Screens Around Town: Bookmarks with character, Delicious Days, a pretty hover, and a Firefox update 27 Mar 2006
28 comments Latest by Joshua
Bookmarks with character
Using characters as icons can lively up your browser window while also saving space in the bookmarks bar. If you use Safari, check out the character palette (Edit > Special Characters) for a big list of options (e.g. arrows, braille patterns, chess pieces, etc.). Set View to All Characters, click the “by Category” tab, and expand Symbols in the list in the left-hand side. I just put an umbrella in for my weather site.
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Icing on the cake
Great photography sure can help a blog stand out. Check out the scrumptious food shots at Delicious Days.
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Pretty hover
Subtle shadow rollovers are juicy. This one’s from last year’s Design Eye effort: Design Eye for the Idea Guy.
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Firefox moves the x
In a previous edition of S.A.T., there was a discussion about browser tabs. Update: The new version of Firefox (the upcoming 2.0a1 release) moves the close icon into the tab. [thanks DonWilson]
Got an interesting screenshot for Signal vs. Noise? Send the image and/or URL to svn [at] 37signals [dot] com (Note: we prefer examples of cool shots, it’s pretty easy to find bad stuff).
28 comments so far (Jump to latest)
Chuck Cheeze 27 Mar 06
What I would really like to see, is the ability to place links on the bookmarks/favorites bar as just the FavIcon, without text at all. Space saving and completely meaningful to the user.
Chad 27 Mar 06
Great photography does go a long way to make a blog more appealing. BldgBlog is another good example.
Rob Cameron 27 Mar 06
Hopefully someone releases an extension that removes all of those close buttons — middle-click close for me, please!
I guess that was for you Mac users… it took ya 20 years to get a right mouse button, no telling how long for a middle. ;)
Chuck Cheeze 27 Mar 06
After my comment above I tried it in FF/XP and it worked. Beautiful! However, Safari is my main browser on my dev machine at home and being that it does not display FavIcons on the bookmarks bar I don’t see myself being so lucky there. Probably the reason for the screenshot above, I suppose.
Baeck 27 Mar 06
Chuck:
You can do just that (in Firefox, at least), by going to the “Properties” dialog and clearing all of the text in the “Name” field. Then, only the FavIcon appears.
Jesper 27 Mar 06
Why would the bottom-most pic be ‘private’?
(Also, close buttons on tabs are way better than just one. The best option is a close button on the active tab, and then a close button on every tab you roll-over, coming and going as you need it, and saving precious text space.)
zx 27 Mar 06
*http://www.apple.co.il/images/Desktops/2005/may/dd7l.jpg
enjoy,
www.apple.co.il
Dan Boland 27 Mar 06
Matt, using special characters as bookmark icons is a great idea! Thanks for sharing that!
But since you have Campfire in the window at hand, I have a question for you — why isn’t the logout link a button like Members, Settings and Admin? It just looks weird.
Baeck 27 Mar 06
Dan:
I’m guessing because “Logout” isn’t a screen, it’s an action.
Alex Cabrera 27 Mar 06
Bookmarks with character
That’s so damn simple that it’s brilliant.
Saul Weiner 27 Mar 06
How about firefox not being a RAM hog first?
Brandon 27 Mar 06
I wonder if there is a way to get special characters with FF… I have to limit the total number of bookmarks across my Bookmarks toolbar because I want actual links to frequently used bookmarks (not just a bunch of folders - though I have several).
This would allow me at least twice as many…
Arpan 27 Mar 06
I’ve been doing that for quite a long time now. I have over a hundred bookmarks ( I bookmark anything I may need later), and using symbols saves a lot of space.
@Dan Boland: The other links are not buttons, they are tabs, and denote a page each. Since logout does not have a page associated with it, and is just a link, it is displayed differently. (At least that’s what I think)
David Askaripour 27 Mar 06
Wow, those are really nice images. I’m always trying to spice up my entrepreneurship blog ( www.cashcampus.com/ftt ) with images here and there. I find it very effective and helps get your message across. That baking blog is making me hungry.
David Askaripour
Cashcampus, LLC
Don Wilson 27 Mar 06
When I installed the latest alpha of Firefox I noticed that links that popup in new windows now popup in new tabs in the same firefox window.
I thought this was going to be a good idea but it didn’t exactly turn out how I thought it would. It’s like battling with a pitcher that throws to the left when you know he always throws to the right.
Anon 27 Mar 06
David,
any design inspiration?
David Askaripour 27 Mar 06
Yeah, definitely. I am actually in the process of learning how to design… Having images on blogs doesn’t really inspire designs, but it does inspire me to think of different color combinations for different parts of my site(s). Also, as seen in the other examples in the post, I love the keep it simple way of thinking with the hover options, very nice touch there.
Mike Rundle 27 Mar 06
David, you’ve got quite the pair linking up your blog that blatantly uses the same design at SvN. I’m sure you emailed the Signals first, right?
jimmiejo 27 Mar 06
David, I think what mike said is what Anon was hinting at. Your site is an orange clone of SvN.
Joe 27 Mar 06
Ditto. I sure hope there’s an option to remove those unnecessary (there’s already one at the far right) close buttons from every tab, thereby freeing up very valuable tab title space and preventing accidental tab closures.
Lisa 28 Mar 06
Funny how when people rip others’ stylesheets, they never work near as well.
Matt 28 Mar 06
Wow, what a blatant ripoff. I agree with Mike- that either takes a lot of balls, or a lot of stupidity.
And it’s not even nice. ugh, orange? Like that??
-Matt
Matt 28 Mar 06
And his main site too!
http://cashcampus.com/
Such blatant disregard…
-Matt
Joshua 07 Apr 06
I actually prefer the far-right “close-tab”. When browing, I don’t conceptualize it as “I want to close the third tab”, but “Close this tab, the one I’m viewing, whichever one that is.”
Maybe this is a browser-habits thing. I tend to have a dozen or so tabs open at once, and as the bar gets more crowded with tabs, it becomes nearly impossible to notice an individual tab.