Interact B.in

Themeforest’s Annoying and Unnecessary Catpcha on Login

I love the folks over at Envato, and for the most part think they do a great job with designin and developing their sites.

The biggest exception to this is that they require you to fill out a captcha field every time you login.  To make it worse, it’s one of those captcha fields that’s really tough to read and I often have to fill it out twice before I can login.

I’m sure they have security reasons for doing this, but it is an usability FAIL and should really be changed.

I Completely Support The Universal Blog Icon

I don’t think I’ve written about it before, but I am a big fan of the universal blog icon.  

If you don’t use it I suggest trying to with sites that need a generic blog icon.

Wording Confusion with Get Backup App for Mac

I love Get Backup for setting up my backup automations for my Mac.  It’s free, and if you don’t have a backup app you love, I suggest giving it a shot.

For those who haven’t used it before, it has an interface that displays all of your backups in a stacked interface so you see one backup at the top and a list of the other backups below.  Overall, it’s a pretty slick and intuitive interface.

I was recently confused though when I went to remove one of the synchronizations I had setup.  First off, I was looking for a delete button in some corner of the synchronization window but didn’t see one.  I looked through the edit menu and then the other main menus until I found Synchronize > Remove from List.

I was a little worried because I wasn’t sure what it was going to remove.  I assumed the project currently in view.

The confirmation text didn’t help either.  The wording “project” didn’t make sense because I didn’t know/remember that’s what each Synchronization was referred to.  Would have liked to have had the word Synchronization somewhere in the language.  I assumed project referred to all of my Synchronization setups.

Turns out that what I did worked and each Synchronization setup in Get Backup is referred to as a project.  

Would love to see some of the wording clarified, but still love the app and haven’t had any need to switch since I started using it.  Thanks BeLight Software!

Weirdness With Tumblr’s Publish Date Format

Tumblr has attempted, and in a lot of ways succeeded in using a “casual” format in how they refer to dates and what publishing status options they give you.

If you select “publish on…” it automatically sets the date to next tuesday, 10am (It actually sets it to whatever the day of the week tomorrow is).

I like the time format of just 10am.

The weird thing is if you set it to a publish on specific date, you can’t just type 10am, you have to type 10:00am for it to save correctly.

Weird.

Adium Tutorial - How to Automatically Connect to IRC Group Chat on Login

I have to use Adium as an IRC tool and whenever I use it I have to join a number of channels.  I knew that it was possible for me to be able to auto-join instead of having to do it manually.  Here’s how it’s done:

1. Join the group manually (Command + Shift + J on mac)
2. Bookmark the group (Contact > Add Group Chat Bookmark)
   
3. Then go to the chat and bring up the info window (Command + Shift + I)
4. In the info window for the chat click on the Advanced Settings tab and check the box for Automatically join on connect.
   

That’s it! Just a few simple steps and if you’re like me you’ll save a lot of time having to join groups on login.

For more info on working with Adium check out their help section.

Confusing Email Settings Help Text in New Basecamp

Basecamp allows you change your email address for each Basecamp account you are a part of.  This is different than your Basecamp ID email address, which is used by default for each account.

When you go to change your email address for a single Basecamp account, you get the following help text.

The language “all Basecamp” makes it sounds like updating this email address will affect all of your Basecamp accounts, not just this one.  I feel like it should read “Send all Basecamp email notifications for this Basecamp account to this address:”

In the end I had to just change the email to test and make sure it worked, but the language above made me question if it would.  I love this feature, but I think it could be labeled better.

I Now Use :nth-child, :first-child and :last-child For Real

I realized last night when I wrote this line of CSS that I have finally got to a point where I have accepted not worrying about browsers that don’t support css3 nth-child pseudo class.

And then I got really happy :) 

Creative Grid Pattern Hover Effects from TED

We all know and love TED, although for me it has gotten too big to be able to follow anymore.  Since the beginning, irregular grid patterns have been used in the site for navigation and displaying content. 

On TED’s new Ed Series they have made an even more creative grid design, especially with their hover effects.  The screenshot below shows what some of the grid cells look like on hover.

Go ahead and check it out for yourself over at TED Ed - Lessons Worth Sharing.

I Like the Recommends for iTunes Ping

I recently wrote about the recommends section on Devot-ee.com that appears below the cart in the checkout process.  Today we’re looking at the recommends that Apple’s Ping Social Network for iTunes gives you after you purchase a song.

What I like about this is that it recommends songs, albums, and the ability to Follow the group whose song I bought.  I didn’t do any of these, but in the future I do plan to click on the link for better recommendations.