Bereninga

Wow, I can’t even explain how exciting and crazy it’s been in the mobile industry this season! Major players right now are the HTC Evo 4G and the iPhone 4. It’s pretty much like a clash of the titans! I’m assuming that by now there are tons of posts about their specs, so I won’t list them here and I’ll assume that you’ve read about them.

Why is it so exciting? It’s bonkers right now because Apple and HTC are throwing a bunch of lawsuits at each other. Apple and Google are also competing for mobile OS domination. Apple’s equipped with iOS4 and Google has Android. Apple seems to be taking on HTC hardware-wise and Google software-wise, and they seem to be doing a pretty good job.

Right now, Apple’s big player is its new iPhone 4, and HTC’s is the Evo 4G. So are you on the fence? I was. That is, until I saw the Evo 4G at the Sprint store the other day. The size of this phone is just way too big! I could not imagine myself putting this beast in my pocket. Compared to the size of the iPhone 4, the Evo is just not pocket-friendly. Of course, some people might not mind having a brick in their pocket. I have an iPhone 3G and already think that it’s too big for my pocket. This may be considered personal preference, though. Also, I’m Asian, so my pockets may be smaller than yours. I still think that phone size is such a fundamental concept that HTC missed in its Evo 4G, though, so expect me to make fun of you when I see you take out that clunky phone.

You can compare phone dimensions here and see for yourself.

Photo is a screen shot from PhoneArena.com.

Today, I found out that most Firefox personas suck and here’s how I found out.

Yesterday, Firefox released 3.6.2. I upgraded as usual and was sent to the Firefox Updated page. I finally gave in to trying out the Personas feature and browsed for about half an hour trying to find a theme that was not distracting and looked seamless with the browsers buttons and input fields.

Here are some reasons why I think a lot of the Personas did not look right:

1. The background image(s) and/or colors were too distracting. Do we read websites with photographs as the background? Various colors in the background just make it hard to look for something quickly and easily.
2. The color of the title bar was too bright or makes the window title hard to read. This may be picky, but the title bar is present all the time and is pretty hard to ignore. I tried one theme that made the title bar text black and the title bar background red. Is this really that enjoyable to look at constantly? Seriously?
   
3. The browser buttons didn’t fit with the theme. It just looks strange to have these gray buttons over a natural Persona or something colorful. The buttons should look like they fit into the Persona or at least share colors that are used.

Unfortunately, I really only found one theme that fit the bill: MozillaZine. Thanks to jrocknyc I was able to find a list of some decent themes. MozillaZine was my preferred choice of his ten, but I may go back to using Themes. I just miss the full integration of Themes. Developers were able to customize fonts, tabs and buttons with Themes. Personas unfortunately only change the background.

Think of it like this: what if everything on my website was the same except the background? It would look silly.

In case some of you haven’t noticed, Google decided to make its buttons a little cooler. I like how they grouped each function according to how similar they behaved. The left three buttons are ways to remove the items from your inbox. The next two buttons are interesting. “Move to” is used to label an item and archive it simultaneously. “Labels” just adds a label to an item. What if you want to add more than one label to an item and then archive it? You will most likely have to do it the old school way by adding the labels and then still clicking on archive. Also, first-time users may (or may not) get confused after moving something to a label/folder. In this new interface, the labels act as both a folder and a tag.

Ohhh, did I just say tag? I wonder why Google just doesn’t implement tags and trash the idea of folders. Perhaps it may have to deal with the way Apple Mail handles Gmail. Currently, Apple Mail doesn’t have a label or tag functionality. Apple, do you hear this?

Anyway, I guess we’ll see how well users adapt to the new interface.

So I’ve decided to do a lot of overhauling here on my website. I’ve decided to completely change the color scheme and update the content as well. I’ve gone extreme and thought about what colors would look cool together. I’m usually against black backgrounds, but I think as long as the text doesn’t contrast too much, it wouldn’t give you readers such sore eyes. I love making color palettes, and I feel like this one works pretty well.

This was another one I’ve made before, but never implemented. Maybe in the future I will.