Feedly: Very good, but with surprising misses...

Like many blog readers, I've been searching for a replacement for the beloved but soon-to-depart Google Reader. Feedly has emerged as the heir apparent, and with good reason: it's attractively designed, cross-platform, customizable, and duplicates the vast majority of Reader's functionality. However, there are a few surprising holes in Feedly's offering - and I thought I'd point them out here so fellow migrators will be warned, and maybe even the Feedly team will take notice and fix them!

1. Next Article / Previous Article: These are literally unpressable buttons because they don't exist: they're available as keyboard shortcuts, but not onscreen buttons. Making them keyboard shortcuts acknowledges them as worthwhile - so shouldn't I at least have the option to use my mouse for this interaction?
2. Save For Later: The location of the save-for-later button (the equivalent of "starring" in Google Reader) is illogical: it's only at the end of each article. If I'm saving something for later, it's likely because I haven't read it - which means I haven't gotten to the end of the article! Give me this button alongside the headline - that's where I really need it, especially in the full-article view mode I use most.
3. Unread Only: I use the "unread only" filter - but the way this filter actually works seems to be: "unread only, unless there are no unread articles, in which case show all articles." I hope this is a bug and not an extremely poor design decision! It's especially bad since I also filter by "oldest first" - so when I log on, I see either (a) new unread articles or (b) hundreds of month-old articles. If there's nothing new, why not give me the satisfaction of that big green checkmark I'm beginning to love so much?

So, Feedly ( #feedly or @feedly ), what do ya say? I'm a fan, but I could be happier...

The Feel of Non-Tactile GUIs...

Despite the lack of tactile feedback, digital interfaces have a "feel" - and one of trickier elements for this are dropdown submenus.  You know them: hovering your mouse over a menu option in a column causes more options to pop out to the right. The trick is that if the submenus pop out too quickly, the interaction is "slippery," and you can too easily slide to an adjacent option and the wrong submenu. So a delay is added, which is effective in preventing these mistakes but makes it feel "sluggish." Well, Ben Kamens has discovered how Amazon's dropdown submenus are lightning-quick and error free: tracking the path of the mouse, rather than its location. He determined that if the mouse moves from a menu option to any location in the colored triangle (shown for illustration here, but not actually visible), the current submenu stays open; if it leaves the triangle, the submenu changes with no delay. So it's not slippery, but it's still quick. It's the GUI equivalent of a tight-cornering nimble sports car - and that's a pretty good feel! Check out his explanation for some good animated examples of dropdown submenus that are slippery, sluggish, and just right.

[via Gizmodo]

When Product Specs Become Meaningless

Gizmodo posted back in November 2012 that PPI - pixels per inch on digital displays - was about to become the "new most meaningless spec."  It made me think about the forward progress of many product specifications until they reach a plateau of meaninglessness - where every product has it, making it better wouldn't matter, and so it's not worth talking about anymore. This has already happened with, for example, the number of colors a display can show, which is in the millions for essentially all displays. Sure, it's technically possible to keep going into billions and then trillions of colors - but nobody would be able to see the difference. PPI is about to join this club, with Apple's marketing blazing the trail by coining the term "Retina Display." But it's worth noting that they've constrained themselves with this designation: it makes no sense to create anything more than a Retina display, since it is by definition the PPI at which the human eye can no longer see pixelation. So, this is where the PPI arms race will end - and we focus on other specs that haven't yet become meaningless, but eventually will: processor speed, RAM and storage, network speed, camera resolution, and on and on and on...