07
Mar
Latitude Q&A on Browsersphere.
Category: Design, Interface Design, Personal Work
I had some Q&A on Latitude, my Dream Browser, on Bernie Zimmerman’s site, Browsersphere. Check it out if you want to read the answers to some questions and misconceptions people have.
Ah, Bernie beat me to the punch on asking you to do an interview.
Very interesting answers, and I definitely agree with you on your overall goal for the project.
We use browsers more than any other app, so I’m sure people would welcome a less cluttered and more Mac-like alternative.
You know, that’s a very fair criticism of how the community responds to features they dont like…I’m referring to the reaction to your Time Machine – history idea. People rarely offer their own ideas.
I hardly ever use the browser history because its just too much information, and its poorly organized. What I’d like is for my browser to organize my history for me. Let me explain:
Say I come across a good recipe and I forget about it or lose it. Wouldn’t it be great if my browser could categorize my history not primarily by date, but by topic or content? Now I would think that could be done by a couple methods. Metadeta, if I even understand that right. But that would require some new web standards, and make me depend on website designers. Which in fine, but what can I do take control, at least a little?
Another solution would be to use the tags for bookmarks. Yeah, this would only work for sites that are bookmarked, but those are going to be the sites I’m at the most. If I tag food.yahoo.com as “food” or “recipes”, then all the pages viewed would be placed in my “food” folder in my history window. Inside that folder it could be broken down by date. And what are your thoughts about an iCal like interface over a Time Machine one? Different calendars for the various tags I create. I’d have an iCal like calendar (week mode would probably prove easiest to accommodate in terms of displaying list and subfolders, but you could allow week, month, and day… whatever works best). Then you could turn “tags” or “calendars” on and off just like in iCal to simplify viewing. I could then open my history viewer which would bring up a iCal like interface, turn on my “food” or “recipes” calendar and go through the lists. Even live search the lists in a much cleaner way.
Man, this would be a feature I would love. I love sports, but I also love specific teams. I could tag some sites, such as “deadspin.com” as just “sports” or whatever. Then tag other bookmarks for sites dedicated to my favorite team as “Minnesota Twins”. Then when I go to my history calendar I could either check my “Sports” calendar or my “Minnesota Twins” calendar in order to view the history for each topic in an iCal like manner.