Mint. Redesign. Image. Cleaning Up the Clutter Online - Pogue’s Posts Blog - NYTimes.co. Readability has changed my life. It’s a new button on your Web browser’s toolbar. With one click, it eliminates EVERYTHING from the Web page you’re reading except the text and photos. No ads, blinking, links, banners, promos or anything else. The text is also changed to a beautiful font and size (you choose them in advance) and the background is made plain white (or a light shading of your choice). Basically, it makes any Web page look like a printed book page or a Kindle page, and it’s glorious. I’ve never understood how people can read Web articles when there’s Times-Square blinking going on all around them. Fortunately, I’ll never have to put up with them again. When I mentioned Readability on Twitter, there were hundreds of “OMG, this changes everything!”
There were also a few remarks like, “Hey, without the ads, how do you expect Web sites to pay for those articles you’re enjoying?” Well, first of all, you still see the ads—before you click the Readability button. You know what? Open source's usability challenge - ZDNet.co.uk. The iPhone has been out for a year, and known about in detail for considerably longer. Yet the very latest crop of state-of-the-art Windows Mobile phones, clearly designed as head-on competitors to that phone, miss the mark by miles. They all have the same feature list — indeed, they capitalise on the many aspects of the iPhone that are well below par — but they all feel cruder and more frustrating to use.
You can't just bolt this stuff on. Usability is extremely important. That should make usability supremely challenging for open-source projects, especially ones of the scale and complexity of Ubuntu. So when Mark Shuttleworth calls for usability to be a primary concern in future Ubuntu developments, it's fair to say that he expects it to be achievable. But it needs more. Any glance at open-source discussion groups will show just how far out of mind such considerations stand. A Better Interface For Image Search? People seem to like Apple’s interface for scrolling through albums visually with a scrollbar. It was copied by SearchMe as a way to browse normal search results.
And now an Austrian developer named Franz Enzenhofer has built his own interface to Google Image Search: CreativeSpace. Users scroll through image search results with the same interface. This is built with Ajax, not Flash, and it’s quite good. You can also set search safe to on/off. He says he built it over two weekends.