With five other awesome Computer Scientists, I’m working on a game which is exploring the whole idea of immersing the player into the world, with the help of head-tracking, rather than holographics or video goggles.

Be sure to subscribe to the blog, or at least bookmark it, as we’ve just entered the last month of development and will be releasing lots of interesting tidbits shortly.

Clearly this is good news for users who want the choice, but what interests me is the way Microsoft have chosen to communicate this feature.

I think, ultimately, it’s smart to use the more natural language of ‘on’ or ‘off’ as opposed to ‘install’ or ‘uninstall’. It’s easier to understand for those who haven’t used a computer for an extended period, for one.

But as someone who has used a computer for a while, it’s almost overly simplistic language. However, what’s more important, in my opinion, is that I can’t be sure if this window will actually do what it claims it will do.

Does ‘turning a feature off’ merely deactivate it, leaving the program dormant and hidden yet still on your hard disk, or does it uninstall the program, requiring the install DVD to be re-inserted if you ever want to turn it back ‘on’?

The middle ground

“A filled box means that only part of the feature is turned on.”

It strikes me that the fact this must be written indicates that the ‘filled box’ user interface element is not obvious enough, and needs re-thinking.

Doing so, of course, is a challenge. Mac OS X uses what looks like a hyphen, which is not entirely an excellent solution… but given the choice between a ‘filled box’ and a box with a hyphen inside, which best represents the state in between ‘all’ and ‘none’?

Stumbled upon this gem of a site, the text of which is impossible to read, while looking for when my next student loan instalment is coming.

Who uses typewriters these days?

Other utterly shit websites made for young people by the government, which could be great but instead have been ruined by terrible IA and UI:

1. Student Finance Direct/England/whatever the hell they’re calling it now, which is now dead.
2. UCAS, who (three years ago, at least) had the most fucked web app for applying for anything, ever. Only worked properly in IE5. It was as if they had designed it to be an intelligence/perseverance filter, too.
3. This new home of our Student Finance information which again makes it a new task to find where to get the information from. Not to mention all the different, obscure kinds of passwords and questions they ask you in order to log in. Seriously, you need to know about five passwords, not to mention an all-numeric ‘username’ (perviously known as an ‘ART ID’ for some reason), in order to be able to log in.

Bah.

Specifically, it adds support for the DIVX and 3ivx codecs, and as such is an essential tool… and especially useful if you want to play back videos downloaded via BitTorrent on your Mac.

Before Perian, it was a pain in the bum to find the correct downloads for these codecs and install them. Now Perian makes it incredibly easy. Excellent work, team Perian!

I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure designing devices without planes of symmetry makes them look weird in the bad sense.

Interesting yes… but weird.

The work has been hailed as a major step forward by scientists and welcomed by pro-life organisations, who called on researchers to halt other experiments which use stem cells collected from embryos made at IVF clinics.

There are two obvious solutions to this:

1. First look at the user, and then add the appropriate menu item to the menu, or:
2. Set up a path which is the same for all users, and when they attempt to access it redirect them to the appropriate path.

Option two is, I think, the simplest and most appropriate solution to this problem, and so that’s what I’m going to show you how to do.

How it’ll work

The user will see a “Members’ area” link in the menu. When they click on it, Drupal will execute a function in order to generate the page. That function will judge the user and instead of generating a page, tell Drupal to forward them to the right page.

1. Make the module to contain the code

I’ve made a module called role_switch to hold all of this code. You can download it below for Drupal 6.9+.

2. Define your menu item

function role_switch_menu() {
  $items = array();

  $items['members-area'] = array(
    'title' => 'Members\' area',
    'description' => 'SKIP Members\' area',
    'page callback' => 'role_switch_members_area',
    'access arguments' => array('access content'),
    'type' => MENU_NORMAL_ITEM,
   );

  return $items;
}

This code uses hook_menu() to say: when a user visits “/members-area“, call the function “ role_switch_members_area” in order to decide what to show on that page.

3. Define the role switching behaviour

But instead of actually producing content, we just want to take a look at the user and get Drupal to send them to a different page based on who they are.

In the example below, users who a logged in, and therefore members, are sent to “/members“, while those who aren’t are asked to log in over at “/user“.

function role_switch_members_area() {
  global $user;

  if(isset($user->roles[2])) {
    drupal_goto("members");
  } else {
    drupal_set_message("To view the SKIP Members' Area, you must log in.");
    drupal_goto("user");
  }

  return "";
}

4. Enable module, create menu item

The final step is to install and enable the module, and to create a menu item (or any kind of link, actually) to the “/members-area” page. There will already be one in the main “Navigation” menu called “Members’ Area” waiting for you to move to the correct position.

