UPDATE: If you are using jQuery or Prototype.js, follow these examples which only affects links. Otherwise use this original version, which affects all double-clicks.

<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">
   document.ondblclick = function() { alert(”We noticed that you just double-clicked a link on this web page. Please be advised that from the very first web browser only single clicks are acceptable. Save your strength.”); }
</script>

Feel free to propagate in your HTML to end the senseless double-clicking of web links forever!

Route 31 is a peculiar stop because the northbound bus waits facing south on the west side of Greenwood, instead of facing north on the east. It does this because it makes the next two rights and a left to get back onto Greenwood. Unless it’s the alternate B line which runs for a few hours a day and appears on the more obvious east side of the street.

On many occasions I have had to inform (and startle) people because they waiting on the wrong side of the street. It boggles my mind that our city spends thousands on glass bus shelters, but cannot manage to equip these shelters with a basic schedule. TTC, please equip at least the main stops on your routes with information about those routes. Not to Deride the Rocket, but how are we to know The Better Way?

To solve this problem, I brought in the big guns, Andrey Petrov, to help me design and build a slideshow plugin for jQuery, demonstrated here using some illustrations of my wife.

Simply include jQuery, the plugin, and create a list of images with the class “wideslide” and you’re off. Want to try it, or try to improve upon it? We open-sourced it.

Download Wideslide on GitHub.

My wife and I are on their basic $10/month plan and over the course of the year incurred $25.25 of “Idiot Fees” (last minute cancellations, extensions by phone, etc.). We are very happy with the service and whole-heartedly recommend it. If only the nearby Beer Store would cooperate and provide AutoShare a spot, it would save us a 1km walk to the closest car!

A nice bonus was a $25 referral fee in August! Those are very welcome, so keep us in mind if you sign up!

I really can’t wait for the project to launch because I expect I’ll have a big attachment to it!

Because of the killer visual search technology at Idée, I’ve had the chance to do a interfaces for software that does things never before seen. More recently than the Multicolr Search is TinEye and the TinEye Music iPhone App.

There’s even cooler stuff on the horizon which you will have to wait for. Idée will have provided the stunning and hopefully I will have provided the elegant.

I had to take the first step of associating my contacts with the faces before it could tell me who was in the photos. That was the big brothery step because it provides Google, and anyone in the future with access to that data, the ability identify my contacts in any photos Google indexes.

It is remarkably accurate and even spotted a space on the gravestone of an ancestor of mine.

It brings up interesting questions about the access to these fingerprints. EXIF data contains exact time, geotags contain exact location, and now these fingerprints can identify people. Will advertisers be able to leverage this data? Will Google allow for public access to these fingerprints? (e.g. who is in this photo) Will Google themselves be enhancing their already massive profiles of their users with this new information?

Now that “when”, “where” and “who” are no longer relevant questions, what’s next? “What”, “why” and “how”?

I will state up front that, as an interface designer, I find the UI to be as terrible as any DVD player I’ve ever used. And if you’re as prone to configuration problems as I am, there isn’t any documentation to speak of, so you are left to the mercy of their chaotic forums.

Once running, the device, which can house its own hard drive and stream content from over the network, plays media incredibly well and improves with each firmware upgrade. If it’s connected to the internet, firmware updates are easily applied from the admin interface.

Also built into the device is a Torrent client, and as of the latest firmware upgrade, a Linux-based Usenet client called NZBget.

Recently the Popcorn Hour people released the A-110 which costs $35 more but addresses most of the firmware concerns I had with the A-100. Surprisingly it fails to add gigabit ethernet. Guys, why cheap out?

For a long while I have been using ByeByeList which presents results from craigslist searches in thumbnail view. A great way to separate the wheat from the chaff. And even though it says alpha, I’ve only ever experienced a downtime once. Enjoy it!

We came up with something pretty neat for TinEye, the image-based search engine. Because queries are images, and not text, users could not easily distinguish between tabs with the title.

So for the results pages, we removed the Idée logo and made the favicon dynamic based on the query image.

And as an added bonus, it works well visual aid for search history in the History menu.