unraveled

July 2003 Archive

Dear Columbus

By the time you read this, I’ll be completely moved out and living with my parents in Pennsylvania. I’ll be staying with them for about a month and a half until I move to London for grad school.

It’s been great knowing you over the past five years. We shared so many great experiences, and I met some wonderful people through you. I realize I barely knew you, but I had a great opportunity before me that I didn’t want to miss. It was time for a change.

I sincerely hope that we will continue to be friends. Thank you for everything.

Regards,
Joshua

Recent Updates

Recent updates to unraveled:

Safari Float Bug

Here’s a Safari bug I’ve known about for a while but only recently documented. I’m mentioning it because I couldn’t find a comparable bug on Mark Pilgrim’s Safari page. The same CSS is used for my comment form, where I noticed the bug.

Independent Days

John Gruber recently wrote a long ramble about earning money as an Independent web publisher. He makes a lot of good points. Notably, that there’s a lot of great content on the independent web that’s worth money, a lot people wouldn’t mind seeing some of that money, and advertising, the way in which many can make that money, works.

I have two concerns about advertisements on the independent web that are difficult for me to get past.

  1. You don’t have absolute control over what ads are shown on your site. John pointed out over email that you can blacklist advertisers you don’t want, but what about the advertisements that end up on your site? Can anyone say with full assurance that all of the Google ads appearing on their site are from legitimate sources? Can Google guarantee that evil isn’t going to happen because of ads appearing on your website? I doubt that’s mentioned in their terms of service.
  2. They can potentially make otherwise beautiful websites, such as John’s, look horrible. If they blended into the design, or even better, were part of the design, I would be much more accepting of them. The Mirror Project is a great example of a site that has ads which are creatively integrated with the site’s design.

Until someone creates an ad service that doesn’t compromise my ethics or design, I’m not giving in.

An Interview with Ethan Diamond

Oddpost debuted last year to a great fanfare in the web design community. With its desktop-quality experience and simple design, this web-based email application was unlike anything anyone had ever seen.

I had the opportunity to interview Ethan Diamond, President and co-founder of Oddpost, about this amazing web application.

Joshua Kaufman: I love the clean and simple interface of Oddpost. What’s your design strategy?

Ethan Diamond: Our strategy is to make the interface invisible, to make the mail data itself the interface. So, we started with the basic three-pane layout familiar to users of Outlook, Eudora, ccMail, and so on, and then we systematically eliminated every non-data pixel from the screen. For example, if a message header is bold, you know that the message has not been read. You don’t also need to see an icon of a closed envelope next to that header, and you certainly don’t need to see a column of hundreds of open envelopes towering next to the messages you have read. Similarly, the indentation of folders does a fine job of conveying hierarchy — little ant trails connecting every folder don’t express any further information.

In addition to omitting the redundant, or just plain content-free pixels (what the information designer Edward Tufte calls “chartjunk”), we’ve also tried to keep all but the most commonly used functionality out of the visual interface. The default message composition window in Outlook contains over 70 things you can click on. In Oddpost, we present you with the ten or so functions you use 90% of the time, a blinking cursor, and that’s it. You of course still have access to the remaining rarely used 10%, but that functionality is neatly tucked away, available via menus, shortcut keys, or, if you prefer, permanently activated via preferences.

We believe all this visual paring is important for several reasons. First, the resolution of the computer screen is very low — just a fraction of a percent of the data density of the printed page — and thus every last pixel is extremely valuable. Second, many people now spend a big chunk of their workday sitting in front of their mail clients. As a result, little things can, over time, have a big impact on productivity. If, for example, an economical design allows for a few more message headers, lines of an email, or words of a subject to make it onto the screen, the time you save not scrolling all over the place can quickly add up. Finally, a simple design facilitates focused thought. We’ve succeeded if you’re thinking about what you’re reading and writing. We’ve failed if you’re forming an opinion about a toolbar’s 3D drop-shadow, or contemplating which of an army of buttons produces a smiley face.

This data-centric approach may sound painfully obvious, but consider that at 1024x768 (the most common resolution on the web), only about 30% of Yahoo! Mail’s inbox screen is devoted to your mail. The remaining 70% is not, as you might expect, all devoted to advertising. In fact, ads only account for about 10% of the screen real estate, and the remaining 60% is consumed by navigation, dead space and administrative debris. This low data density is one of the reasons why Yahoo! Mail is really only acceptable for occasional use. Our objective with Oddpost has always been to become your primary email client, the kind of application that you could reasonably use all day long.

JK: Oddpost has been criticized for not being cross-platform because it requires Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher for Windows. Are there any plans to include more browsers?

ED: Shortly after Doc posted his denouncement, Evan Williams, creator of Blogger, responded:

…I don’t get it. I can see how it’s annoying if you can’t use something you’ve heard is cool. But it’s not evil. I’m all for cross-platformness, but I also don’t see the harm if someone wants to take advantage of some kick-ass functionality that exists in IE5W and no where else. If they didn’t, the product just wouldn’t exist (or would exist in a less-interesting way) and no one would benefit from the cool functionality. Interesting, you don’t hear these complaints if a piece of software is platform-exclusive but not delivered in a web browser, which is really an arbitrary technical point. If Oddpost is evil, why isn’t iTunes, or HomeSite?

