Friday, March 22, 2002

Referers indeed Here's an odd thing. My Referers page displays the (hopelessly short) list of other sites that refer back to mine. The subtitle of the page is "Statistics and information about your community of Radio users." But I just noticed on the list another site I run -- a site that has nothing to do with Radio. That site does refer here, but how did it get into the referer log without being in "my community of Radio users"? 2:10:56 PM

More on Local Pages Another issue with the second Radio menu in Radio -- specifically the Local Pages -- is that one of the local pages is called Weblogs.Com. The ".com" clearly implies a page at a particular domain, not anything local. However, it some sort of local page containing weblogs that have changed recently, and out of those, the ones I've chosen as my "favorites". The page lives at a fairly obscure local address: http://127.0.0.1:5335/system/pages/weblogsCom One of the things Radio is doing is blurring the distinction between "local" and "web"; some of my local pages have content that automatically comes from the web. some of my web pages update automatically based on things I've done locally. I think this is a good thing, but the UI is not helpful at all in making any of this clear. Instead of using existing terms in ways that don't fit, we need a bit of new vocabulary to apply to new kinds of features and new contexts. 2:07:54 PM

Local pages The Radio menu bar has a few quirks, not least of which is that in OS X there are two menus called Radio. The Radio menu -- that is, the second Radio menu, contains only hierarchical menus. The largest one is called "Local Pages". This makes sense for some of the items, including obvious things like your Prefs page. But the menu is clearly depending on the "Local pages" to indicate that the Home Page you select is the local one, not the public one. The "Cloud links" menu also contains a Home Page item, which in that case is the public one, not the local one. Then there's the home page itself -- the local one -- which contains a Home Page heading that's not a link. That heading refers to the local one, not the public one. And on the right, under a tiny "Cloud Links:" heading, is -- what the heck? The same choices you see in the Radio > Cloud Links menu. It seems as if the Radio UI design was created by somebody who thinks in "paths" rather than locations; the user must trace back the path containing an item to understand what the item is. This could be made easier two ways: change the name of the local home page to make it clear what it is, or simply call it "local home page" in menus and links. 10:58:30 AM

© Copyright 2002 Peter Harbeson.