Fun Life Hack Our Products

Today, we are proud to announce the launch of Bloxes.

Bloxes are essentially 3D cardboard Legos that ship flat, and fold up in modular building blocks that are strong enough to stand on. While they aren’t tech per se, we use them for building tables, walls, cubicles, and desks at the Humanized office. Google and Mint.com have already ordered some, and Mozilla has expressed interest in using them in their offices too. This may well be the new thing in terms of agile office-space deployment. Don’t like where a wall is? Just move it! Don’t like the way it looks? Just rebuild it! They are cheaper than cubicles, and much more fun.

They are also eco-buzzword-friendly (meaning that they are made from recycled cardboard and are recyclable).

So head over to Bloxes and order yourself some re-factorable furniture and walls. Then come back here and tell us all about it.

We are now a Python and cardboard shop.

Our Products Software Development

You can’t spell “opEN SOurce” without “ENSO”. An amusing coincidence, but appropriate, since from now on Enso is free-as-in-freedom as well as free-as-in-beer. This means anyone can download the source code that we use to build Enso. Anyone can read it, modify it, build Enso from it, and redistribute it to others. We’ve chosen the revised BSD license. This is among the least restrictive licenses, giving you the right to do basically whatever you want with the software; read the link to find out the details.

What does this mean for you?

The opening of the source isn’t going to have any immediate effect on the way Enso works for users. For now, the free Enso installers are remaining unchanged. Users should continue to download those. If your only interest in Enso is as a user, then you can say “Enso is open source now, that’s neat” and go on to the next thing in your reading list. Or check out our brand-new forum. But if you’re interested in how software is made, then keep reading…

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Design Our Products

As usual, our readers delighted us with the number of well-thought-out comments about our recent release of the Enso 2.0 prototype. We’ve posted a new version of the prototype here, with several bug fixes and some tweaks to the visuals of the new argument-input box. If you found the previous prototype to be crashing too much to seriously consider, please try again; the new one should be more stable.

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Our Products

Get ready. Flex your pinkie finger. It’s time to try out the Enso 2.0 Launcher prototype. It runs on top of the free Enso Launcher, so all you have to do is download the prototype, install, and try it out. You’ll get some new features, several improved commands, and (of course) all of your old commands will still work. If you haven’t been following our weblog, you might want to read about the motivation behind this design, and our explanation of the design .

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Design Our Products Software Development

As part of the our move to Mozilla and thinking about a free-as-in-speech Enso, I want to be more transparent with our design directions and goals. Our designs can only benefit by incorporating the criticism and suggestions of the community we have here. Open-source design is a balancing act between making final decisions and finding consensus. We hope to take the lessons that Jono spelled out in his excellent article on successfully humane open-source projects and use them in our own projects.

This post is about the new directions we are taking Enso. If you haven’t done so yet, start by reading about some of the motivations for doing some Enso redesign. In short:

• Enso shouldn’t make you type all of “open” every time
• Enso should be able to open paths and urls
• Enso should support international character input
• Enso should gracefully handle the case where there’s no convenient place to enter text
• Enso shouldn’t require you to type out text, select it, and then run a command when you’d rather run the command and then enter the text (think calculate)
• Enso shouldn’t make you hold down a key while typing lots of characters

We think we’ve solved these problems with our Enso 2.0 redesign. In this post, and possible follow on posts, I’ll walk through the new stuff. I should note that our upcoming prototype will not yet have have all of the features mentioned here.

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Design Our Products

Last month we added an “about songza” page to Songza. It’s a simple page — just a couple headers, some text, and a return-to-Songza link. I thought I’d a walk through my thought process in through-designing this tiny feature. It’s not quite as simple as it first appears.

The first question is whether to have the about content be on a separate page, or as lightbox/hidden-div content on the main page. I was tempted by the second option; there is a seduction to having Songza exists on only one page. On the other hand, that solution isn’t particularly scalable — Songza has already added other pages similar to the about page, how would they all interact? And how do you keep the load-time reasonable as more and more content is added? — More importantly, the content is not linkable or search-able. Using clever Ajaxy tricks means that the visibility of the content is dependent on application state.

It’s clear that the about page should be, in fact, a separate page. That leaves us with a glaring usability problem. Do you see it? It’s bad enough that I would be wary of clicking links while listing to songs if I ever got bitten by the problem.

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Our Products

We are fairly happy with Enso, but there are a couple nagging problems with our current implementation that need to be fixed. We know because you keep telling us (which we are grateful for). Fairly happy isn’t good enough, so we are working on fixing the following most common complaints and suggestions.

