Monthly Archives: June 2009
Jun 30, 2009 by Matt | Posted in Design, Featured
Usability authority Jakob Nielsen recently published a new article suggesting that developers “abandon legacy design” and stop masking password fields with bullets or asterisks, because of “reduced usability to protect against a non-issue.”
Most websites (and many other applications) mask passwords as users type them, and thereby theoretically prevent miscreants from looking over users’ shoulders. Of course, a truly skilled criminal can simply look at the keyboard and note which keys are being pressed. So, password masking doesn’t even protect fully against snoopers.
More importantly, there’s usually nobody looking over your shoulder when you log in to a website.
This is wrong on so many levels.
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Jun 29
I recently read an interesting post over at Blogsessive on the big controversy over the GPL and WordPress. It covers the other perspective, that of the smaller theme developers trying to earn a living, from a somewhat neutral standpoint of someone who on one…
Jun 28
Do you know what the Twitter API is missing? A way to sync the last status you read. I use a Twitter client on my laptop (Tweetie), and I use another (Twitterific) on my iPod Touch. And sometimes I might use either Twitter.com or…
Jun 26
Ow.ly is a URL shortener that has gained a measure of popularity of late. It ties in with the HootSuite service, which allows you to schedule tweets, manage multiple Twitter profiles, and track link statistics. Ow.ly and HootSuite together are sort of like an…
Jun 25
There has been some recent buzz about Google changing how they hande the NoFollow attribute, and how it’s the end of the world. SEOs are running around in circles, and there’s talk of moving to JavaScript and iframe commenting systems so Google can’t read…
Jun 24
A new feature recently launched on WordPress Extend allows plugin authors to create changelogs in their plugin readme files, which will now show up in a separate tab on Extend, as well as in the dialogs that appear when you click the “View version…
Jun 23
The new widget management in WordPress 2.8 is greatly improved. You can drag widgets from the available widgets area to any widgetized sidebar, and edit the settings with a click of the little arrow. There’s no more annoying “Save” button for you to have…
Jun 22
WooThemes just launched their second iteration, bringing with it several changes, including a website redesign and GPL compliancy on all themes moving forward. The themes still cost money, but there are no longer any restrictions on how many times you can use the theme…
Jun 21
WP Recipes has a neat WordPress trick. Apparently WordPress has a few variables ($is_gecko, $is_IE, etc) that are set to either true or false depending on which browser a visitor is running. Coupled with the body_class hook, you can add a class of the…
