greenthinks

Ryan Stewart (great blogger and Adobe evangelist) recently blogged about his trouble with Google Reader:

I just screwed up. I accidentally marked all of my Google reader items as read when what I intended to do was mark a specific folder as read. If this was a desktop application I could hit undo and I’d back up, have all of my data the way I want it, and be ready to read all of the delicious feeds I’ve been missing this week. But Google Reader is a web application, so I can’t do that, I’m just SOL.

This is actually just a problem with Google Reader, and not with web apps in general. In fact, many of Google’s applications make wonderful use of Undo. I was alerted to this fact by a talk that Aza Raskin (the late Jeff Raskin’s son) gave at Google, called the Death of the Desktop. He talks about “Are you sure” messages and why they were so problematic. Raskin explains what we all know instinctively, that when you have initiated a task any message that is trying to warn you away is going to be ignored as you are trying to complete your task. Over time we begin to develop muscle memory to just click OK. What works much better is realize that it is only after you have completed your task that you then may want to not have done it in the first place. This is why Gmail’s status messages that double as Undo controls work so well. Just selected 20 messages and marked them as junk? Gmail gives you the option to Undo. Just changed the labels on your work messages from “work” to “from mom?” Gmail lets you undo. As Raskin points out, though, some other Google apps need to get on board this train as well (he uses Calendar, Stewart is frustrated with Reader). For my money, this is how web apps should work, at least whenever they can. Anyone know what technical limitations on this feature might be?

Khoi Vinh, of NYTimes.com, writes the absolute best article on the new Apple-made cell phone that everyone and their grandmother seems to think is being announced/released at MacWorld Expo on Tuesday.

Vinh talks about how he has been planning on replacing his Palm Treo 650 with whatever Apple decides to release in the mobile phone arena:

In fact, when I think of that passel of features in terms of what a design tyrant like Jobs might release, it seems somewhat unlikely. Very unlikely. I mean, think about it: does it seem remotely possible that Steve Jobs would release a phone that’s a browser, an application platform, a camera, a PDA, an email client and an iPod? Would you bet money that he would? That kind of modal schizophrenia seems like it would be a clear affront to his sensibilities, and none of this even addresses whether the phone will sport a keyboard. I’d be happy if I’m wrong, but can we really expect a phone with a keyboard from the Barnum-like genius who gave us an iPod without a screen?

It’s a great piece – go read it.

So I’m trying out the new Google Calendar, which does work yet in Safari (Apple, get going on those Web 2.0 improvements!). I’m running it in Firefox and hitting up against a pretty irritating Firefox behavior: When you hold down the mouse button in Firefox for macs (like if you are dragging to create an event or dragging an event around), it pops up the right click menu.

Now, that does make some sense, because Macs don’t by default have a right click button and some people would not otherwise know how to access the right click menus, but there should certainly be a way to turn it off.

Does anyone know how to turn it off?

Update: I figured this one out myself, thank you very much…

The answer? A setting you can reach in Firefox by using the “about:config” function (for all your newbies, that’s type about:config in the Address Box and hit Return/Enter). If you search for “dom”, you will see an entry called “dom.disable_open_click_delay” with a default integer value of, I think, 1000. I changed it to 5000 and now have no problems dragging all sorts of stuff around in Google Calendar. Wonderful!

Another Update: So it appears that I was entirely wrong. The previously mentioned entry in the Firefox config has no effect on the issue I was dealing with. The reason Google Calendar started working was because Google modified their site’s code. Ah well, still looking for a solution for this behavior on Firefox for Mac.

Final Final Update: I just tried this again (holding down the mouse button over a web page in Firefox on Mac) and found that the functionality has either been disabled or completely removed in Firefox 2.0 RC1. Wonderful! Case closed.

I love Firefox. On Windows I use it for 97% of all my browsing, with IE 7 beta occupying the other 3% (if it was a choice between IE6 and anything else, I would choose anything else). One of the most helpful extensions for those of us in the “real world” is the View in IE extension. Once this is installed you can right click on any page in Firefox and click View in IE and voila! instant opening of IE with that exact page. No cutting, no pasting, no mess.

Something like this would be really useful on the Mac as well. While Firefox on Mac has been getting steadily better, there are many times when I want to open something specifically in Safari and an extension that passes the URL to Safari would be great. I could Applescript it, but FF does not have AppleScript support, as least not as of yet.

So, any extension devs up to the challenge?

UPDATE: Check the comments for the solution. I checked—it works.

Dave Winer, who is now using a mac for many things, is having some trouble with the latest release of Firefox, version 1.5 (rc2):

I’m using the old version of Firefox on my laptop, and it confirms my impression that they took a feature out of the browser in the latest release that I want back.

If you single click on the URL in the address field, the whole thing is selected. That’s the old, correct behavior. The new behavior is to give you a caret and make you manually select all the text. But it’s so easy to select part of the URL if that’s what you want (when exactly do you want that, btw). As a blogger selecting URLs in that bar is on the path to my linking to something, and I fight against anything that makes that path longer. The Firefox guys just did that. Why?

I figured out the solution. It turns out the Mozilla guys did not totally alter the functionality Dave is talking about. Rather they just swtiched the default. In versions of Firefox prior to 1.5 there was an entry in the config (about:config) called “browser.urlbar.ClickSelectsAll,” which was by default set to True. The only change in 1.5 was to set it as default to False. Not sure why that makes sense to them, but in any case Dave, all you need to do in 1.5 is change that back to True and you’re on your way.

Yesterday Microsoft made some pretty big announcements, and while much of the web does not seem to understand their significance, at least some of the stuff they showed off yesterday is getting some real buzz. Only problem, there is no stream of the announcement available from Microsoft’s web site. We know that one exists, since Scoble was watching it internally. Microsoft, please open it up to the rest of us?

Maybe it has something to do with Dave Winer’s comments on the presentation…

Just a quick post to say that I tried using Jotspot Live tonight to help my college-age sister with a paper, and it kept throwing up errors everytime we both tried editing. They weren’t even English errors, just some jibberish about connection lost or something.

Ah well, we switched back to Writeboard and things moved quite well, though she has to learn the Textile system that 37sig uses (a post on that is coming real soon – I promise) and it does not support simultaneous editing, but at least its system does not behave like Alpha software.