digitalBush

I'm proud to announce the first Beta of my Masked Input Plugin for jQuery. This release fixes a few bugs from the Alpha and adds a few features.

The following is a list of changes for this release.

• Fixed issues with allowing punctuation on number masks.
• Added validation cleanup of text. Example: pasting in “123-456-7890″ into a “(999) 999-9999″ mask should format correctly.
• Added validation on paste events for Mozilla and IE.

Please head on over to the project page to download this release by clicking here.

Today's weather was absolutely awesome.  It was just a great day to be outside.  I took a 30 minute walk at lunch.  On my drive home I rolled the windows down just to feel the nice breeze.  I also fired up the chiminea tonight for the first time in a while.  Ashley and I just sat there looking at the fire for an hour or so tonight. 

Let me preface this bash by saying that I use my computer to work. As such, I expect it to respond when I ask it to do so. If I click a button, I want an instant response.

We live in an interesting time in computing. We're finally getting to the point where we have excess CPU cycles to spare and gobs of memory. What is a developer to do? Well, any good developer would make sure to use the equipment to it's fullest potential. Instead of just showing a window, let's take 500ms to animate that window flying across the screen. Let's take 700ms to fade this object in instead of making it just appear. Of course the last couple of statements were intended as sarcasm and the numbers were made up. Still, there's a point to be made, and I promise I'm getting there.

Why in the world would we create hardware that's faster only to slow down the user experience? I'm sick of animations that make me wait for them to finish before I can do something. If I click a link to your web page, please don't fade the damn thing in. I clicked a link and traditionally the view port blanks out and new content appears. I'm already incurring overhead by requesting your web server to do something, please don't make me wait any longer because you think something looks cool. To me, to be cool is to give me what I want as quickly as possible. If I click on an item in the task bar, I'd rather not watch an effect while my window comes up and into the foreground (I'm looking at you Vista). It's just plain counter-productive.

I'm not totally against animations; they do have their place. I think animations are appropriate when the UI does something that's not expected. The digg website is a prime example. When you click the login link at the top, a login bar appears above the header bar. This isn't normal, and if it didn't fade in the user might miss the fact that the bar just appeared. In that instance, the login bar needs to draw attention to itself.

There are plenty of examples both good and bad here. I just want to point out that we as developers needs to be mindful of our users. Just because we can do something doesn't mean we should.

I took the plunge and upgraded my work laptop to Vista. I've been mostly pleased so far.
First, here are the things I like:

• The Interface - It's pleasing to the eye. I switched my window border to black and I like it much better than the default. My laptop runs glass fairly well, and the transparent effects are aesthetically pleasing.
• The Start Menu - First off, I like the fact that it doesn't say "Start" anymore. Also, the integrated searching is VERY nice. It's only been 2 days, but so far I don't feel the need to stick Launchy or Google Desktop on this machine
• Descriptions - Thank the Lord! Microsoft finally got rid of that annoying "My" garbage. Now "My Computer" is appropriately named "Computer"

Now for the things I dislike:

• Initial Setup - The first things I turned off are the UAC, Savepoints, and Windows Defender. I noticed a huge gain in speed and usability(I'm looking at you UAC) from just these changes.
• Drivers - Actually this has been the best Windows driver experience I've had. However, it's still not where it should be. I have an nVidia GeForce Go5200 with 64M of RAM. The stock windows driver worked with glass, but was very choppy. Also I got some weird flickering with my laptop docked. I went on over to LaptopVideo2Go.com and tried a few of driver sets out there. Now my graphics are smooth, but text rendering appears to suffer. Also, I tried the absolute latest version that they had and it crashed a few times. I settled on the 98.09 version and I'm somewhat satisfied. I think my finger pointing here is more toward nVidia.
• Effects - I turned off the minimize and maximize effects. I just don't like waiting on an animation before I can use a window.

I'm sure as I use this more I'll have a few more things to add to both lists. I think the specs for my machine are the bare minimum required to run Vista. My Windows Experience Index is a 2.0 because of my graphics card. Other specs include a Pentium M 2.0Ghz and 1G of RAM.