Evan is obviously a very wise and excellent human being, because he hits on the key point: Oddpost is not a web page, it’s a software application. Web pages, whether devoted to totally pajama-less coed pajama parties or The Declaration of the Rights of Man, present information, and there is a good and widely held belief that information should be available to everybody. Fortunately for this principle, it’s not all that difficult, nor is it particularly expensive, to make a web page available to anyone, regardless of their platform choice. Software applications, on the other hand, are tools, and it’s absurd to apply the web’s freedom of information standard to them. Moreover, software applications, with all the incredible sophistication that that label implies, require tremendous cost and effort to develop for any single platform. For web applications like Oddpost, W3C standards mitigate, but absolutely do not negate this truth. This is a point we often have to make, but never to anyone with even a modicum of cross-browser web application experience.

So, given the challenges of application development, we made a very simple business decision: we chose to target the platform with 95% of the market. If, in some infinitesimal way, this choice bolsters Microsoft’s browser monopoly, that’s unfortunate, but Oddpost is a for-profit business, not a monument to justice. We don’t hate Macs, Opera, or standards, and most of us don’t even worship Satan. But market forces dictate our behavior. It makes no sense to exhaust half our development resources catering to 5% of the market. Until the Patron Saint of DHTML Development drops off the briefcase full of money,* we’ll continue to focus on making the best possible product for the majority of people on the web.

*Saints may drop the briefcase off at Oddpost, Inc. 609 Pacific Ave, SF, CA 94133

JK: Oddblog, where you “prattle on incessantly about bug fixes, feature additions and all things Oddpost,” is always informative and enjoyable to read — an uncommon combination for support weblogs. Why Oddblog and why the humor?

ED: Well, before the blog I was busy putting inappropriate comments in our code and unnecessarily lengthy entries in our bug database, so the first reason for Oddblog is to confine this noise to a more suitable locale. It’s also turned out to be an excellent marketing tool. The blogging community deeply appreciates the concept of reading as an activity you perform when you have absolutely nothing better to do, and our subject matter fits that bill perfectly. The result is a blog that drives a surprising amount of traffic back into the site. Finally, the blog is a much better way of communicating with our subscribers than sending out mass email. Reading ahead, I see that this last point provides a nice segue into your next question:

JK: What’s next for Oddpost?

ED: Businesses who want to run their own Oddpost web mail server in conjunction with an existing IMAP server will be happy to know that that product just entered beta and is available at www.deerfield.com. Humans who could care less about mail servers will be happy to know that as of June 18, you can read all of your favorite news and blogs from right within Oddpost. Rather than waste time each day clicking on a bunch of bookmarks, half of which take you to sites that haven’t posted any new content since your last visit, you can instead sit back, check your mail, and get all the latest stories from the BBC, Wired, Slashdot, Salon, Scripting News, Oddblog of course… the list is endless. (The geeks in the audience will know that I’m talking about RSS aggregation, and hopefully understand why I waited until the third sentence to drop this acronym.) Anyway, we believe that news and email go together perfectly. After all, the most common thing you do with an article, besides read it, is send it along to a friend, and in Oddpost that’s now as easy as clicking the forward button. You can definitely expect to see much deeper applications of this technology from us in the near future. Thanks Joshua!

Ethan Diamond is President and co-founder of Oddpost, Inc.

Google Exposed User Data

I attempted to access Google’s AdSense website this morning at approximately 10:15 AM EST. The first three or so times I attempted to access the site, I received an error page stating that there had been a server error and I should try again in 30 seconds. A few minutes later, I reloaded the page and was somehow automatically logged into someone else’s account. I don’t use a shared computer, and the account I was viewing belonged to someone outside of United States (I live in Ohio). I was able to view their account information including their address, password and AdSense earning report. A few minutes later when I reloaded the page, I was automatically logged out and directed to the AdSense homepage.

A Better Library Login

Columbus Metropolitan Library is a fantastic library. In fact, they were rated the #2 library in the U.S. in 2002. Their website has a great feature that I use frequently which allows library users to reserve titles from their catalog online. Those titles can then be picked up at my local library branch, just a few blocks north of my apartment. But there’s a small problem.

The problem is that every single time I reserve an item or log into my library account, I have to enter my library card number. There is no “remember me” checkbox on the About You login page. (Many browsers have a password manager that will ask to save login information. Unfortunately, since the library set the library card number (user ID) input to type="password", the browser can’t recognize the user ID/password couple.) From an email form, I mentioned to them that a remember me function would be easy to implement, offered my free services and left my phone number in case they wanted to contact me. They did call me back and tell me that they appreciated my comments and would take them into consideration in future redesigns.

Months went by but still no remember me. I decided it was time for that to change. By using the same JavaScript that I use on my weblog, I created a demo About You login page that contains a remember me function. It took me about an hour.

I emailed the URL to them, and told them to use any or all of the code. Since they called me last time I emailed them, I assume they take all comments seriously. Hopefully they’ll take this comment seriously enough to implement it on their site, and I can live knowing that I made thousands of library users happy with one hour’s work.

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