Today I launch a US spelling version of my aluminium aluminum resource. This sees a little flag widget added to the sidebar of the site to flick between the different spellings of the versions.
Why make this change? Well research suggests that this spelling is more popular than the IUPAC standard. And the more people the resource can help… the better. You can check out the classic version here, and the US version here.
I posted an analysis of Live.com’s search interface not so long ago. And today on the official “beta-tag-removal” day I see many of the criticisms I made corrected in ways I suggested.
Lets first compare the looks. Here is the old:
And the new:
There are a few striking differences I think you will agree. Lets review what I criticised.
1. Live.com is styled not to underline the links. This is not really a problem for identifying the links, they are still pretty clear since they are marked in blue. But I think it may add some extra whitespace between the title of the webpage in the results and the description associated with the page.
>> Now the links are underlined just as they are on Google. The extra whitespace still seems to be there though.
2. The clarity of the tabbing system they have used at the top there could also be improved. At the moment it is not only not clear what they are, but also that you are on one of them (Web).
>> It is now much clearer that you are on Web which has a lighter shade for its background.
3. They have a footer at the bottom of the page that is visible since the search uses the infinite scroll bar so you feel like you are looking at a results viewer rather than just viewing the results.
>> They have dropped the infinite scroll bar! At least for the Web tab by default they have. It seems to be enabled for the image search. So with this of course the footer can be lost from “above the fold”.
One bug they seem to have picked up rather than corrected is they now have a space before the name of the file the page is from. E.g. “www.google.com/support/talk/bin/ answer.py?answer=24075″. I am not sure what the point of that is, but it certainly doesn’t make anything clearer for me.
I finished by concluding that the whole thing had a pretty gormless look, which with the changes they have made seems to have gone. I am liking this search facility now, competition is of course always good for the consumer.
Univillage is the new social networking site on the scene standing as the only competitor for Facebook specifically for the college and university niche. A source has informed me that they received an email from Univillage when they hadn’t signed up, which gave them a password. Upon signing in with the details this student found a full account complete with someone else’s details.
This is clear incompetance on the part of Univillage. This is what must have happened:
And when suspicious Elsie logs in with her email address and this password she finds all the details of Andrea. That is all the details… she is actually logged in as Andrea. I have contacted Andrea for comment on this story (at this time she is unaware of the issue) which will be published here when it is received.
Maybe Facebook wasn’t so bad after all?
For obvious reasons all names have been changed. This article is published with the permission of Elsie, and under the premise that it will help avoid more privacy exploits by the service in the future.
Updates - See bottom.
Everyone has seen Google Maps. That lovely AJAX interface that reinvented online mapping. Dragging maps… it is unbeatable. I had never actually used the maps for directions until last week when I used them for a trip to France. Somethings in the system were great and very Googly. But there were major flaws. Lets just say I got lost a few times.
What’s Good
The layout of the maps for printing is very neat. They offer the option of having little maps by the side of the instructions, and the small images that it uses for left and right are very clear. Overall it just looks nice. It is plain and simple. Unfortunately that is where the positives end.
What’s Bad
The instructions are not nearly sophisticated enough for actually using. Or at least for long distance travel I thought. As you drive in your car they just can’t be used to get you to your destination. The phrase “Turn left at such-and-such a road” is very common. Well the positioning of road names, at least in Europe, is almost exclusively such that you can’t see the name of the road until you are on it. And even then it is difficult to see it if you are trying to drive at the same time. You definately need a few observant assitants to be looking for the typically small signs that indicate road names. It is clearly not practical to park at each turning or junction to survey each of the road names that can be chosen from at the junction. Instead it needs to say “Take the 6th left” or “Take the left signposted as towards such-and-such“. Then you could use the instructions to get to where you wanted to go.
There is no cumulative column for milage provided by the service. So you can’t glance down to see that you have done 100 miles or whatever. You would have to manually add up all the previous components to get that figure. So working out how far you have progressed in relation to the total distance you have got to travel is not easy. The distances seem to be in the units standard to the country that you start in. Moving from England to France you move from miles to km, but it stays as miles throughout the journey. I’d really like a choice of being able to display one of the other throughout or display both in seperate columns. When you are in a country where all the mileage (or kilometreage) information on signs is in a different unit to those on your instructions it doesn’t make things easy. It would be nice if Google could offer choice in this area.
The printout gives time values for significant steps (more than 1 minute) but it doesn’t say how this is calibrated. I don’t know if it takes into account the grade of the road, and the speed limit on it when it works this out. It certainly should do. There should be some information about this conversion clearly on the instructions. When it says “289 mi (about 6 hours 28 mins)” I would like it to say what speeds it has assumed for that.
The lack of sophistication is really important when it comes to things like vias, avoiding toll roads, taking the shortest route over the “quickest” etc. Google Maps doesn’t offer any of these things. For vias you have to just input the locations in seperate sittings, which is really not what I want to have to do. If you dont want to go on non toll roads getting a map out and plotting your own route is the only way.
And finally it is unpolished. I have never heard anyone call a roundabout a traffic circle before, but that is what the instructions insist on saying. Sometimes it will choke on the instruction and have an instruction that just says “Continue” which just splits up the distance for one step so you have to add up the bits yourself to find out how far you need to go on a particular road.
Solution: Maps 1.0
There is only one way round this right now. It is to use one of those old mapping 1.0 services to get your routes. Say Multimap or the AA. They have all the sophistication that you need to actually get from A to B. Although they aren’t fast loading, and they don’t have maps that you can drag or maps that seamlessly zoom they have much better services for directions than Google Maps at present. Trust me when you are lost in a foreign country the last thing you care about is if when you were printing out the route the map available was draggable. Ironically functionality over looks is what Google is famous for with their “ugly” homepage that is so so useful. But with their maps they have gone the other way.
A German language blog, GoogleWatchBlog, discusses the issue. Some commenters point out other problems with the maps, whilst others disagree with the points made here.
Gary Price of Ask.com points me to their mapping service. Whilst not available in Europe it’s US version offers some of the sophistication I wanted. It can do vias but its printed version, units options, toll/non-toll options, and actual nature of the directions is lacking.