Saturday, September 26, 2009

Weave Web UI - Passwords Ideas


"The Mozilla Labs Design Challenge is a series of eventsto encourage innovation and experimentation in user interface design for the Web." (link)

Like I've said before Weave is a great Firefox extension that syncs your browser data (that includes, bookmarks, history, cookies, passwords, form auto-completions, tabs, preferences, extensions and more in the future) across all your browsers: On your desktop PC, laptop or mobile.

So anyway, Mozilla set a project for letting the users help out on suggesting ideas for the Weave Web UI. Here's mine.

I'm not that good with UI but I know what I want; The problem with the auto-completion of passwords is that you forget them rather quickly when you don't need to type them anymore! So providing a "forgetful" mode for a login sounds good. If you could mark a password for a reminder every now and then you probably won't have to dig through your mail looking for that activation mail from your website or to reset a password when you're using another computer without Weave installed.




Now for the web UI. I don't know if this will / should be the final design, simply because I don't know what will be comfortable. But still, here's what I had in mind for the Weave Passwords Web UI:




To create these I used Balsamiq Mockups: http://www.balsamiq.com/demos/mockups/Mockups.html

Sunday, September 20, 2009

Transparent Firefox Theme (Windows Aero style)

If you've seen the Firefox 4 mockup theme and thought it was cool, or if you want Firefox to look cool with Windows Aero's cool transparency effect, check out this cool addon. Try it, it's cool.

With the tabs below the menus:


With the tabs above the menus:

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Black Screen at Windows 7 Login

I'm using Windows 7 and set Windows updates to install automatically.
However, one specific update was, after restart, causing Windows to show a bank screen after login. I start up the computer, wait a bit, watch the login sequence and after the "Welcome" fades out to black I get nothing but my mouse pointer.

Using Safe Mode I removed the most recent Windows Update item and my computer got back to normal. The night after it tried to install itself again, so the exact same thing happened. Now it's hidden so it won't cause problems anymore.

The update is called "Security Update for Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Package (KB973924)". I don't mind not installing that.