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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.