Flipping through my December edition of Photoshop User magazine tonight I came across this bit of misadvertising:

I dunno about you but I really resent the many hours I waste paging through irrelevant search results on stock photography websites. Can you think of a better way to emphasize this pain?

With multiline input fields text is word-wrapped and a vertical scrollbar appears if the allotted space is not enough, but when you outgrow the width of a single-line text input no horizontal scrollbar appears to help you out - at least, not in any browser I’m familiar with. Does that seem right to you?

I suggest something like this:

Zirr.us is a sexy newcomer to the web-based To-do list scene enjoyed by 37Signals and activeCollab, among others. But instead of listing, they’re tagging. Your default view is a cloud, with a slider to adjust the priority (size) of each task. I was initially very impressed by the simplicity and beauty of the website, and the potential of the idea. But I quickly discovered some quirks that sent me right back to Ta-da Lists for the mean time.

Hey InterfaceThis - listen up! Here’s what needs fixing before you’ll have me as a user.

• Stop poaching the Ctrl+T hotkey - Firefox, IE, and Opera all rely on Ctrl+T to open a new tab. This alone is a dealbreaker for me.
• When I reedit a task containing characters such as ” they are converted to their HTML entities. This is bad.
• When I mark a task as completed, where does it go?!
• If I set the priority too high, the phrase is truncated. Is there perhaps a better way to handle that? It seems backwards for the highest priority tasks to be the ones that are partially hidden.
• I would like to see some way to share certain tags in a non-writable mode with the public. This could be done simply by employing the use of a reserved tag (”public”?). “http://zirru.us/userid/public/taghere/” would be sweet.
• Why no RSS feed on your blog? I’d love to get updates - there’s no way I’ll remember to check back on my own. Update: I found the feed, it just wasn’t obvious.

I’m looking forward to seeing Zirrus mature over the next few months. Please don’t disappoint me!

In case I’m not the last person on earth to discover how to do this…..

IE7-rendered pages looking crisper than in Firefox? That’s Cleartype. And the rest of your XP desktop can take advantage of it too.

Links:

• Download Microsoft’s ClearType Tuner PowerToy.
• Learn how it works.
• Get out there on the web and enjoy your newfound readability.