A good friend of mine opened up a recording studio in Montreal. See those huge pieces glass in the Live Room and Studio A? They weigh several hundred pounds each. The first one went in pretty easily once we got those suction cups. The second one was a lot harder, we could only get to it from one side. And no, nobody lost any fingers.

At Y Combinator’s Startup School, most people I met got very upset when anyone mentioned Ajax or Web 2.0. It’s true the technologies behind the buzzwords have been around for years, but now they’re mainstream. The usability bar has simply been raised. I think if someone says they’re going to use Ajax in a Web application, it’s like saying they’re going to use HTML.

Some speakers encouraged us to focus on simple and useful applications. I was thinking about what could be done, and went so far as to look into some names for my potential projects (like goolicious). I have a del.icio.us account, but would like more powerful bookmark search, hence goolicious. Searching for available domains was frustrating, no matter which service I tried. So my application became just this—a better domain search.

Here it is: Instant Domain Name Search.

Let me know what you think: beau@hartshorne.ca.

A few years ago, I wrote Thorston Lemke with a feature request for his excellent Graphic Converter. I asked him to add some code that would set the file’s format from the filename I typed. Every time I saved a JPG, I needed to fish through this huge list to find it:

He added the feature in a day or two, and it’s been the default since. I know most applications don’t export 75 formats, but even 5 make the drop-down a chore compared to just typing the format in.

The format drop-down has lots of cousins on the Web. There’s the credit card expiry date pickers, the state/province pickers, the country pickers, time zone pickers—the list goes on. Look at this:

To be fair, this mess is only revealed if you want to choose a specific date and time instead of the default “later today” (or one of the nine other presets in another drop-down).

And that’s from Backpack, carefully built by the brilliant team at 37signals. Now go look at Simon Willison’s date picker—it’s a weekend hack, but is so much better than mousing through dozens of options spread through six drop-downs.

For some facts, hop over to Wikipedia’s entry on Fitts’ Law. I’d appreciate your comments or other examples, please send them to beau@hartshorne.ca.