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Commentary Our Products

Software is too frustrating. There are a lot of choices in today’s computing world — what’s worse, most of them are too complicated. Hundreds of features, dozens of user preferences, unresponsive programs, inscrutable error messages, crowded toolbars, merciless disrespect for the safety of your data; all of these are problems that plague most of today’s software. We, as Humanized, are dedicated to tackling these problems and to making software effortless.

Mozilla is about making the web (which isn’t just the browser!) useful for, and usable by, everyone. Mozilla is in a unique position — not being beholden to any particular technology or the bottom-line — to push the web forward, past the boundaries of the browser, focusing foremost on people. Which is why I am excited and proud to say that we are joining forces with Mozilla to head up the user experience side of Mozilla Labs. We will be working inside the browser, on the browser, outside the browser, and mixing all three. Enso’s coming too.

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Our Products

As of today, Enso is free!

Some say that it’s the destiny of all software to eventually become free. For Enso, that eventuality is today. By making Enso free we make it able to reach a much wider audience, much faster.

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Our Products

Sorry that this weblog hasn’t been updated in so long. There’s a good reason for the lack of updates: Enso went on a vaction over the holidays. It went someplace it’s never been before. Here’s a postcard.

Fun Our Products

I am proud to announce the release of Songza, a music search engine and Internet jukebox. Songza solves the related problems of “I want to hear a song” and “I want to share a song with a friend.” Released on November 8, its popularity is growing rapidly: We’re poised to reach one million songs played within just a week of launching Songza.

Songza is also an interface showcase. I’ve used the interface principles discussed here on the Humanized blog to design Songza to be humane, slick, and viral. Play with the interface for a bit, and you’ll find habituatable pie-menus instead of slow linear menus; an inviting design that uses only two icons, both of which act as illustrations for words; an incredibly high density of content and a correspondingly low amount of interaction; undo instead of warnings; and transparent messages that don’t break your train of thought.

Ironically, there’s a lot that went into making Songza so simply. Achieving such a high level of simplification required a lot of code, in part because we couldn’t just use standard widgets. It was worth it, though.

You can’t be better without being different — I think Songza is both.

Design Our Products

Okay, so for all of the Quicksilver enthusiasts out there: Yes, we know about Quicksilver. And, no, we didn’t steal our ideas for Enso from Quicksilver. Enso is based on Jef Raskin’s command quasimode, an idea that has been around for years. As Quicksilver’s creators will tell you, Raskin’s ideas formed part of the inspirational basis of Quicksilver’s current design.

If you’re familiar with Quicksilver, you know roughly what Enso Launcher can do. And if you’re stuck using Windows, you may be surprised by the new things Enso offers.

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Our Products Software Development

Ever since we launched Enso, we’ve been getting feedback like this:

— When are you going to come out with the Python API for commands?
— I’m looking for a way to extend Enso.
— Is it is possible to enrich Enso with custom commands?
— I heard there will be support to create your own commands. How far off is this?
— An SDK would be wonderful!
— Being a Python developer, I am very interested in the ability to expand Enso.
— Would you have any available API’s?

The entire Humanized team is extremely proud to announce that the answer to whether is “Yes“, and the answer to when is “Now“! Today marks the release of Enso Developer Prototype, which lets anyone develop commands for Enso. It’s free and it’s available for download.

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Our Products UI Design Fundamentals

Today is a good day to listen to music: Enso Media Remote Control now has six new commands in it. Remote Control has been the most popular beta product, so we chose to revisit it first. Like all of our other beta products, the new Remote Control is completely free. (Unlike our full products Enso Launcher and Enso Words, our beta products do not automatically update, so whether you already have Remote Control or not, you’ll need to download the new installer if you want to try it out.)

Play me a song, Enso

The whole point of Media Remote Control is to let you control your music without having to switch applications. With the old Media Remote Control, if you wanted to hear a specific song, you would still have to go back to your media player and then click around to find the song you wanted, breaking your train of thought. With the new commands, you can tell Enso to play a specific song without having to switch applications, or indeed, even take your hands off the keyboard.

How does it work? If you know the exact song you want, you can say play song heart of the sunrise (for instance). If you want to hear a certain artist but don’t care what song, you can say play artist zappa and let Enso pick a random song by Frank Zappa. You can do the same thing with albums and genres: use play jazz and let Enso surprise me with a random jazz song.

