2013/4/11 更新：軟體版本更新至 v3.1.0.4267 最新版。微軟的 MSN 軟體停止服務了！不過其他廠商開發的第三方即時通訊軟體還是一樣可以正常登入 MSN、跟朋友聊天唷！ 如果你用不慣新版的 Skype，可以改用這個 MSNLite，更輕巧、更好用，就像以前一樣！
MSNLite 是個非微軟官方的 MSN 即時傳訊軟體，雖然名稱裡面有個「Lite」、檔案大小只有 4.11MB，不過功能卻相當豐富。
MSNLite 是免安裝、可隨時執行的可攜式軟體，除了操作介面還算簡潔、沒有廣告，也可支援多重帳號登入、離線訊息傳送、線上備份聊天記錄、離線傳送檔案、聯絡人備註、個人化名片、MSN對話加密保護、聯絡人黑名單、多人群聊、群組發訊、針對特定帳號隱身、區網檔案共享…等功能，還可支援外掛擴充機制，透過不同廠商開發的外掛或擴充功能加強互動與聯繫等實用性。
Closetu老讀者的粉絲激增耶！為它感到光榮 :)
Mixed news everyone!
1. First and the most important: thank you everybody for your donations. We now have enough to secure our servers for the next two months or so. You can donate using Flattr or using bitcoins: 1JMYDeTaJHvfL6stbvwNdbY8zVqWfEnucU.
2. We’ve got an incredible amount of emails during last three weeks. There’ve been several days when all three of us were busy mostly dealing with user requests. If you believe that The Old Reader is missing something (and it surely is), please go to our Uservoice page, browse the issues (most likely, someone has already created your suggestion), and vote for the ones you like. Also you can see what’s already planned there. And please, check our Status page or subscribe to our Twitter account — we are updating these two on current issues.
We only have that much time during the day to spare on this project, and we would prefer to spend it making The Old Reader more reliable or implementing new features, not removing duplicate feature requests or explaining how to create a folder.
We are focused on making everything work for the vast number of users and feeds, for now this is our top priority.
(image by ProlificPen)
3. We could really use some help on the Ruby on Rails front. If you have experience engineering medium-size websites, and you’d like to become a part of our small team, please, drop us a line to hello@theoldreader.com. If you have any other suggestions about how you can help us, feel free to email us as well. Or just spread the word, that’d be much appreciated.
We can’t pay you a huge pile of money, but we still have something interesting to offer.
4. Cool graphs, no?
Closetu很有趣捏，下次 coding 試試它 XD
我們曾經在去年報導過，美國有研究顯示適度噪音，例如咖啡店的環境噪音有助提升創意。最近筆者就找到 1 個網站，能夠提供模擬咖啡店的環境。
網站 Rainy Cafe Machine 提供咖啡店的模擬環境音效，或者沙沙的下雨聲。網站亦提到溫和的噪音會讓人想得更遠，造就更多創意；下次如果當需要為功課或工作加一點創意時，不妨讓這個網站幫一下你。
*** 想更緊貼更多著數資訊的話，請讚好 加入我們，每天就會收到最新的免費資訊了，一定不會錯過 ***
Closetu先檢驗(你的想法)，再來寫完整的程式吧
We’ve finally hit the 500,000-user mark at Buffer, a product that helps you share on your social media networks more efficiently. About two years ago when we started on our path to building Buffer, we knew we’d be meeting obstacles and making mistakes along the way.
One of the main things we’ve kept in mind is that making mistakes is unavoidable and that if we choose to learn from them, they’ll be helpful in giving us good guidance on how to move forward more effectively.
And I believe that it’s partly because of these mistakes that we were able to get to where we are today.
Before I discuss the biggest lessons we learned from some of our UX and design mistakes, I want to talk about one of our primary product development principles:
"Validate first, code later"
Let me tell you how this came about.
When the idea of Buffer for building a smarter way to post to Twitter and other social networks came about, our founder Joel Gascoigne immediately started coding instead of first validating his idea (which is how he used to typically approach things).
A few minutes into his coding session, he realized that that wasn’t the way to go.
So he tried something else.
What he did was to put up a landing page as if his product already existed, even though he hadn’t finished everything yet.
He then went ahead and spread the link of his site across Twitter.
People whose interest got piqued would click on a button on the landing page to sign up for an account. They were then presented with another web page that said Buffer wasn’t finished yet and asked the interested user to leave his/her email address so that he/she can be get an email as soon as Buffer launched.
This strategy worked out quite well and we got our first paying customer within 7 weeks of coming up with the idea.
Three key product development principles were created from this experience:
Now that you know a little bit about our product development principles, the following lessons that we learned will make a bit more sense.
A key user experience (UX) lesson that we discovered early on was that we needed to concentrate on keeping our customers rather than generating revenue.
This is how we learned this lesson. Our initial landing page’s user flow was as follows:
With this user flow, the rate of people choosing one of the paid plans upon signing up is high, thus allowing us to generate revenue early on.
However, we quickly learned that users who picked to pay for the product before getting the chance to use it sent our churn rate through the roof.
