Electron Hut: Kyle Bedell’s Blog

I purchased some hosting from Verve the other day, as I needed a place to host all of my personal “web experiments” and web services. Although its front-facing image is just a WordPress blog, I have two projects-in-progress up on Neutrino Labs.

• Mozilla Weave server (because Mozilla’s services.mozilla.com is frequently swamped and inaccessible)
• TrackMe! Mobile Location server (because I just want to do cool stuff with my new HTC Kaiser)

If you find some cool server project floating around on the tubes, let me know!

Specifically, labels! The topic is a fair bit more interesting than you might think.

Every web form has a few components; labels, input fields, and actions. We use the labels to ask questions of our users, the input fields to give them a way to answer our questions, and actions to let them submit the answers they’ve filled in.

The alignment of your labels can have a profound effect on how people go about filling in your form. There are three types of alignment: left, right, and top.

Top-aligned labels keep the labels and input fields close together. This provides three distinct advantages:

• Processing the labels and input fields requires little cognitive effort because they’re so close together (average of 50ms to move from label to input, vs. 500ms for left-aligned labels and 240ms for right-aligned)
• You can get through the form more quickly because you only have to worry about moving in one direction (down)
• There is plenty of room for the labels to expand horizontally (so you can fit longer ones on the page)

The disadvantage is that they require a lot of vertical space.

Right-aligned labels have reduced readability compared to left or top-aligned labels due to the ragged left edge they create (because we read from left to right, we prefer hard lines on the left side). They also suffer from issues with flexibility; you’ll often see right-aligned labels taking up two vertical lines of space which makes them harder to read. However, they have the benefit of taking up less vertical space and keep the label adjacent to the input field (cuts down on processing time).

Left-aligned labels make it very easy to scan through the entire list of labels in a form, useful when users have to fill in potentially unknown information. They also take up less vertical space. However, the variable length of the gap between the label and the input field requires a lot of cognitive processing power and will slow down users.

The type of alignment you use depends on the situation; there’s a place for everything!

Images from Luke Wroblewski’s excellent book, Web Form Design: Filling In the Blanks

…when it’s virtualized! I’ve been experimenting with running Windows 2003 Server R2 via VMWare Fusion on my new MacBook Pro. So far, everything’s been running much more smoothly than I anticipated. However, I found that trying to run a server OS as a workstation OS is full of its own quirks (like having to fill in a reason/description every time you power off). I just (about two minutes ago) finished installing Windows Vista Ultimate via Boot Camp and am going to try Fusion’s new beta feature that allows running a Boot Camp partition as a VM. I’ll let you know how it works out!

My search for a new laptop ended abruptly yesterday, as I took a trip to the local Apple Store in the Burlington Mall (about 15 minutes north of Waltham on Route 95/128). After having read about so much awesome Mac software like MarsEdit (which I’m using to write this post), Coda (really cool one-page web development software from Panic), and OmniGraffle (think Visio, but much easier to use), I decided to take the plunge. I realize that there’s a Centrino 2 revision on the horizon, but at the end of the day, I figured the best of the present-day was fine for my purposes. Yes, I purchased a 15-inch Macbook Pro.

The machine is pretty zippy, having the following specs:

• 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo “Peryn” with 3MB L2 cache
• 2GB DDR2-667 RAM
• 200GB 5400RPM hard drive
• 1440×900 LED-backlit screen (matte finish)
• 802.11a/b/g/n wireless and Gigabit ethernet
• GeForce 8600GT-M with 256MB of VRAM
• Slot-loading DVD+/-RW burner

The first thing I noticed about the Macbook Pro was its all-aluminum construction. I’ve never used a notebook whose body was completely made out of metal (Lenovo’s high-end ThinkPads with their magnesium frames come the closest). It’s extremely solid, although the metal does tend to heat up more quickly than the plastics on my old notebooks have. The screen is the real shocker; this is the first LED-backlit panel I’ve used, and it is downright awesome. Not only is the screen super-thin (for something real crazy, go take a look at the Macbook Air in person), the colors are rich and the contrast and brightness are worlds-above what my X61 tablet could manage. I’m really liking the feel of the keyboard keys. There’s no flex to the keyboard at all, and when it’s dark in the room you’re typing in, the keyboard backlight automatically turns on to help you see. The only real issue I’m having has to do with my transition from Windows - I keep pressing Control-C/V/X to copy, cut, and paste (it’s Command-C/V/X on the Mac).

The speakers are better than the mono one on my old ThinkPad, but (as you might expect from a notebook with no subwoofer), they’re lacking in the bass department. I haven’t tried plugging in my headphones yet to listen for any line noise. The slot-loading DVD drive is a nice touch as well, but it’s pretty noisy, and I feared that my discs were getting eaten judging by the noises I first heard. Apparently, after some research, I found that slot-loaders DO tend to cause more wear on your discs after awhile. We’ll see how everything goes.

OS X is very shiny; there’s a lot more gloss spread around than there was on XP (or even Vista). I can see how the general experience is geared towards “creativity.” It’s almost like OS X is pushing you to just jump in and start making something (Apple has bundled movie, audio, and image creation apps right into the OS). I’m going to start playing around with GarageBand, so expect to see some horrible loop-generated music hitting the blogs soon!

I suppose my only real complaint so far is how expensive the 3rd party software is. Parallels (the virtualization software) runs $80 per copy, and other awesome apps like Apple’s iWork suite and Panic’s Coda run $80 per copy as well. I’d like to get copies of all of these things, but $240 is a lot of money for software.

So far, I’m liking what I’m using! I’ll keep putting up any additional thoughts as they come into my head.