Before you get too excited, right now these commands only work with iTunes. That’s why Media Remote Control is still a beta product. (Why iTunes? It’s not kickbacks from Apple. It’s for purely technical reasons: it was easier to make this work with iTunes than with any other media players.)

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Fun Our Products

Imagine this. You are writing an email to a friend and you mention that you want to meet at your favorite breakfast place in Chicago: Tre Kronor. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to send them Tre Kronor’s address along with a map? Currently, the only way to do this is to open your browser, load up a site that provides maps, do a search for the restaurant, wait for the map to appear, copy the URL of the map to your email, copy the address to your email (and reformat it), and finally close your browser. Gross—and you’re not even sending a map, just a link to one!

Enter Enso Map Anywhere.

Enso Map Anywhere lets you select an address or a business name and add a map in place. For instance, if you don’t know where a business is, you can just highlight its name and you’ll get a beautiful map from Google with the location marked, along with the business’s full address and phone number. Alternatively, you can use the map command on a partial address like “4611 N Ravenswood” to get a map and the full address. It’s a great way to look up a forgotten ZIP code.

So download it now, it’s free forever and works with (but doesn’t require) other Enso products. Go map happy. It maps in lots of places, from Word to Gmail. You can even use it while blogging in Word Press. Check it out:

Bongo Room, Chicago

Bongo Room: 1470 N Milwaukee Ave, Chicago, IL - (773) 489-0690
Did you mean the Bongo Room at 1152 S Wabash Ave, Chicago, IL - (312) 291-0100?
Mapped by Enso Map Anywhere

Fun Our Products

In honor of International Talk Like a Pirate Day we’ve added the pirate-talk ability to Enso Translate Anywhere! To chat like a sea dog, all you’ve got to do is to select your text and use the “translate to pirate” command. To make your Photoshop captions more swashbuckling, just select them and use the “translate to pirate” command. Even your file names can be made less land lubbin’. Seriously, what could be better?

Want the penultimate laugh? Select an email to your boss, translate, and shiver his timbers.

Arrrr you wanting to know more about this horn swogglin’ Enso and its commands? Sail o’er to this link. And, a round of rum to Jeffrey Souza for being the source of all our buccaneer-talk knowledge!

So take out your hornpipe and grog, and download Enso Translate Anywhere, the pirate edition. Where does it run? I’ll give ye a hint: XP marks the spot (Vista and 2K too, arr).

Now, t’ return t’ findin’ me some golden interface booty.

Our Products

We are proud to announce four new Enso products. This time they’re all free.
Enso Media Remote Control
A remote-control for your music: play, pause, and skip tracks in you favorite music player without moving from your current application.

Enso Translate Anywhere
The power to translate English to and from eight other languages, in any application.

Enso Web Search Anywhere
Provides commands for performing web searches using a variety of web services, from Amazon to Youtube to your Gmail account.

Enso TeX Anywhere
Effortlessly render TeX markup into beautifully type-set equations (and convert them back again) anywhere from Powerpoint to your email.

Can’t decide which one you want to try first? Then download them all with the One Installer.

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Our Products

Here’s the situation: After a lot of searching, I have found that piece of information I really need. But it’s on a website written in a language that I don’t speak. I don’t need a perfect translation; I just need to get the gist of it.

Of course, there are free translation web-apps like BabelFish or the beta Google Translate. But by the time I’ve found the translation service, gone back to the first web page, copied the paragraph from there, gone back to the second web page, and pasted it in, I’ve already forgotten what it was that I wanted to know.

I’m lazy. I’m impatient. I want it now! And when my friend is chatting to me online and trots out their French, I want to be able to impress them by immediately knowing what they said and how to respond.

Actually, it annoys me every time I have to take my mind off what I’m doing and have to go somewhere else in order to do something. I want to bring everything to me. So really, I want everything to be an Enso command.

Well, we don’t have “everything” yet, but we’ve been working on something big. How big? How does thirty-three new commands sound? How about thirty-three new commands for the cost of zero?

Check back soon to find out what they are.

Our Products

…the news that Enso now works on Windows Vista and Windows 2000!

We’ve just released a new Enso patch which has added compatibility with Vista and 2000. There is still only one version of Enso, though — instead of supporting a separate version of Enso for each of the three operating system versions (and making you worry about which version of the installer you need to download), we’ve just made one Enso version that’s compatible with all three.

If everything works as planned, your copy of Enso should be automatically updating itself to include the new patch.

