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IDENTITY IN THE BROWSER

One of the problems with web applications is that most of them need some kind of login / identity system in place before users can use them effectively, which usually requires the following (minimum) features:

1. The ability to create a user account on the web app
   
2. The ability to log into the web app with that user account
3. The ability to add / update / delete private information for that user account
4. To have all of the above stored securely
   

This system then has to be implemented on every single web app on the Internet, but because not everyone is the same, every web app will implement this differently and not always in the most secure way.

One of the solutions to this is OpenID, which attempts to offload the identity system onto a third party provider.  This means any web app which supports OpenID doesn't have to write the login / identity system as all of that is taken care of by the (trusted) third party provider.

Though it is a good idea, OpenID does have its problems and it also isn't the easiest system to explain to people, which may also explain its slow adoption. 

Aza Raskin (son of Jef Raskin) has posted an entry recently on his blog about a new feature he's been developing for Firefox, where instead of your identity being managed by a third party provider, it is managed by your local browser. 

From what I've read, it appears that all your user information is stored on your local machine in the browser (and potentially on OpenID servers).  When you first log into a web app, you decide what information to share with the server and Firefox takes care of the rest.

Some of the use cases on the wiki page sounds very interesting, especially the mass password reset, in the case of notebook theft as most people have cookies / saved password stored in their browsers. 

It will be exciting to see what happens to this in the upcoming months and I can see this getting quite popular if they get the implementation right. 

GOOGLE READER FAVICONS

Not sure when this came about but I was playing with Google Reader earlier today and looks like they now support favicons for feeds!

To enable, just click on the menu drop down on subscriptions and select "Use favicons" and you should be away!

Yay!

CALM AND CONSIDERED SOLUTIONS

One of the things I love about the iPhone is that it has a very easy way to switch the phone's ringer from "ring" to "silent".  It achieves this by having a little switch on the top left hand corner of the device which you can flick up, or flick down to select the state of the ringer. 

Below is the ringer set to the "ring" state, which rings the ringer and (if set) vibrates the phone. 

Below is the ringer sent to silent, which no longer rings the ringer and (if set) vibrates the phone. 

It's by far the fastest way I've seen on any phone to change the ringer to "silent".  Even on my beloved 8310 I had to perform the following steps to do this:

1. Hit the Menu button
   
2. Hit star "*" (to unlock the phone)
   
3. Hit the power button (to bring up the ringer profiles menu)
   
4. Hit the arrow key down once (to select the silent ringer profile)
   
5. Hit select
6. Hit the Menu button
   
7. Hit star "*" (to lock again)
   

Because the process for setting the phone to silent was quite long, I didn't find myself using it much, and because I didn't use it much, when it came time to have my phone on silent I never remembered to do so.  

Now I use the feature all the time.  I.e. at work when I'm at my desk, instead of leaving my phone on I now habitually flick the silent switch before I sit down, and as I leave I do the opposite.  I've been also finding myself doing the same thing in meetings and in movies too, almost without thinking.

I watched the Objectified documentary recently and found the following clip very enlightening on how Apple design their products (which I've seen reflected in the feature I highlighted above), especially the following sequence where Jonathan Ive makes the following quote.

It's one of those funny things.  You spend so much more time to make it less conspicuous and less obvious, and when you think about it, so many of the products you're surrounded by, they want you to be very aware of just how clever the solution was.

When the indicator comes on [on an Apple notebook], I wouldn't expect anybody to point to that as a feature. But at some level I think you're aware of a calm and considered solution that therefore speaks about how you're going to use it.  Not the terrible struggles that we as designers and engineers had in trying to solve some of the problems.

NEW CONTROL IN IPHONE 3.1?

I haven't noticed this before but I think I found a new control in the iPhone 3.1 upgrade:

I found it by going into the Photos application, selecting a photo and then tilting the screen horizontally.  I then clicked on the screen shot circled below, and got the screen shot above:

Fiddling around with the new control, it looks like it's a scrollable list, but it doesn't really make sense in this case as they aren't any more items to display off the screen.  The scrolling was also extremely laggy (I'm currently on a 3G), and this new control doesn't look to be implemented anywhere else.

Below is the default control when in the Mail application, which I think more than does the trick, and seems more consistent with the rest of the iPhone UI.

GOOGLE MAPS ADDS TRAFFIC FOR MELBOURNE

A bit late to be classified as news but woot!

"The traffic information on Google Maps comes from data provider Intelematics Australia and is sourced from data from other motorists.

"This means motorists provide information on current traffic conditions by setting their mobile phone up to share anonymous data."

Too bad (or is that luckily?) the iPhone can't run background apps.  

THE PERFECT SIZE FOR PERSONAL ELECTRONICS

I've owned quite a few mobile phones in my time, and they do blur together after awhile, but one phone which still stands out as the best phone I've ever owned was the phone I had during uni which was my Nokia 8310. 

It was probably one of the longest periods I've been with the same phone, but it was the combination it being a no nonsense straight to the point phone, and also being extremely small and light weight which kept me constantly buying new face plates for it every 6 months in an attempt keep it looking brand new for the (close to) 4 years I had it. 

It wasn't until one day it took one too many drops on the concrete that I had to find a replacement, and I did hunt around on the second hand market for another 8310 replacement but realistically replacing an old phone with yet another old phone wasn't the most appealing thing to me, which is a shame as to be honest as I never really found another phone I liked as much until I got my iPhone (but the iPhone is a smart phone and can't really be compared to a pure mobile phone like the 8310).

Another of my favourite possessions is my 2nd gen iPod Nano which (I think) runs in the same vein as the 6300 as it was a small and light, no nonsense, no lag, straight to the point music player which didn't pretend to be more than what it was suppose to be.

I (fortunately) still have my 2nd gen Nano, but my original 8310 was lost during a move, and I never really replaced it till recently a friend found her old 8310 and decided to donate it to me knowing how much I felt for my old 8310.

Below are some pictures of my recently acquired 8310 side by side with my 2nd gen Nano and I have to admit the similarities between their form factors are remarkably close, and I wonder if it's something inherent about that size which makes it seem like the perfect piece of personal electronics?

PETROL PRICE FLUCTUATIONS

I've never really paid attention before, but was told recently that when filling up on petrol I should always fill up on a Wednesday due to petrol price fluctuations which occurred during the week.

Since I heard that, I've been casually checking petrol prices and never really noticed a pattern, till I did some research and found some results from the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) website. 

Here is a chart from the site below:

DOMAIN AND GOOGLE REAL ESTATE

As per my previous tl;dr, here is another article in Australian IT which covers a different angle on why Domain is refusing to play nice with Google's new real estate mapping feature.  The money quote from John Brand (GM of Key Categories at Fairfax Media) being:

"If Google wanted to be a serious player, it would need to develop mobile applications [...] I think they need to do it pretty quickly [...] Sometimes I just don't understand Google at all." 

Here are some screenshots of the mobile application that Domain have for the iPhone:

TWITTER TRENDS

I haven't logged into twitter for awhile, so I've only just noticed the Trending Topics side bar

Kinda cool, kinda useless, but it reminded me of a more micro version of the Google Zeitgeist site.

I'm not one to speculate, but maybe this could be the first step in twitter's plans for turning a profit. 

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE PERSONAL COMPUTER

I was randomly browsing YouTube today and came across these two videos titled "How Windows REALLY Became The Market Leader".

I'm not sure when the videos were originally made, but I thought it provided a very nice snapshot of the beginnings of Microsoft and Apple.