This technique is especially resilient against node access modules removing the menu item for users who aren’t logged in, as we’re creating our own intermediate page to which all users have access.

If you want to add more pages which ‘fork’ users like this, simply add another entry in the hook_menu() function and duplicate and rename the role_switch_members_area() function.

Download the role_switch module

Download the role_switch Drupal 6 module (zip, 4KB).

This module isn’t really big enough to warrant an appearance in the Drupal.org repository, but I am happy for others to take it, extend it and make it something much better (and then put it into their directory).

But, if you’re working on a community site (or any site, really), chances are you don’t want your newly-logged-ins to go there. Well, it’s sort of a dead-end as far as content goes, isn’t it?

Download and install the simple Login Desitnation module, which will allow you to specify exactly where users should go.

This module allows you to specify just one path, or allow you to execute some PHP in order to decide where this particular user should go. This is especially useful if you want to forward users based on their role.

Some related words of wisdom:

Where do you disable public registrations?

By default anybody can register a new account. To remove this option, visit /admin/user/settings and look at the ‘Public registrations’ options.

How can I change the ‘Access denied’ page to the ‘login’ page?

The ‘Access denied’ page Drupal shows users who’ve clicked on a link to content which is typically restricted to logged-in users is a bit useless.

To change what’s displayed to the login page, visit /admin/settings/error-reporting and change the (blank by default) ‘Default 403 (access denied) page’ field to ‘user‘.

If you do this, you should be aware that logged in users who are visiting a page they’re not allowed to access (the ‘modules’ page, for example) will be forwarded to their profile page when this occurs, without an error.

However, in most simple Drupal environments this shouldn’t be an issue, as users shouldn’t be presented with links to content/pages beyond their access.

The problem affects all software and systems that store system time as a signed 32-bit integer, and interpret this number as the number of seconds since 00:00:00 January 1, 1970.

The latest time that can be represented this way is 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, 19 January 2038.

Those damn computers, always trying to take down the world…

It’s a great little application for OS X that’ll help you find what’s taking up all of you hard drive space, and promptly delete it.

It even works for external, mounted volumes, too.

Dr Ben Goldacre, who writes the ‘Bad Science’ column for the Guardian, absolutely rinsed a well-animated Dr Aric Sigman’s writing on the effects of Social Networks, on Newsnight last night in the wake of the recent media hype about their potential damage

Goldacre follows up on the appearance on his blog.

Inline Progress Indicator [NEW]
Safari was the first browser to move the progress indicator into the address field, making it more visible and freeing up space for web content. At a glance, you can see exactly when a site is finished loading.

Unusually, however, this feature is neither new nor present.

Well, it is there, you just have to execute a hack to get it back:

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4LoadProgressStyle -bool NO
defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeToolbarRedesign -bool NO

Running both of these commands within Terminal will restore the old Address Bar without the permanently attached “Add Bookmark” button, and restore the background loading indicator.

It will, however, break the UI slightly: a spinner with the wrong background colour will appear in the corner of your tab. An acceptable loss, I feel.

(I found this out thanks to a nice guy called Caius Durling’s pastie, where you can find some other useful tips, too.)

[Via DF.]

It’s Apple Tuesday, and a beta release of Safari 4 is now available to download and try out.

An quick critique:

• I don’t like how they’ve match the iPhone by putting the refresh button inside the Address Bar on the right. It feels wrong.
• I don’t like how you can’t get rid of the ‘Add Bookmark’ button, which is embedded into the Address bar on the left.
• I don’t like how the widths of all tabs, which are now displayed along the top of the window, is in total 100% the width of window. I’ve got a large monitor and it means I have a hard time negotiating that; by using fixed-width tabs you can easily anticipate where they lie, and so use them quicker.
• I don’t like how you can no longer use an entire tab to drag it around, but rather you must look for the ‘handle’ in order to reposition it. It seems like they’re making the target smaller, and so the interface more difficult, for no apparent real reason.

…and some praise (it’s due):

• Although I might not use it, I think users will like the ‘Top Sites’ screen.
• Cover Flow is kind-of good. I don’t think it’ll be useful much, but it could be useful, especially in the context of looking through your history. Often when looking for an elusive site you’ve visited, you’re in a ‘I’ll know it when I see it’ situation, which this addresses nicely.
• I like that they’re giving Windows users their native feel back.
• I love full-page zoom. It’s going to help me enjoy reading on the Internet quite a bit more. It works wonders, for example, on the BBC News website.