If you’ve been wanting to try Enso but your operating system wasn’t supported, now’s your chance to try out our full-featured free demos.

If you’re using Enso on Windows XP, this patch still has something for you. As usual, we’ve fixed all the bugs we could, so the situations where Enso could crash — already pretty rare — have become even more rare.

Also, you can now get help on a particular command by typing (for instance) “help calc” or “help google”.

Speaking of help and rare situations, there’s a new pattern we’re starting to follow: If Enso runs into a weird situation — for instance, if it can’t complete your command for some reason — it will put up a short error message, and if you want to find out exactly what went wrong, you can use the “tell me more” command. At the moment, there’s only one place where we’re using this pattern, and you might never even encounter it. But our goal is to take care of every problem, not just most of them, in a humane way. So we’ll probably be adding more uses for “tell me more” as we expand on Enso.

The other big change is in the way Enso gets installed. If you’re upgrading an existing installation of Enso, this won’t affect you. But from now on, when you install Enso on a new computer, you’ll be installing it just for one user account (your own) and not for all user accounts on the computer.

If you’re the only one who uses your computer, there’s not much difference. But if you have a family computer with an account for each family member, how will this affect you?

First of all, let me be perfectly clear: We’re not going to start charging you for each user of your computer. (That would be silly.) You’re still welcome to buy a single license and use it to register Enso for multiple users on the computer.

So why are we making this change? There are a couple of advantages for you. The big one is the ability to install Enso from a regular user account now, not just an administrator account. For security reasons, it’s better to use the administrator account only for the things that absolutely need it — and Enso isn’t one of them.

Also, this change means that preferences are now per-user too, which we think is an improvement. Suppose I want to hold down Caps Lock to activate Enso, but I share a computer with someone who wants to tap the right Shift key to activate Enso. We don’t have to fight over it if we can each have our own settings.

Finally, trial periods are also per-user now: if somebody else on your computer has been using a trial for 30 days, this no longer prevents you from downloading a trial on your account and having 30 days of your own. (Can you tell we want as many people to use the trial as possible?)

We’re already at work on the next Enso patch, which will add a very exciting new feature. I can barely wait to show it to you, but I’ll restrain myself until the feature is ready.

Please note: Since January 15, 2008, all Enso products have been free. Any information in the above post about prices, trials, or demos is, therefoure, out-of-date. To get the latest version of Enso, free of charge, see the main Enso page.

Our Products

Today we released another Enso update, our fourth since Enso was first released.

Although we’re raring to add some of the new features we have planned, we decided to focus on fixing bugs for this patch. Our thanks goes out to all those who took the time to submit detailed bug reports when Enso misbehaved.

Continue reading »

Our Products

Since we first released Enso in January, two of the most often-requested features have been:

• the ability to change the Enso entry key from Caps Lock to something else;
• the ability to make this key’s behavior “sticky” (i.e. to not have to hold it down while entering commands).

I’m happy to say both of these have now been implemented in a new Enso update which went out last night. If you have Enso installed on a computer with Internet access, your copy should already have updated itself.

To change Enso’s settings, issue the “Preferences” command. This will take you to a screen where you can choose the activation key and make its behavior either quasimodal or sticky. “Quasimodal” is the default behavior: hold down the activation key while typing the command, then release it to execute. “Sticky” means a single tap activates Enso, which remains open until you either tap “enter” to execute the command, or “escape” to cancel the command. (We prefer the quasimodal behavior ourselves, and we encourage new users to give the quasimode a chance before changing it.)

Besides “Preferences”, there is another pair of new commands. “Capslock On” and “Capslock Off” allow you to change the Caps Lock mode of your keyboard even if Caps Lock is set as your Enso activation key. This way you can still type in ALL CAPS without holding down Shift.

User feedback has been critical in guiding us to choose these features as the first ones to implement. We’ve been getting some excellent feedback and constructive criticism from users around the world. Please, continue! Share your thoughts through the contact form, by posting them on this weblog, or by e-mailing them to support@humanized.com.

This update also made numerous minor bug fixes. We’ve made Enso more stable and better able to recover from errors and exceptions. More features, fixes, and improvements are scheduled in the weeks to come. If you have the demo version of Enso, it will get all updates until your 30 day trial period expires. If you purchase a license for an Enso product, all updates are yours free indefinitely.

Thanks to everyone for using Enso!

