Jason Madigan

Today Microsoft has released Beta 1 of IE8. It includes some pretty useful developer debugging tools. You can grab a copy here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/readiness/Install.htm

I mean it. Thank you for listening to the developer community and reversing your stance on this:

In light of the Interoperability Principles, as well as feedback from the community, we’re choosing differently. Now, IE8 will show pages requesting "Standards" mode in IE8’s Standards mode. Developers who want their pages shown using IE8’s "IE7 Standards mode" will need to request that explicitly (using the http header/meta tag approach described here).

I have a problem, I admit it. I just can’t seem to remain happy with a design for a period longer than say, oh, a week?

Oh well, everything counts - it’s a good way to build up a portfolio.

Last weekend I started putting together a new theme for here. It was a pretty big design departure from my usual blog style, since I decided to splash out on some stock imagery to put something incredibly nice together. There’s only so much a designer can put together without having access to a decent stock repository. The initial mockups felt nice to work with initially, but there came a point (after playing around with blending modes for a coffee stain layer for the second hour) where I became frustrated and scrapped the whole thing. It looked like this:

I had a plan B, and it’s what you’re looking squinting at right now. It’s been inspired by all sorts of great grid based designs I’ve been exposed to over the past few weeks.

I come from a multimedia background - the creative information technology jerks - and any graphic design lecturers I’ve come across have always tried to hammer home the importance of grid based design. Grid-based design has been around for eons, particularly for desktop publishing. There’s been a resurgence in interest amongst web designers over the past few years, Khoi Vin being the technique’s current poster child in terms of web design. Make no mistake about it, though - grid based design for the web has always been around. It’s one of those common sense things which people have been applying to designs subconsciously for years - the principle just becomes more interesting with research and analysis.

The design is far from finished - I’ve added hardly any polish whatsoever so far. I’ll refine it more over the coming days.

Captchas suck. I really don’t think anyone is going to disagree with me here. They suck because they attempt to stop spam bots at the cost of the end user’s experience. How many times have you entered a captcha only to have an error returned because the image presented to you is incomprehensible not only to spam bots, but also to the user?

Surely there must be a better way of differentiating a humans from spam bots with minimal impact to usability. It just so happens that I think I may well have stumbled upon a pretty simple solution which should prove far less prone to user error and still remain effective at preventing automated spam bots from passing as humans. The idea is pretty simple. Instead of relying on a user to comprehend a randomised string embedded in an image, we instead ask the user to do something they’re pretty good at already: clicking. Far less prone to user error but just as effective. Here’s some quickly stitched together mockups (I’ll replace these with nifty JavaScript ones as soon as time allows):

Click the numbers in order 1-4.

Join the dots!

There are many ways of implementing this. The key is using JavaScript to detect mouse clicks on specific portions of the Clickcha and then having the server interpret these clicks to determine if they’re correct.

Edit: It would appear that I’m slightly lysdexic and have a hard time spelling Captcha!