Comments on: Small things; How Facebook and Twitter share new features

By: dion

dion — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 17:14:09 +0000

@Iraê – Good idea, that would be cool.

@Daniel – Yah, you are right. The X should be a minimize.

@Scott – SWF FTW :)

@Brendan – I agree. They need to keep track of that so it doesn’t pop back up :)

By: Brendan Gibson

Brendan Gibson — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 17:09:36 +0000

Have to disagree with you there, Dion. I find the twitter bar incredibly annoying. Every time you refresh the page – it’s back up there…

By: Scott Morgan

Scott Morgan — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 15:13:35 +0000

Another option would be to store the persistent data in a Flash Shared Object. A lot of sites are doing this now. Load a small 5×5 pixel swf on to the page, use javascript to communicate with the swfs API (which are just hooks into the getters and setters of the Shared Object). You can even roll back to flash 8 or 7 so you can almost be guaranteed that everyone has the proper player on their system, if they don’t have Flash you can just use standard cookies. Shared Objects are a lot more difficult to accidently delete. If you really wanted to get fancy you could use the AS3 corelib library and store a JSON object in the shared object (this approach would require Flash Player 9).

By: Daniel Shaw

Daniel Shaw — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 15:07:20 +0000

Glad to know that clicking on the ‘X’ minimizes the election bar. I never clicked on it because I had assumed that it would go away (”close”). Some sort of minimize icon might have been more semantic. Maybe even a slightly modified down arrow that would match the restore indicator, but not appear to be a drop down menu.

By: Iraê

Iraê — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 14:04:08 +0000

This could be a simple, yet useful thing to implement with HTML5 local database (or gears maybe). They could keep a local copy of a series of actions already taken by the user (i.e. closed that sign, personalized the template, used this or that new feature, etc) and adjust the interface accordingly.

Cookies could become too big to be usefull here and server databese storage could cost more to the site them it benefits from the feature.

Great post. This kind of thing always annoys me too.