This is a fantastically useful integration of Google maps and Craigslist housing listings. There are no API’s available for either service, so there must be a lot of screen scraping going on in the background. The whole thing is really well done – it’s great how you can view housing photos within the map view. I can see this being extended to cover lots of other data (eBay listings, personal ads?).

This is a first – a commercial studio site built with processing. It also has a nice one-page navigation system. Right now the main problem I see with processing sites is the initial delay before anything shows up.

In other processing news, setpixel has been updated with a set of processing experiments in live-video recognition and manipulation. ‘Robot Mirror’ is especially cool.

I just came across this example of a longstanding usability beef of mine: menus consisting of tiny unlabeled buttons.

Why is it annoying? Try browsing through the images in the illustration section. As the buttons have no labels (or rollover descriptions), there is no reason to click one button over another. This leaves 2 choices: click on the buttons in sequence or at random. Clicking in sequence is difficult because each time you want to go to the next image, you have to move your mouse precisely 5 pixels horizontally with no vertical movement. This causes you to focus on your cursor, when you should be focusing on the images. Clicking randomly has an extra problem, in that you cannot tell what images you have already viewed, so you are likely to view the same image multiple times.

This example is noticeable because otherwise the site is great: fantastic illustration and nice audio.

There are various solutions to this problem. The simplest would be to allow the user to skip to the next image by clicking on the current image (or add a next button).

After reading about the new Firebird browser at Joel on Software, I thought I’d give it a try. It’s now my default browser. It’s fast,
skinnable and has tabbed browsing. Once you try tabbed browsing you
won’t want to go back.