Dave Dash › Likes

Totally brilliant idea. I write my own bad html mockups in a text editor or whatever IDE I'm playing with at the time, but a tool to ease this process would mean I could get on to abandoning the half-finished project much sooner than usual. :-) - Slippy "WildBeard" Lane

Um, isn't that what Balsamiq does?? - Cyndy

Please god no, don't create another "doesn't need to generate good html" code generator. srsly - Jason Wehmhoener

Well, as for the mockups, there is really great Firefox extension called Pencil. You should try it. - Mladen Srdić

using Cappuccino, an open source framework that makes it easy to build desktop-caliber applications that run in a web browser? - huixing

Paul, have you checked out Axure http://www.axure.com/? I've typically used Visio or resorted to whiteboards/paper as they are easier to edit. - Jauder Ho

Jason, I would be fine with it not generating html at all. As for Balsamiq and some of the others, the idea is actually that it would look more like the final product instead of less. Photoshop gets fonts wrong and stuff because it isn't a web browser, and yet people still keep using it, so it seems that it must have some advantage over the other tools. - Paul Buchheit

Photoshop has two major advantages, multiple uses and precision. Photoshop can be used for more than just web mockups. One person can achieve multiple goals with Photoshop while a mockup tool just makes mockups. The second advantage is the mockups look great in presentations because the author has complete control. Photoshop mockups aren't real they're hyper-real. - Kevin D. White

Are mockups that look exactly like the finished product even desirable? I'm reminded of the "Napkin Look & Feel" (http://napkinlaf.sourceforge.net/#Overvi...) - Laurence Gonsalves

Depends whether your goal is to sketch and idea or create a final design. For the latter, you really do want it to be pixel perfect. For the former, you want a "wireframe" or whatever the cool kids call it these days. - ⓞnor

What ⓞnor said. For "wireframes" a whiteboard is fine, but eventually you want pixel-perfect designs. - Paul Buchheit

Paul, you should check out Denim, http://dub.washington.edu:2007/denim... - imabonehead

Paul have you tried Fireworks, that's what our designers use. - Michael

http://www.balsamiq.com I got this link from Cooper U boards a while back, and a lot of my co-workers have found it very useful. While it's not pixel perfect, it allows for really quick mock ups with the idea that the design of the end product will be done by actual designers. - Sam Ee

http://www.balsamiq.com/product... That's a better link. The demo video sold me on the idea. - Sam Ee

Second attempt: http://friendfeed.com/e... - Paul Buchheit

I've been looking for something like this for years. Balsamiq is definitely a good start, but I feel like there's not quite enough depth yet. Has anyone had luck with stencils like the ones found at http://graffletopia.com/ (for Omni Graffle)? - Sutee Dee

pixel perfect? The web isn't print. Complete control over the rendering environment is an illusion. Don't submit to it! - Andy Bakun

Paul, have you checked out Axure RP? - Jauder Ho

http://gomockingbird.com/ - Neil

Vi is pretty good. You just write some text and point a browser at it. - Cliff Gerrish

Try wireframing and prototyping apps - I am not sure if output is rendered at browser level though. Protoshare.com, jumpchart.com, productplanner.com - TrafficBug

so, your time is valuable than creating a server farm when scability become a problem for your project? - Emre Yılmaz

Generally speaking, yes. - l.m.orchard

So this is how Terminator gets its start. - imabonehead

So far as I know there is only one incident of someone being killed by an industrial robot. It was an arc welder, and the person stood in the wrong place at the wrong time. - DGentry

Dude...that IS scary. - Rahsheen ™, Coach Rah

That bot has mad handles - Rodfather

When it can do this: http://www.youtube.com/watch... I'll be impressed. - Robin Barooah

WTF O_O - Danny Minick

I could totally do all that, but I don't wanna. - Louis Gray

OMG!!! It's over. Humans, RUN! - Alex 'BuckyBit' Covic

Robots scare me more than clowns. - MR

Good - Mo Kargas

I, for one, welcome our robot over...Oh nevermind. - Kevin Arth

that reminds me of my cockatoo.... play with your toy and then when you're done, just drop it on the floor. - Lindsay

Could we defend ourselves by running a ddos attack against them? - Laurent

Why so complicated as a ddos attack, all you need it to pull the plug ;-) - lelapin

Those guys do have batteries ;) - Laurent

I assume by now - a couple hours later - they have found a way to charge themselves with nuclear power. Probably they are assembling one another and upgrading as we type. Doomsday. #robotsex - Alex 'BuckyBit' Covic

On a Mac I take it. In windows, Ctrl+Q does nothing. - Mohamed J

Third comment from the bottom at http://forums.macosxhints.com/archive... might be applicable to Firefox. I'm not on a Mac to verify. - Mohamed J

Have you tried customizing this setting in OS X System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts ? - Alex Barbara

The whole notion of that applications like the browser (or your computer) are routinely "started" and "stopped" is not user-friendly. One does want to be able to do that, but for many it's much less common than the undesirable situation where you need to reset (i.e. quit/restart) because the app is bloating. Session restore tries to get around this, but it's still duct-taped on, hence... more... - j1m

Just download the source, make the small change you need, and recompile! :) - Gabe

@j1m make your computer suspend-able instead of power shutdown, you won't need that start/stop anymore... besides, I hear complaints about problem of start/stop paradigm mostly from computer-illiterates which are main cash cow for Apple Inc. so I have no wonder -- you can't teach them anythign anyway, so let'em suffer with Macs and Ipods ;) - A.T.

