Alex Jones: Web Technologist, Barbecue Acolyte, Information Junkie, Austinite

Secure Passwords and Your iPhone

1Password, an amazingly useful password manager for the Mac has just released a beta version which provides the ability to auto-fill and submit your passwords on the iPhone. This is a massive improvement for anyone who uses even slightly secure passwords, but gets frustrated when inputting them via the on-screen keyboard.

The info is stored using 448-bit Blowfish encryption on the iPhone itself, and requires that you input a master password on the phone, so there isn’t any communication with external devices. So, now you have the ability to use secure passwords sans frustration, for all of your accounts, knowing that your passwords will stay secure.

If you don’t have a Mac, I’m afraid you are out of luck. But, if you do have a Mac, you need to download 1Password, it is a great program, that makes my life much much easier every day - seriously. The addition of the iPhone autofill bookmarklet has now made the program invaluable.

Posted in iphone & Tagged: iphone, security

Slanty Design in the Real World and on the Web

Architectures of Control, which provides some very interesting analysis of products that are “designed with features that intentionally restrict the way the user can behave” in order to encourage the user to follow certain practices and behaviors, has posted Slanty design, which is a great introduction to the concept and bridges design in the physical world and design for the Web. It’s a quick, well illustrated article that I encourage everyone, not just designers to read.

For non-designers, it may shed some light as to why some of yoru favorite products and services act as they do.

Posted in Architecture & Furniture, Design, Design & UI & Tagged: architecture, Design, web design

Recent Links: January 26 to January 29

Posted in Quick Links

Bad English

A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.

George Orwell in ‘Politics and the English Language’

Posted in General & Tagged: english, language, politics, writing

Recent Links: January 23 to January 26

Posted in Quick Links

Revising My Thoughts of the Future

Having spent some time digging into the various arguments around IE 8’s plan to address compatibility concerns since my first post on the subject, I’ve shifted away from my initial embrace of the plan. While I’m not as deeply entrenched as many on the Net, I see this as a major problem. Microsoft will implement this change no matter what, and many developers will make use of it. It may start with bits and pieces - a quick fix to address one incompatibility, but in time we’ll see it crop up in corporate-wide, multi-site environments - like your bank. In time this will drag down the Web as innovation won’t be as important without the looming threat of browser changes. If a corporation can stick with an IE 6 Web application design for five years, they will - it could make a lot of sense economically, but I think it will hamper the interesting changes to user experience and usability practices that come with the new technologies inherit with spec and browser updates. This concept isn’t too well formed in my head yet, so I’ll have to post more later, but until then, I recommend reading the quotes from folks who have thought about the issue far more than I have, and provide much more articulate responses this post: Opera, Mozilla and Safari react to IE’s solution for browser compatibility issues

Posted in Web Development & Tagged: browsers, web design, Web Development, web standards

Recent Links: January 20 to January 23

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The Future of Compatibility

A List Apart has ignited a discussion around future-proofing our sites and targeting specific browser version. Read Aaron Gustafson’s Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8 and Eric Meyer’s From Switches to Targets: A Standardista’s Journey to learn what has sparked the renewed discussions and arguments.

After an initial reading, I rather like the idea. If we can get Firefox, Safari and Opera to implement the same method as recommended in Aaron’s article, the Web development industry, and all those it serves (including the vast majority of business, education, government and blogging sites - i.e. the entire Web) would benefit.

Ugly sites will still exist, but they’ll at least stay the same shade of ugly as their creator intended.

Posted in Web Development & Tagged: browsers, web design, Web Development, web standards

A New Face for Refresh Austin

I plan to kick out the official announcement tomorrow morning, once I trust that the DNS has propagated to each little piece of the Net, so consider this a soft launch. We’ve launched a redesign for RefreshAustin.org after months of discussion, and a few stutter-steps. I won’t go into all of the details as the message I posted on the site covers a lot of it and I plan to write more about the foundation when time allows. The long and the short of it is, we have created a central location to make it easy for our members to communicate with each other, contribute to the group and access our useful resources.

Check it out when you have a chance.

Posted in General, Social Groups, Web Development & Tagged: refresh austin

Recent Links: January 17 to January 20

Posted in Quick Links