Please note: Since January 15, 2008, all Enso products have been free. All information in the above post about demos, trials, and purchasing issues is, therefoure, out-of-date. To get the latest version of Enso, free of charge, see the main Enso page.

Our Products

We’ve received a lot of requests from our programming-oriented users asking us when they’ll be able to create their own commands with Enso.

As Jono mentioned quite emphatically in the Enso Tour Movie, the answer is: soon!

But for the time being, you can already implement certain kinds of commands for Enso Launcher, as long as you know a programming language that can operate on command-line arguments. I’ll show you how to make a simple one with a little code in our language of choice, Python. Even if you don’t know Python, you should be able to get the general gist of what’s going on and be able to port it to your favorite programming language, as Python is notoriously easy to read.

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Our Products

Thanks to everyone who downloaded Enso and tried it out, and a special thanks to those who have already bought Enso. In the last week, we’ve gotten an enormous amount of feedback, and we’re working as hard as we can to respond to all the requests, complaints, compliments, and feature requests. Happily, we’ve fixed the first round of bugs. And, already on its way, is the next round of changes: adding the oft-requested features (like the ability to change Enso’s entry key and whether Enso is “sticky” or not).

In this update we’ve made two important changes.

First, we’ve heard a lot of feedback that Enso was just too expensive. We hear you. We are dropping the price of both Enso Launcher and Enso Words today. They are now $19.95 each. What’s more, we’ve added a discount for buying both products: people who purchase a second product will be charged $14.95. Personally, we hate it when we go buy a new product and then its price drops the next day and we can’t get that money back. So, we will be refunding the full difference to those who already purchased the software. Our goal is to make usable software that is also affordable.

Second, for those of you who have downloaded and installed Enso Launcher or Enso Words (or both), we issued an update to the software earlier this week. We hope that most of you didn’t even notice it go by. In that update, we fixed a number of bugs, most of which only occurred on a small number of computers. Among the things we fixed were:

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Our Products

It all started with one man’s dream for a computer that worked the way people did; a dream for a computer that he could compose music on. That man was Jef Raskin. And the dream became the Macintosh.

Jef never could accept the status quo. When something didn’t make sense to him—whether it was in mathematics, aerodynamics, nursing, or musicology—he pressed until he either understood it, or discovered that it actually didn’t make sense. This is how he was able to formulate the philosophy underlying the orginal Macintosh design: That computers should make tasks easy for people, not the other way around. Jef’s talent was in realizing when something was flawed, challenging it, and inventing something significantly better.

Jef did not dwell in the past; he focused his energy on moving forward. He felt that, while inventing the Macintosh was laudable, there was much work left to be done and many ways to make computers more humane.

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Our Products

Today is a great day for us. We released Enso and ate great Indian food. And, for dessert, the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg covered it (Enso, not the food). Walt’s video review is below and you can read the full article here.

Please note: Since January 15, 2008, all Enso products have been free. To get the latest version of Enso, free of charge, see the main Enso page.

Our Products

We’ve been quiet, at Humanized. Too quiet. That’s about to change.

For the last year-and-a-half we’ve been working on a piece of software we think will change the way we use computers. Now we are weeks away from its debut. We call it Enso.

Enso is a new idea in computing that brings true universality to interfaces. It makes Windows, and everything in it, more humane. It breaks down the walls of applications. What does that mean? See for yourself. First, read this link then watch the trailer for a sneak preview of Enso.

Are you good at finding bugs? Then there’s barely enough time to sign up for the Enso beta.

Please note: Since January 15, 2008, all Enso products have been free. To get the latest version of Enso, free of charge, see the main Enso page.

Our Products

Applications are like isolated cities, each with its own customs and infrastructure.

Both applications and isolated cities have a lot of needless redundancy. Cities have an excuse: they’re in physically different places and are forced to duplicate a lot of things. Applications don’t have such an excuse—they all share the same hard drive, processor, memory, and operating system. Yet despite such proximity, for the end-user, applications don’t actually have that much in common with one another.

For example, both Microsoft Word and Macromedia Fireworks have spell check, but they work in different ways and include separate dictionaries. On my computer, I counted 7 separate implementations of spell check—all of which work slightly differently—with 7 different lists of every word in English. No wonder I have to upgrade my computer as often as I take out the trash*.

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Our Products Redesign

We’ve all seen dialog boxes that look like the picture on the right.