I'm complaining about the start/stop paradigm. Are j1m and I computer illiterates? - ⓞnor

Firefox, unlike other apps on the Mac, wasn't honoring the keyboard shortcuts that Mac OS lets you set. ⌘Q may be different; I haven't tried. I ended up writing an extension to redefine some of the keyboard shortcuts. Bleh. - Amit Patel

@e3r well, you don't complain about turning engine key in your car on and off all the time, do you? you don't blame light switch for necessity to turn on and off your whole adult life... but the notion of starting and stopping program makes you complaining, huh? - A.T.

I agree with j1m that the notion of opening and closing apps is bogus. Opening and closing “files” is also bogus. Palm OS was nice. I do like Firefox session restore. Mac's Quick Look is another bandaid. - Amit Patel

silpol, I'm frequently annoyed by having to turn my car on and off. In this case the bigger issue is that I accidentally exited Firefox -- I've never accidentally turned off my car, because they made that an appropriate separate action from shifting, steering, etc. - Paul Buchheit

People frequently try to turn their cars on when they're already on though. :-) Prius owners (and presumably owners of other pushbutton hybrids) can easily turn their car off when they mean to turn it off because the action is identical and reversible. - Kevin Fox

Another option is to simply set browser.tabs.warnOnClose to true, since I'm assuming you'll most likely have multiple tabs open anyway - Aviv

Do you mean Apple-Q? - Sam Pullara

Yes, Apple-Q. I thought it as called "option", though now I notice that there is a different key labeled "option", and other people seem to be calling it "command". - Paul Buchheit

Is there a problem with starting it again? If you use the session feature, you shouldn't lose your place or anything. And Aviv's suggestion is a good one. - Tanath

If starting/stopping an app was instantaneous, that would be fine too. - Amit Patel

Just did it again! I actually have browser.tabs.warnOnClose set, but it doesn't seem to do anything, possibly because I also have the "save session" option set (but as Amit points out, that's far from instant, and of course things are never quite the same when they come back). - Paul Buchheit

This any use? http://www.macosxhints.com/article... - Slippy "WildBeard" Lane

I just don't use tabs. I open every browser window in a separate process, then I don't have to worry about that. - Gabe

I finally found a workaround to this horrible nightmare. For me, it didn't work to set a global keyboard shortcut in OS X that would change the "Quit Firefox" keybinding, command-Q would continue to do its damage. It also didnt' work for me to turn on browser.tabs.warnOnQuit and set it to true (in about:config or preferences). What did work is install Tab Mix Plus and force it to prompt me whenever FF exited before it saved my session. - Huy Zing

Paul, have you seen this? http://www.mydigitallife.info/2008... Comment #19 looks helpful. Haven't tried it myself though, sorry. - Diego Barros 

I worked for 5 years for one of the major obesity researchers and saw a ton of data on many areas associated with obesity. It's fascinating and a wide-open field for inquiry. - Heather

Scary is what that is. - AJ Kohn

This seems like an inevitable consequence of our TV- and marketing-driven lifestyles, an ever-longer work week, and ever-weirder preprocessed foods at the grocer. Staying in shape simply requires more concentration than it ever did before. As a country we're no longer using our muscles on the job, eating plain foods, or getting a good nights' sleep. - Daniel J. Pritchett

I was born in 1981 so this animation pretty much tracks my entire life. It's strange to see how this epidemic seems to have chiefly occurred over the last quarter century. - Daniel J. Pritchett

Another important thing to note is that we as a people aren't culturally prepared for the new preponderance of obesity. It's never been this hard to be self-aware of one's own eating and exercise habits and to carve out the time and energy to completely repudiate convention and push one's body back to a pre-Marty McFly state of health. - Daniel J. Pritchett

Your parents and grandparents are no better prepared to handle the new culture of obesity than you are. When they grew up plain food and manual labor were the order of the day and most people just didn't need to plan their own health to the degree we are forced to today. - Daniel J. Pritchett

Certainly useful list for more than few people. - Daniel Schildt

For an engineering magazine in 2008, targeting these instructions at only males strikes me as surprisingly sexist. I don't read PM - is this its normal tone? - Jutta Degener

Reminds me of: "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. " - Robert A. Heinlein - Stuart Woodward