Why did this happen?
We found out that people would pay, but then they wouldn’t even start to use Buffer, and eventually they’d cancel their subscription.
So we changed our sign-up user flow and philosophy of acquiring users. We decided to say to ourselves, "Let’s get the person to start using the product first so that they can experience first-hand the value of our product, which will hopefully encourage them to upgrade to one of the paid subscription plans."
That worked out a lot better for us.
As a result, the user flow through our website is incredibly more seamless now:
As a result of this user flow redesign, two important things happened:
Since then, we’ve made many more product changes that give out more free features, and our core product features are still free. Only after we’re sure you’ve really seen lots of value from using Buffer that we would encourage you to upgrade to a paid plan.
Making user flows that focus on user-retention was an important discovery for us.
After dozens of failed A/B tests to improve the conversion rates of our landing page, we came up with the idea to enable social sign-in (i.e., signing up for a Buffer account and logging in using your Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn account).
After all, Buffer is for posting on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn so it only seemed logical that our potential users would be able to quickly and conveniently sign up using one of their existing accounts.
For comparative purposes, below is our initial landing page that would let you sign up with your email and a password:
Our change from the email sign-in to social sign-in is one of our biggest growth hacks, allowing us to eventually increase sign-ups by 50%. And around the time of this sign-in switch, we went from 500 daily sign-ups to 800 daily sign-ups practically overnight.
Let me tell you a story about how we failed miserably with a new browser extension redesign idea.
One of the essential parts to Buffer is our browser extension for Chrome, Firefox and all other major browsers. We know that if you’re a user and use the extension, you’ll have the best experience with the product. Sharing from any web page and easily adding everything to your "buffer" to share on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn emerged as the most powerful use-case.
So it was only natural for us to focus on this element of the product and try our very best to improve it, as we clearly had some ideas on how we could make it better.
But when we got going with the production of a better browser extension, it seemed like we fell back into our old habits and made the same mistakes we knew we should be avoiding.
Here’s the sequence of how we (incorrectly) approached building our new extension:
This was the new layout of the browser extension that we never pushed to production:
Getting into the habit of testing every single assumption you have as early as possible is something we now have seared deeply into our brains since that failure.
To make things right, this is now how we approach building new products and features:
The last lesson that I want to share with you is something that I’ve been thinking about for quite a while: It’s the issue of being clear with your labels, buttons, help text, etc. versus being clever with them.
Des Traynor from Intercom defined this problem incredibly well in an article:
Situation: You’ve built a great feature that solves a real problem that you know your users have. They’re not using it though. Usually, it’s because they haven’t seen it, or they saw it and didn’t know what it did.
That situation is something we continue to face.
The key example I wanted to describe here is the following: Inside Buffer, you can connect multiple social accounts together so you can post to them all from one location, e.g., you sign up or login with your Twitter account but you also want to connect your Facebook and LinkedIn account to Buffer to make posting from one place easier.
What it used to look like was this:
We thought to ourselves that having a clever "plus" (+) sign icon will indicate to people that that’s the way to add your other social network accounts.
And yet, we repeatedly received emails from our users asking us if there was a way to connect their Facebook or LinkedIn account in Buffer.
So what we did was to change various aspects of the "connect" button by making it a placeholder icon, using a bigger plus sign, and many other design tweaks.
What was the eventual design solution?
The solution was simple: Using the text "connect more accounts" in plain, written words, which is a lot clearer and more effective than having (what we thought was) a cleverly devised icon to represent this UI task.
We learned that picking the clear solution over the clever solution — even though the former might not be as pretty or as unique or as cool — is always what’s better for the user.
We believe that our company and our app is still in its early stages, so a lot of the design processes and methods we have are still very experimental.
The concept of not being attached to a single idea and treating every design or feature iteration as a hypothesis that needs validation is the overall biggest thing we’ve learned.
We plan to build many more features that people will hopefully love. And we also expect to build many more that we’ll have to throw away.
We think this way of thinking will give us the biggest potential for building something our users truly want.
Leo Widrich is co-founder of Buffer, a better way to post to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. He also blogs about insights on lifehacks, business and productivity on the Buffer blog. You can say "hello" to him on Twitter @leowid (he is a super nice guy).
Tom Moor is co-founder at Buffer, a smarter way to share on Social Media. At Buffer Tom leads design and UX, constantly trying to make the interface easier to use, whilst focusing on the little details. Follow him @tommoor on Twitter for more great chats on startups and design.
