I get an outsized amount of enjoyment from this simple little feature. Part of me wonders why it hasn’t been such before — it’s so simple! Another part of me enjoys the physical convenience — no paper, no trash. And part of me gets a silly little feeling of cleverness — that we /are/ actually living in the future.

In general I hate Wells Fargo because they continually charge me extra hidden fees and make me jump through silly hoops repeatedly even though I’m a long time customer holding, I believe, nine different accounts with them (our TIC/condo group in part of that).

But while the bank may such (don’t they all?), their ATMs are cool. (For those interested in UX and Interface design, Pentagram studios did the redesign and Physical Interface has the story / case study.) In addition to the emailed receipts, I like that

• the screen options are personalized with your most common transactions (how much to withdraw; from which account; receipt preference);
• you can deposit checks without an envelope, and print a receipt with a scanned image of the check;
• and that you can buy postage stamps.

Anyways, I write this because I’m up early on a Saturday morning waiting on a phone call to come in. Uggh. Scanning Techmeme while I wait and this post reminded me about the WF feature and that many other hadn’t seen it (apparently only testing in Northern California and Colorado)…. So there you go…back to my coffee…

I believe in low-fidelity sketching at the wireframe stage. Balsamiq makes it easy with its large library of UI control stencils, its auto-complete driven keybroad stencil selection, on-screen snap-to alignment guides, a powerful inspector for precise control when rarely needed, and, more of all, a simplicity that makes it easy to start sketching or tweaking your mockup immediately.

The output is Balsamiq files, PGN or flattened image files, and XML. Because it exports XML it’s possible to use Balsamiq as a programmatic ingredient for downstream engineering systems and tools (such as partially automating the creation of detailed functional specifications, or using it as source for the automated building on the actual interface.

There is a rumor that they’ll be announcing clickable output files shortly, which might allow for the fast creation of clickable wireframes for usability testing (and other) needs.

I haven’t noticed, but it should be possible to customize what’s in the included UI Widget Library to a) take on a different visual skin; b) reflect new or fewer interface widget options.

All and all, I’m pretty intrigued. It seems there’s a market for consumer-friendly ways to design interfaces. Once more people catch on how to much fun we’re having, they’ll want a shot at designing and realizing all the apps they’re dreaming up, too!

I’d love to hear what you think of this approach. Have you tried it? Does it work for your teams”

Songbird is a media player like iTunes. Except that it’s build on top of the awesome Mozilla Firefox foundation. And like Firefox, it has an extensive array of extensions, themes, and assorted addons. Earlier versions haven’t supplanted iTunes for me, but it’s looking like this version may well do that.

I had some trouble imagining what type of addons would make sense, but in this release we’re beginning to see. An early favorite for me is the ticketing integration:

You can read all about the release on their blog, download it here, and see a screenshot below:

I’m still not thrilled with the ear buds, and am shopping for new ones, but the software fix was a big help.

YSlow has three main views: Performance, Stats, and Components. Performance view scores the page against each performance rule, generates an overall YSlow grade for the page, and lists specific recommendations for making the page faster. Stats view summarizes the total page weight, cookie size, and HTTP request count. Components view lists each component (image, stylesheet, script, Flash object, etc.) in the page along with HTTP information relevant to page load times. It also contains several tools including [Douglas Crockford's] JSLint.

Give YSlow a try, your users will thank you. And for more about performance, check out the Exceptional Performance section on the Yahoo! Developer Network.

For years, electricity experts said this kind of thing couldn’t be done. “If you had asked me seven months ago if this was possible, I would have said, ‘Are you dreaming? Have you been smoking something?’” says Govi Rao, vice president and general manager of solid-state lighting at Philips. “But to see it work is just amazing. It could revolutionize what we know about power.”

The range is about three feet, with radio waves being converted to DC current by a small receiver embedded in the device. Price point seems to be about five bucks, which means it’s viable everywhere. The idea of having your ipod, camera, and phone charge while you’re sitting at your desk — with them still in your pocket — is pretty cool. A wireless mouse that never needs to dock is attractive too. It’s low-power stuff for now — including pacemakers — but as with all technology i’m sure it will improve and expand.

Here’s the article Death of the cell phone charger from Business 2.0 magazine.

Really, it just feels right. It works just how it would if you designed it yourself. Seamless. Flawless. I’ve been bookmarking about 20x more links since I started using this tool. Love it. Install it now.

Notes

• During the installation process be sure to click “sync” to avoid losing your current Firefox bookmarks and links-bar bookmarklets.
• Don’t worry, you can still save private bookmarks by clicking “Do Not Share” during the normal bookmarking process.
• You can still use “keyword search” and navigation keywords, but it’s a bit non-obvious. To create a keyword, save your link, then save it again to see the keywords field show up.

Enjoy!

The whole world of “Mobile” is about to get much much more exciting in the US in the next 18 months, and I’d like to be with a carrier and on a device that lets me experiement with as much of it as possible. Is this the carries, the device?

I’m moving from an old Treo (the 600), so it’s also a switch from Palm OS to Windows. Any words of advice in that regard?

By default, Thunderbird places “Joe Smith wrote:” at the top of your message when you reply. I’d prefer to have a date stamp there toom like “on 5/12/2006 10:03 AM Joe Smith said the following:”. Firefox is a great browser and Thunderbird is a great email client for more reasons than extensibility, but extensibility sure is nice. The change is nearly-trivial in Thunderbird by modifing the User.js file in your Thunderbird profiles folder, and restarting Thunderbird (not your computer). How? Change Your Thunderbird Response Header

Another nice extensibility feature is Mozilla’s Extensions system which Thunderbird also shares wth Firefox. Returning from another time zone the other day, my POP server got confused and sent me all my recent messages again. Which stinks, because I ended up with about 1800 duplicate messages filtered and spread throughout my inbox folder structure. In the past I’ve just accepted that fate, but this time I looked for an extension.

Sure enough, the perfect tool for removing duplicate messages exists. One tip: switch which message (older or newer) is discarded, lest you delete your metadata (read, flagged) along with the older message. By default it seems to keep newer, but I’d recommend switching that. Aside from that, it’s a blazing fast tool that without fuss does exactly what it advertises.

Thanks,
Nate

Here’s the promo link for the Dell 30-inch widescreen LCD.