This release also sports some updated UI graphics, if you look at the Address Bar and search field. They’re looking crisper than their other counterparts, sporting no cut-out shadow. Is this a taste of the ‘marble’ look said to be coming in Snow Leopard?

I personally choose to believe this is not an illustration, rather a photo of some glorious bygone era.

What’s inside

Part 1 of the report gives a very fair and concise overview of social networks and the issues they bring up. It’s surprisingly broad, actually, covering topics such as location data, the Internet with regards to a child’s physiological development, and of course child abuse and bullying.

Part 2 gives recommendations for good practice, and as such is the most relevant to those who produce websites with social networking features. It’s very thorough, and well worth a read through even if only to refresh your memory regarding these sorts of things.

There is a clear, and rather agreeable, emphasis placed on the default options leaning very strongly towards privacy… ‘open profiles’ are the kind of feature which should certainly not be enabled by default.

Part 3 contains advice for parents and carers. While the advice in this part is just as good, I can’t help but read through it and think “yeah right”… parent’s can’t possibly be expected to pull all that off successfully, let alone attempt it all!

There is an important balance between educating children and young people about the risks online, viewing what they are doing and actually trusting them in their use of social networking sites and allowing them a degree of autonomy.

True ‘dat.

Being effective

If anything, it drives home that those who can be most effective in protecting children/young adults is us; we make the websites, we make the rules.

It’s down to us to make the playground safe, because legislators and parents can only do so much in this space.

This is a clear, sound and well-produced document which is certainly worth reading if you work with any sort of ’social’ media. Its just a shame Jacqui ‘that crazy woman in the Home Office’ Smith is the one to give the forward. Well, at least she’s actually taking this one into account.

While Tumblr has “absolutely no interest in censoring users,” Mr. Karp wrote, and in fact had “rushed into enforcing this policy” somewhat by mistake, he stood by the move to root out the use of Tumblr blogs for “harassment,” which the new policy describes this way:

Accounts with the sole or primary purpose of repeatedly harassing or abusing specific members or groups within the Tumblr community will be suspended.

I’m personally a pro-platform kinda guy, but I must admit ‘harassment’ is an area of speech I don’t particularly care for.

In this particular case, it seems Tumblr have made a decision based on the impact to their community of ‘malicious re-blogging’, which is a fair cop. Their community is this business. They are right to move to protect it, and are right to explain and defend their efforts.

The Guardian is sporting an interactive guide to show what it takes to be an Oscar winner, using data from throughout the years.

It appeared to be backing up correctly, but the transfer of data was causing an error for some reason.

It looked like I might have to completely reset my iPhone and start from scratch, which would have been annoying, but luckily I found a fix first.

How to fix

The solution for this problem for me was pretty simple:

1. Attempt a sync and watch for which part of the sync fails. For me, for example, it was when iTunes began to delete photos from my iPhone which it wanted to replace with new ones.
2. As the photos part of the sync was failing for me, I had to go to the “Photos” tab in the iPhone’s iTunes page and uncheck “Sync photos from: iPhoto”. If, however, you are having problems with video, podcasts, apps or music, you must adapt this method for that kind of media.
3. Then perform a sync, and iTunes will remove all photos from the iPhone without causing an error.
4. You are now free to re-check the “Sync photos from: iPhoto” box, or whichever box you disabled, and sync again.

For example, within Drupal, one might have a node with an alias, which results in the node being accessible through two URLs:

1. www.example.com/node/1234
2. www.example.com/my-node-alias

The URL which we’d want Google to focus on in this case would be the alias URL “/my-node-alias”.

To do this, you can now include this line of code in the HTML head of both pages:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/my-node-alias" />

This is a really great idea, especially as the implementation is easy, open and sensible.

Comfused.com, for example, have run an ad campaign in the UK for a few weeks now in which actors/users give heaps of praise on how ‘friendly’ and ‘easy’ their insurance comparison site is.

It looks like this will become a trend for technology marketing; usability appeals, after all, to all the people who aren’t confident using PCs, iPods, etc.

Companies like Nintendo (with the Wii) and Apple (with the iPhone) are reaching those outside of the ‘information revolution’ (basically older generations, if you’ll allow the generalisation) by marketing the easy-of-use of their stuff… and it’s doing wonders for their business, quite clearly.

It’s a good thing, especially if it means sales departments will be lobbying developers/engineers for better usability!