Dialog boxes are bad enough: they pop-up at inconvenient times, they derail our train of thought, and normally we don’t even read them. But this type of dialog box is worse. It’s not even a dialog box. It’s monolog box. There’s nothing one can do with this messages but click “OK”. Or wait and click “OK”. They have, as I’ve explained before, 0% efficiency. Beyond that, monolog boxes can have frightening consequences: because I often use two monitors, I’ve spent panicked seconds thinking I’d lost my work due to a crash… only to discover later that a monolog box had appeared on the other screen and stopped Word from operating normally. Even with a single monitor, you can miss the dialog box, and you’ll have a similar scare.

In the article The Spelling Check is Complete by Jensen Harris (of the Microsoft Office User Experience team) defends the “Word has finished spell check” monolog box shown above, along with the “Word has finished searching your document” box. The Office team had tried removing those documents but discovered that “people who were spell checking their document manually had no idea when the process was complete.” Thus, the monolog boxes were reinstated.

This is classic inside-the-box thinking. The problem is valid: people have trouble knowing the process is complete. But the solution isn’t to use monolog boxes. I can think of two different—and better—solutions. You can probably think of more.

Solution 1: Bypass the problem

Implied in the justification for reinstating the monolog boxes is the false idea that spell check is a fundamentally modal operation. In Jensen’s words:

“Spell check is one of those great features that have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning is you clicking the spell check button. The middle is the computer conversing with you about potential misspelled words and giving you an opportunity to fix them. And the end is the computer telling you that the process is complete.”

But Spell check isn’t necessarily a modal interaction at all. Word’s own spell-check-as-you-type feature is a great example of a non-modal spell check. The text is underlined with a red squiggle: you only need to “converse” with the computer if you decide to fix it. The Gmail spell check, although ever-so-slightly modal, is another example of a spell check that does not require a “conversation”: spell check is done when you are done. Besides obviating monolog boxes, non-modal spell check has another benefit: it isn’t mutually exclusive with writing. If you are correcting a misspelling and you see something else you’d like to change, you can do it without exiting spell check. Your train of thought is never endangered—let’s see the standard Word spell checker and it’s monolog box do that!

Solution 2: Think outside the (dialog) box

If you keep Word’s somewhat antiquated spell check mechanism, then it’s true that the user needs to be informed when Word has finished spell checking. As I’ve explained, a modal monolog boxes are dangerous and inhumane. Luckily, there are many other methods of presenting information that are not modal. In particular there is one we are using in Enso, our upcoming product: transparent messages.

Transparent messages are the brainchild of Jef Raskin. It’s simply a large and translucent message that’s displayed over the contents of your screen. They fade away when the user takes any action (like typing or moving the mouse). In practice, the message is both noticeable yet unobtrusive. And because the message is transparent, you can see what’s beneath it. It’s just humane. Take a look:

Message Log

Transparent messages, however, introduce a problem: messages disappear easily. What happens if the user wants to see what it said? The solution is message log—simply a list of past messages. This way if the user doesn’t have time to read a message, they can go to the message log to view it only if they think it is important enough. And think about it: a message log would be a great thing to have anyway. How many times have you wanted to reference the contents of a dialog box and couldn’t because you had already dismissed it? And how many times have you had to transcribe the contents of a dialog box because the text wasn’t selectable? The lives of users and the lives of tech support staff would be greatly simplified by the addition of a system-wide message log.

On the web

The transparent message also has a place on the web. Web designers have a constant struggle to come up with non-obtrusive means of conveying fleeting feedback to users. For example, validating user input and checking login credentials. It is in instances like this that the transparent message really shines. Give it a try below.

The correct email is trans@parent.com and the correct password is pass. Make sure to play with incorrect login information.

Feel free to nab the source code.

Conclusion

Transparent messages are a simple and elegant solution to a problem that is normally either over-looked or over-engineered. They’re not right for everything, but for messages that need no user interaction, transparent messages are hard to beat: they have an efficiency of 100%.

Plus, they look pretty.

Our Products

I recently posted an article called “No More More Pages?“. It argued that the “more” pages used everywhere from Google to Slashdot are a possibly aging technology that might be given a face lift with the new tools available to Web 2.0. In short, it argued, “Don’t force the user to ask for more content: just give it to them“. A number of people wrote some thought provoking comments. This is a response.

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Our Products

As soon as I heard about the concept of Web syndication, I wanted to take advantage of it. Reading on the web would be so much more convenient: I could just go to one place to find the information I wanted, instead of visiting a bunch of different blogs every day to see if they had anything new.

The problem, as I soon discovered, was the aggregators.

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