Blog « Romain Vuillemot Website

I HATE TILT SHIFT

April 19, 2011 by Romain

Tilt-shift photography refers to the use of camera movements on small- and medium-format cameras, and sometimes specifically refers to the use of tilt for selective focus, often for simulating a miniature scene.

Example:

The Sandpit from Sam O’Hare on Vimeo.

Announcing Thunderbird Conversations

March 6, 2011 by Romain

Making Mozilla Thunderbird a step closer to GMail. Available as an add-on for Thunderbird > 3.3 (still at a beta stage).

Flickr

January 31, 2011 by Romain

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Thunderbird extensions collections

January 27, 2011 by Romain

Anyone can create and share a group of related add-ons for Thunderbird.

Discrete arrow

January 26, 2011 by Romain

A nice way to show both a direction and a stair level using just an arrow.

Misused Flash Ad overlay

December 18, 2010 by Romain

Not much to comment on this one..

Flash overlay can sometimes be fun and (positively) surprising. But they also may be (negatively) surprising and misused regarding website’s content. Especially news websites, where news updates may be automatically extracted from a wide range of information sources. And of course ads being 180° away from the right direction to choose.

Who is to blame for that?

iPhone overloaded apps folders

November 8, 2010 by Romain

What is the user supposed to do with so many apps in folders? Explore all of them to find the right app? Not using folders at all?

The difficulty is that apps are not all visible at the same time. Some are hidden within folders and not visible on the icon. Those icons are quite small, making them difficult to recognize and their text bellow is barely readable.

Furthermore, Apps notifications are tied to folders, making hard to guess which app is concerned by updates or new messages.

My life saver is the text search interface. But then I need to know exactly what I’m looking for, and if so, no room for spelling mistakes..

My Top 5 Thunderbird Add-ons

February 24, 2010 by Romain

I am a big fan of Thunderbird 3.0.1 (ThB3). It is a great piece of open-source software; and as every Mozilla project it has a very active add-ons community. Take a look at the official add-on list. This list is quite exhaustive.. So here is my Top 5 Thunderbird Add-ons:

#1 Nostalgy

Nostalgy 0.2.23 by Alain Frisch: it adds a command-line support to Thunderbird, for moving emails or jumping to a folder.

It makes non-repetitive task (such as sorting emails to different folders) quicker.
It allows to reach folders you don’t even know where they are because you have too many of them.
You can easily jump to folders even if they are collapsed (i.e. not visible).

#2 Quote Colors

Quote Colors 0.3 by Malte Ruecker: it displays message thread into colors. In other words, replace the >>> with a color regarding the conversation depth.

At a glance it displays how many replies there are in the conversation thread without visual overload.
You can focus on the content without looking to the >>> on the left side to get the conversation depth.

#3 ImportExportTools

ImportExportTools 2.3.2 by Wind Li: export/import emails from files or other mailbox systems.

Perfect if you have email quotas and want to free some space.
You can easily re-import mails if you get quota extensions

#4 Display Mail Route

Display Mail Route 0.3.1 by Jürgen Ernst: it adds a symbol (such as a country flag) regarding the route that took the email.

Very intuitive and compact way to detect spam/scams without visual overload.
Of course not enough to detect frauds, but one more indicator that does an IP lookup for you..

#5 AttachmentExtractor

AttachmentExtractor 1.3.5 by eviljeff : enhance email attachment extraction.

Provides a download shortcut to your favorite download folders.
Automatically renaming files to avoid replacing existing files.

#Future

I’ve been reviewing and playing around with lots of add-ons lately for the DLM 3.0 project. But even if most of them got good reviews/rates and were recommended by many people/websites, I just didn’t stick with them. That’s why in a future post, I will share my failed attempts, which can be as worthwhile as successful ones..

Youtube’s New Player Annoying Overlap

February 20, 2010 by Romain

YouTube has recently updated its video player, and replaced the HQ button with a Multi-Resolution (MR) button that displays a selection list with available resolutions (360p, 480p, 720p, etc.).

What really annoys me is the overlap between the MR list and the volume range when I quickly hover the MR button to acquire the volume button. This situation is very common when the mouse is on the right of the video and you want to change its volume. Here is screenshot of such a situation:

Overlap is annoying in general, and in this situation it makes me not to see the volume level or I need to wait the MR list to disappear (~couple of hundreds of milliseconds) to change the volume. Enough to be distracting.

A few simple design alternatives would overcome this annoying design flaw:

Restrict the MR list to its vertical space delimited by the MR bottom (360p) button (no more overlap with vicinity)
Add a (very small) waiting time before the MR list rolls out
Require users to click on the MR button to roll out the list
Change the button order (put the MR button leftmost)

The first alternative would be the simplest and quickest to implement. Other alternatives would require extra actions from users or change their habits. But would prevent any overlap.

I am astonished that such a flaw can appear on a major website (and even more suprised that it is not fixed, yet). This design flaw is also discussed in YouTube’ Bug Reports & Technical Issues forum thread. But don’t worry it won’t prevent you from watching a good NASA parody from The Onion

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