The FuzzyBlog!
Marketing 101. Consulting 101. PHP Consulting. Random geeky stuff. I Blog Therefore I Am.

Monday, August 19, 2002

And I guess I'm not the Only One Bothered by Font Sizes Talk about serendipity -- Dave, Jakob and Jeffrey (and me) all focusing on the same issue at the same approximate time.  Exalted company.  Dave's right that the real fix comes at the browser level.  Still as Mark showed us, it can be better than it is. Triangulation. Both Jakob Nielsen and Jeffrey Zeldman ask Microsoft to let users control text size in MSIE/Win. Add my vote too. There are a few sites that I can't read because of text size issues. Some of them don't respond when I manually change the size. Further, MSIE resets the default font size when I choose it manually for one window, making me reluctant to ever set the font size through the menu. Instead I just don't read the sites that set the font size so small that my eyes can't parse the text. While MS is making changes, please also add a user pref that turns off the "open in new window" feature that Zeldman uses on his weblog. It's one of the most irritating things a website can do.  Here's a tip that a reader gave me: CTRL+Mouse Wheel scrolling increases or decreases the size.  Very useful.  I'd seen the effect before but never knew what triggered it.   5:13:59 PM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This

You Read It Here First What was it, last week?  Two weeks ago?  That I was talking about Palm really needing to make phones, not PDAs.  Read Story.  Anyway, from today's New York Times, no less than Steve Jobs seems to concur: Mr. Jobs continues to be coy. He insists that he still dislikes the idea of the conventional personal digital assistant, saying that the devices are too hard to use and offer little real utility. But a telephone with personal digital assistant features is another matter. "We decided that between now and next year, the P.D.A. is going to be subsumed by the telephone," he said last week in an interview. "We think the P.D.A. is going away." http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/19/technology/19APPL.html?8hpib I feel vindicated.  I do.  I do. Oh and please bear with me on that rich and frothy PHP goodness.  It is coming.  I've been coding for like 4 days straight now and haven't been balancing the writing as well as I should.  There will also be a written treat for Radio users coming soon too. 5:06:51 PM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This

Marketing 101: When the Product Manager Needs to Take Control At the request of a reader, I'm answering a real live question.  I've opted to write it in an Ann Landers like fashion pretty much for no other reason than to amuse myself (and the one or two readers out there that have ever sneered at an Ann Landers column). Question: I'm a new product manager, for a product that is currently at, approximately, version 0.4.  I'm concerned about scope creep as, every time I turn around, the product seems to sprout a new module or big feature.  Or 5.  Or 13.  It's a difficult situation for me since the lead engineer has more seniority than I do and is, ahem, on the assertive side.  I know he knows what he's doing but I want to see this ship before the next millennium.  Comments?  Thoughts?  I've thought about hitting him over the head with a chair but that might not stop him.  Help!!! --- Features ^ 13 ==> Read Story <== 4:04:16 AM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This

The Best Titled Page I've Seen in a While Take a look at: http://www.jesszaino.com/links/index.html for a good page title.  It's also a fairly bad, framed site but the title grabbed my attention in the google results.  So I guess it really was a good page title. 2:40:00 AM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This