a lifetime warranty (it’s heatshielded for gosh sakes!) Hopefully they’ll do the right thing and send me a new stick, otherwise I’m running on a gig. I can get by fine at a gig, but I’m really hoping this company provides the excellent service they claim.

It looks like later revisions of the firmware on this imac don’t let the heat stay that high for extended periods. I haven’t been watching firmware updates as that’s something I really only want to update if I have a problem. Well I’ll be changing that practice now as well!

After taking out the offending ram module everything is working 100%, though I do notice when I have several programs open it’s not quite as responsive with 1 gb as it was with 2 gb.

To be fair, it’s a stinking pile of poo because my Mac only has one processor and it’s not the beefiest of processors to boot. It also doesn’t have a great graphics card. Even so, Aperture is really a lot of poo.

I installed the trial because I need a DAM solution, and I’d heard good things about Aperture’s management of offline files. To be a bit more explicit I have tens of thousands of large photo files. I don’t keep them on my hard drive, I back them up to DVD. Now when I want to go back and get at some of those photos, I need to know where they are. The discs are labeled with date ranges, but that doesn’t help much. I don’t have a photographic memory. So what I need is a piece of software that can store small versions of all my photos so I can browse through, find the disc they’re on, put it in, and pull them up.

It doesn’t really sound like much to ask. Well, apparently it is.

There’s a number of software packages that do this; at least they claim to do this. Apple’s iPhoto would actually be a better solution for me, because I don’t need any more photo editing tools. I tried iPhoto, the new version supports offline files similar to the way I want, but it has some bugs and acts clunky so it can’t do the job I need.

I bought some software last year specifically for this task, it was called Qpict. Seemed like a saviour, but it was just a tease. It actually has exactly the features I want, but silly me, I updated to the latest version and it broke. I can no longer look at my library. This is of course after I had indexed and tagged 22 some odd dvds, no small amount of time. Qpict support has yet to solve my problem, actually they don’t even respond to my emails. The software would be really great, if it worked, or if it was supported.

But back to Aperture. I downloaded the trial, imported my dvds (which took forever,) and now I’m trying to browse the library. It chokes. It hasn’t even made thumbnails of everything yet. Qpict did this in a matter of minutes (per dvd), iPhoto as well. I’m not sure what the deal is here. This is almost completely unuseable. I have better than the minimum requirements, but uh… I guess those are exaggerated.

So now I’m trying something called iView, and it SEEMS perfect. It’s $120 through Amazon, so I’m considering buying it. I’m going to play with the trial a few more days and see if I can break it. These guys are a larger company so I think they’ll be able to support the product properly. They also have a user community so I’m likely to be able to get help there if I need it.

– Update –

The good folks at Qpict did refund me in full, as well as offer me the next version of their pro software for free. While I still have a problem with how they handled the issue initially, I understand that I was a strange exception and not a high priority. They made a nice gesture as apology so there’s no hard feelings. Their new software looks like a great solution for me and many others.