Productivity

Styling tables presents lots of fun infodesign opportunities that are largely still untapped. Backbars is of course an example of that.

At a recent project, I stumbled on another subtle styling that I’m descriptively calling highlows from ignorance of precedents. Here it is, on the left part:

The idea is to highlight the first occurrence of a row value and to lowlight the next occurrences, until a new row value comes up and then the high switch is turned on again.

It’s a simple, useful way to help scan column values in category tables.

Backbars on social link-sites is a GreaseMonkey script to turn the headlines and comments of social link-sites into ambient bar charts (of votes/diggs/views/users…) It works on Reddit, Delicious, Digg, Hacker News, and Stack Overflow (and MetaFilter now!).

The idea is to give you subtle non-verbal clues to improve your browsing experience almost subconsciously. The backbars don’t replace the count they represent, what they do is convey you its magnitude unobtrusively, and, crucially, compare that magnitude to those around it. So you can now see, almost without thinking, that, say, some comment is popular, but that there’s a comment around that’s twice as popular.

Once you have it, just start browsing at your favorite social link-site: Reddit, Delicious, Digg, Hacker News, and Stack Overflow.




It’s the first release but it’s very usable already, I hope.

I hope you enjoy and find it useful, please let me know what you think of it in the comments.

An experiment in improving the reading interface of the world’s best news magazine. Very early days. Check it out at elzr.com/reader.

Right now it’s just a glorified table of contents but even that I think helpful. It includes the abstract of every article or it’s first line —in my experience The Economist’s pithy, playful titles can be under-descriptive. And there are also backbars behind every title, giving you an ambient, non-verbal hint to the article’s size. Both features are there to fix something that got lost in the transition from print to web.

I’ve read The Economist for many years now, almost since the beginning from the web (I subscribed for a year when it was behind a paywall, the only time I’ve paid for content). And almost as long, I’ve been struggling with it’s interface. I guess it’s not that bad for casual readers, but for longtime junkies it can be much improved. Which is what I’ll try to do in the coming days.

Changelog:
.3 version, 16 June 2009: BIG changes. See http://elzr.com/posts/03-release-of-the-economist-reader for full details. Read the whole magazine in a single page, columns, much better design (sections separators!), and… flags!


.12 version, 14 June 2009: Fixed
.11 version, 13 June 2009: Prettier version.


.1 version, 8 June 2009: Kicking it off.

Wikipedia Backbars is a GreaseMonkey script to add histogram backgrounds to Wikipedia tables. It’s a great way to make tables more graphic, to visualize the patterns in the excellent, but usually very dry tables in Wikipedia.

It’s early days yet but it’s already usable enough to give it a spin.

To install it just download it from its UserScripts page. You need to have GreaseMonkey (version 0.8 or more), a Firefox extension, installed first.

I love his phrase. In 20 something words he nails down the present and future I want to contribute to, belong to.

What structure would you give to Mexico’s 2006 GDP, the wealth it generated in a year? Just gather your prejudices, take a guess, and try to put it into numbers.

One painful thing about translating between two languages is that you usually have to specify a direction. That’s bollocks. Life’s already too complicated to worry about whether you’re translating from English to Spanish or the other way around.

In that spirit I created the str (“Super/Simple/Synchronous TRanslation”) YubNub command. You specify, in any order, 2-letter codes for the two languages you want to translate between and the text you want to translate. str avoids the direction decision by doing both at once, each one presented in an individual vertical frame. This is not only much faster in practice, it’s more unconscious and habit-friendly.

You can try it right here! (en stands for ENglish, es for ESpañol=Spanish)

You can see more instructions and the 2-letter codes at str’s man page.

YubNub, for the uninitiated, is “the (social) command line for the web”—a social webapp to use (and create!) handy commands that search your favorite websites and do a whole nother bunch of wonderful things. The simplest way to use it is from their homepage but there are a ton of ways to install it. Installing it in the location bar, as I once explained here, is in my opinion one of the coolest.

William W. Lewis’s The Power of Productivity (PDF and HTML versions available), a summary of his same-titled book^AM, has only grown on me since I read it a month ago. It’s main thesis, that wealth hinges on productivity, has come to resonate inside me like few things have of late.

It was, for instance, what lead me to finally accept the possibilities of technology and, shortly thereafter, to naively proclaim I’d one day have a massively profitable company with less people than my then-age. The whimsical limit, I believe, will force such a company to be always awake, always flexible, always smart, always doing technological judo. It would force it to value people in a way we’ve barely explored at all.