Closetu在專案進行的任何階段都可能會產生新的見解，開發流程應針對「改變」做最佳化。
Ryan Singer（圖片來源：Rob Lambert）
37signals 的 UI 設計師 Ryan Singer（同時也寫程式、當產品經理）相信：
上週末他在部落格寫了一篇文章 〈 What UI really is (and how UX confuses matters) 〉，用簡單的例子解釋了 UI 是什麼，以及 UI 與 UX（使用者體驗）的差異1：
人們常把「UI」跟「UX」兩個詞混著用。UX 這詞其實很奇妙，因為它本身並沒有指涉任何一件特定的事。介面設計、視覺風格、程式效能、正常運作和功能都是「UX」的一環。而 UX 相關書籍更是包含了研究和開發方法的理論，把事情變得更複雜。
這就是為什麼我會避免教人家「UX」這個術語，那對許多不同的人來說代表了太多不同的東西，因此我傾向於聚焦在個別的技術上。一旦你明白了各種技藝，便可不受混淆地將他們組織成一個系統。對軟體設計而言，所有圍繞著使用者所面臨之問題的核心技術就是 UI 設計。
你可以非常精準地定義 UI——介面就是人和電腦相遇的地方。電腦具備某種功能，人呢則需要利用這些功能來完成「輸入（inputs）」和「輸出（outputs）」。介面就是輸入和輸出的規劃安排，讓人們得以應用電腦的功能來創造所需結果。
舉個例子，一台電腦可以算出任何數字的平方根，像是 167391 的平方根。我無法直接在腦中或是紙上算出答案。為了要運用電腦計算平方根的功能，我需要輸入和輸出。輸入可以是個警示框，具有文字框與「送出」按鈕；輸出部分則是另一個警示框，標上文字並展示答案。
這樣的一個介面提供了一種功能，功能越多事情就會變得更有趣。以自動櫃員機（ATM，國內稱作自動提款機，這裡譯為「櫃員機」有它的目的，看下去便知）為例，請先想像一台只會吐鈔，不會顯示餘額、不能存款、不能做其他任何事的自動櫃員機。這樣的設計就像先前計算平方根的例子——輸入和輸出。現在請想樣，如果你要把自動櫃員機升級，讓它具備提款和存款的功能，那麼新的介面就需要提供一種方式讓人們選擇想要的功能，而這就是「導覽（navigation）」。
各種功能、輸入、輸出和導覽，你要在螢幕上安排輸入和輸出，並且與導覽做好連結。介面就是要在人們使用所需功能——取得平方根或是領取 60 元的現金時，得以運作。
這樣明確的描述能讓你確實指出輸入、輸出、功能，將它們一起稱為「介面」，接著你就可以開始評估使用介面時的經驗並且改善各個環節。
你可以運用視覺風格讓介面看起來更加美觀；你可以研究使用者，找出怎麼樣的介面才能充分符合他們的需求和習慣。
但是對於軟體設計師來說，我建議先深入了解 UI 本身，光是基礎的部份就便能使你獲益良多。
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Closetu這對鹿皮來說，會不會有一點點點用處呢？
Closetu難以置信。這東西太可愛了。 So lovely !
Closetu看起來簡單操作且實用。嗯...哪裡會用到呢？
Closetu很有趣 .. XD
《龍珠》熱又回來喇！相隔 18 年的 《龍珠Z 》新電影即將在日本上映，不要以為只有 70、80 後的動漫迷才會喜歡喔，身為日本的國民動畫，同樣深受日本女高中生的喜愛！說的就是這班女高中，飄浮相很多人都影過，但都是扮彈下彈下，而這班女高中生就來一招龜波氣功，搞笑得來亦十分有創意！
來源：kotaku
*** 想更緊貼更多著數資訊的話，請讚好 加入我們，每天就會收到最新的免費資訊了，一定不會錯過 ***
Closetutag autocomplete 和 CDNJS 都很實用耶!
不推不行~
The jQuery Foundation has allowed corporations to become members for a year now, and they’ve just opened up the programme to individuals. If you’re interested in effectively sponsoring the jQuery Foundation, the jquery.com/join page has details on pricing and rewards.
Each pricing tier includes a gift, starting with a t-shirt, and the top $400 tier also includes “access to individual members only benefits at jQuery Foundation events”. I’m not sure what these individual benefits are, but where I come from $400 gets you a lot of benefits for your buck, so consider me cautiously intrigued.
When you’re writing Bootstrap-based projects, including any old jQuery plugin sometimes requires a bit of extra work to tailor the required markup and CSS to fit in with Bootstrap’s defaults. That means Bootstrap plugins are in demand from developers and designers. Nada Aldahleh recently sent in Bootstrap Tag Autocomplete (GitHub: Sandglaz / bootstrap-tagautocomplete, License: Apache 2.0), which is a Bootstrap and jQuery UI component for creating Twitter-like autocomplete interfaces.
It’s built on Bootstrap’s Typeahead library, and includes its own caret position library for getting and setting the caret position.
QUnit tests have been included, and the project’s website includes documentation and code samples.
Ryan Kirkman sent in CDNJS, which is an open source CDN. They’re looking for feedback on which libraries should be included – there are currently 325 listed. The code that runs the project is available on GitHub at cdnjs / cdnjs, and it’s based on Node.
Scripts can be added to the CDN by forking the GitHub project and following the instructions in the readme file. The general rule of thumb is that projects must have over 100 watchers on GitHub, but as long as sufficient popularity can be demonstrated the authors will consider including a new project. That means the list of libraries on cdnjs.com is useful for finding high quality scripts.
