I tend to find writing (or explaining) for other people and doing it for yourself blend. A lot.
The old adage that you don't truly understand something unless you can explain it to someone else holds particularly true with tech writing. When I'm writing to communicate something to someone else, I'm also helping myself understand the topic better. It's win-win.
I read a little way into the article to see whether he'd explain the lack of axis labels or just how the graph maps to anything real. Nope.
The article is reasonable but the loops just annoyed me too much.
1. A write-a-document test. I was given a fairly simple (contrived) scenario over the phone and was asked to write specs and a deployment plan with a deadline of an hour.
2. A programming test. Again, a description given over the phone and someone available to answer questions if I had them. After delivery, there was a followup programming task to extend it from a client app to a web app. It took about 8 hours in total.
Provided you're willing to put in the time (and I was), it seemed to be an excellent way of judging whether I could really do the work they needed me to.
I went to the site, and I had to watch the video twice before I got it.
Ok, it's a not really a social network like Facebook (that's what I immediately think when I hear social network). It's more like Reddit or Digg, but with the comments embedded in whatever page you're looking at. Am I right?
A few comments:
1. That video isn't really helping your cause. The fact that it's the only source of information about Weblerr combined with the fact that I had to watch it twice to have any idea what it was is a problem. The video goes for 1:17, and there's literally only 5 seconds of it that tells me anything.
2. With so little information about it, I'm not going to hand over my details. I have questions - do I have to download anything? What browsers does it work with? Does it tie into any other social networks? Do sites have to support it before I can comment on them? What does the UI really look like? etc.
3. You have the very serious disadvantage that you're competing against established competitors (Reddit/Digg/Twitter) that have thousands or millions of users.
In general, probably a nice idea, but you're really just embedding Reddit/Digg/Twitter into the original page. I'm sure there are plugins that'll do that for Firefox and Chrome already.
The screens are a bit hit and miss for me. The alarm clock, music player, and bottom half of the home screen (messages) are beautiful. The top half of the home screen (weather and time) is horrible. The others - meh.
1. No worries - Chrome is "5.0.342.2 dev", and FF is 3.5.8
2. Yep, it's working for me in FF now. Still not in Chrome, btw.
3. Yes, I did. That'd be it - my bad. Maybe something hinting that that's why? As a suggestion, perhaps a number in parentheses in each tab? e.g. "Restrictions (1)" if I've selected one restriction? Just an idea :)
4. I can't reproduce this now! Maybe the JS update fixed it?
Looks good - nice idea, but I had a couple of problems using it... I think it's still a bit buggy:
1. Doesn't seem to work in Chrome? I get no results no matter what I do.
2. Checking the checkbox next to "International" or "All country extensions" should select all the checkboxes in that section IMO. It feels like it's not doing anything.
3. After playing for a bit in Firefox, it disabled the individual and country extensions so I couldn't select them individually.
4. If my word doesn't match any valid domain, I get an error telling me I need to select a country extension.
That said, if you can iron out the bugs, this could be useful :)
The author seems to be completely ignoring the fact that sometimes navigation SHOULD be one-way only.
If the link or button you've clicked on makes a change on the server that affects that page, it might not make sense to display the old page when you hit Back.
For example, you were on the edit page of a list of messages you want to send to another user on the site. You finished making changes and clicked "Send". Now you’re on a page with a message saying, "Messages Sent!". What do you expect when you click the Back button?
1. The edit page with the list of “pending” messages that have actually already been sent?
2. The edit page with an empty list of messages or the original messages but now with a “sent” status?
I’d argue that the second option is far less confusing for a user, but that’s not what you’ve suggested should happen.
And what happens if you click Send again? In the first case, you could send the same messages again, or maybe the server will reply with, "I don’t know what you’re talking about - those messages are already sent". There’s no way for a user to know!
Caching is all good and well, but sometimes you really don't want a page to be cached. That's why there are headers for caching...
This is the service we decided on at my old job. Our only difficulties were that we're based in Australia. The messages were sometimes slightly delayed (not by more than 30 seconds or so though)
I tend to find writing (or explaining) for other people and doing it for yourself blend. A lot.
The old adage that you don't truly understand something unless you can explain it to someone else holds particularly true with tech writing. When I'm writing to communicate something to someone else, I'm also helping myself understand the topic better. It's win-win.