Recently while Googling “Olla de Carne” (Costa Rican beef stew) my browser (Chrome 3.0) was hijacked after taking a search results link. Rather than receiving a list of ingredients, the link redirected the browser to a bogus antivirus site that mimicked Windows and faked an integrated Explorer virus scan (see screenshot below or watch the video).
User agent and analysis methods
The user agent, a piece of data transmitted in the HTTP header during a client-server exchange, contains information that can be valuable for collecting usage statistics and gathering web analytics data.
Example user agent string sent from a web browser:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040612 Firefox/0.8
Screenshot of a Lightview modal dialog
Though modal dialogs are not a new concept in UI design, the number of homegrown Lightbox clones appearing on the Web since major JavaScript libraries like Prototype and jQuery hit the scene has been staggering. Unfortunately, many of the clones developed leave some key usability considerations unaddressed, and struggle with common problems in accessibility. Some key usability features that should be considered during creation of a Web-based modal dialog include (1) manage focus and allow tab navigation (2) disable elements outside the modal dialog (3) give users an out and (4) provide graceful error recovery.
Firebug > *
Following is a cross-browser/platform list of web development and debugging tools useful for client-side development and front-end debugging.
Tools for Firefox
Build for standards.
- Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse.
- HTML Validator is a Mozilla extension that adds HTML validation inside Firefox and Mozilla.
- Web Developer adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.
- IE Tab, an extension from Taiwan, embeds Internet Explorer in a Mozilla/Firefox tab.
- ColorZilla provides Advanced Eyedropper, Color Picker, Palette Viewer and other colorful goodies for your Firefox.
- YSlow analyzes web pages and tells you why they’re slow.
- HttpFox monitors and analyzes all incoming and outgoing HTTP traffic between the browser and the web servers.
- MultiFirefox is a small launcher utility that allows you to run multiple versions of Firefox side-by-side.
After recently losing a USB flash drive with all my passwords, I was grateful for the precaution I took by storing all my password data using Brad Greenlee’s PassKeeper password manager.
PassKeeper is a Windows utility that allows you to keep a list of accounts with usernames, passwords, and notes. This list is stored encrypted.
The utility is freeware and has been available for public download since the mid-90’s. Data are encrypted using the 56-bit DES cipher and stored in an DAT file in the application’s root directory. The size of the application (189 kilobytes) and the data file (~400 bytes/entry) are lightweight and can easily be carried around on any USB flash drive.
iTunes users opting not to allow the program to automatically keep their folders organized (the default setting) may be well aware that iTunes does not respond well after changing locations of or renaming files. In fact, any change in the file name or path renders the item inaccessible from within iTunes. To make matters worse, iTunes doesn’t offer users an easy way to relocate groups of files if this happens. Instead, iTunes prompts the user to relocate each missing file individually upon playback:
The [song|movie|...] “name” could not be used because the original file could not be found. Would you like to locate it?
That’s all fine and great. But if a directory containing hundreds of files needs to be moved, to a larger hard drive for example, locating files individually becomes too much work.
Recent Comments