Tiffany B. Brown

a mish-mosh of stuff

Link dump: July 31, 2006

I suspect, though that two four is not much of an actual ‘dump.’

Tor Mac OS X Installation instructions
More anonymous web surfing using Tor, Vidalia (a Tor GUI and Privoxy. (And the Torbutton extension for Firefox.)
Cultural differences in gameland
i18n and l10n of games based on cultural frameworks. [Hi-jacked from Rebecca's Pocket]
Screen Resolution and Page Layout
Jakob Nielsen gives the go ahead to ‘optimize’ your layout for a 1024-by-728 pixel resolution, but make it work with all.
  • http://www.rashidmuhammad.com Rashid Z. Muhammad

    Nielson has always been on that “liquid layout” trip, but I’ve been running at at least 1280×1024 for 5 or 6 years and found them annoying for every page except his. The extra amount of work incurred to reduce the breakage from graphical headers alone seems to make it a losing proposition. That is unless everyone adopts his swanky text header motif.

    He makes the point about people running at 1600×1200 not browsing full screen but I just don’t find that true from the many people that I know who use that resolution or higher – especially in these days of tabbed browsing and dual monitors. My point: This whole thing has been a non-issue for most designers for a while. Developers are a different story, but I never took that as his primary audience.

    Is it me or is he saying that everybody who makes more than 25K a year should have a 1600×1200 screen?

  • http://www.rashidmuhammad.com/ Rashid Z. Muhammad

    Nielson has always been on that “liquid layout” trip, but I’ve been running at at least 1280×1024 for 5 or 6 years and found them annoying for every page except his. The extra amount of work incurred to reduce the breakage from graphical headers alone seems to make it a losing proposition. That is unless everyone adopts his swanky text header motif.

    He makes the point about people running at 1600×1200 not browsing full screen but I just don’t find that true from the many people that I know who use that resolution or higher – especially in these days of tabbed browsing and dual monitors. My point: This whole thing has been a non-issue for most designers for a while. Developers are a different story, but I never took that as his primary audience.

    Is it me or is he saying that everybody who makes more than 25K a year should have a 1600×1200 screen?

  • http://www.tiffanybbrown.com/ tiffany

    I’ve seen graphical headers on liquid layouts that have worked. The trick is to make it a cut-out so that the background image rests on a background color. *Sigh* it’s easier shown than explained.

    He makes the point about people running at 1600?É‚Äî1200 not browsing full screen.

    It’s quite common for Mac users, actually. I only browse at full screen when using Win.

    And no, he’s saying everybody who makes more than $50K should have one…LOL. I agree about the productivity of a larger monitor though. Going from 17″ to 19″ at 1280×1024 was the best thing I could have done.

  • http://www.tiffanybbrown.com/ tiffany

    I’ve seen graphical headers on liquid layouts that have worked. The trick is to make it a cut-out so that the background image rests on a background color. *Sigh* it’s easier shown than explained.

    He makes the point about people running at 1600?É‚Äî1200 not browsing full screen.

    It’s quite common for Mac users, actually. I only browse at full screen when using Win.

    And no, he’s saying everybody who makes more than $50K should have one…LOL. I agree about the productivity of a larger monitor though. Going from 17″ to 19″ at 1280×1024 was the best thing I could have done.

  • http://www.rashidmuhammad.com/ Rashid Z. Muhammad

    You’re right, liquid headers can work, but it severely hampers what you can do and you are pretty limited to a static background color instead of an image. Which would really reduce the effectiveness of some layouts. If you know of a way to work around that (perhaps some sort of pseudo vectoring?) I’d really like to hear it.

    The window behavior is one of the things that I’ve always hated about the Mac OS. I appreciate the idea of optimizing the size of the window by not wasting window space, but that philosophy doesn’t translate as well to the web as – unlike a desktop application – the “optimal” width of a site is not a static value.

    He said $50K and then he went on to say that the overhead of an employee is equal to what they take home and to always make these productivity measurements based on the real cost and not the take home pay. That sounds like a 25K salary to me (25K take home plus 25K overhead).

    No disagreement from me on resolution either. There were two non-negotiable requirements for me accepting my current job: a 8-foot white board and a workstation with dual monitors running at 1600×1200.

    I think Nielson is great, and obviously he knows more about this stuff than me, but I’ve felt that some of his suggestions over the years have been pragmatically counterproductive to the evolution of the web.

  • http://www.rashidmuhammad.com Rashid Z. Muhammad

    You’re right, liquid headers can work, but it severely hampers what you can do and you are pretty limited to a static background color instead of an image. Which would really reduce the effectiveness of some layouts. If you know of a way to work around that (perhaps some sort of pseudo vectoring?) I’d really like to hear it.

    The window behavior is one of the things that I’ve always hated about the Mac OS. I appreciate the idea of optimizing the size of the window by not wasting window space, but that philosophy doesn’t translate as well to the web as – unlike a desktop application – the “optimal” width of a site is not a static value.

    He said $50K and then he went on to say that the overhead of an employee is equal to what they take home and to always make these productivity measurements based on the real cost and not the take home pay. That sounds like a 25K salary to me (25K take home plus 25K overhead).

    No disagreement from me on resolution either. There were two non-negotiable requirements for me accepting my current job: a 8-foot white board and a workstation with dual monitors running at 1600×1200.

    I think Nielson is great, and obviously he knows more about this stuff than me, but I’ve felt that some of his suggestions over the years have been pragmatically counterproductive to the evolution of the web.