Relating back to our posts on the Dream Browser, we found a great demo of a much improved technique for scrolling windows at Thorwil's Blog.

The concept of scrolling using scroll bars in a GUI has not altered for over a decade, and an improvement like this makes a lot of sense. It may not aesthetically be the most attractive solution right now, but as time goes by it's highly likely this could end up in desktop software and operating systems.

It's going to be interesting seeing how this concept develops and whether it will make it into the wider world of mainstream software.

Fellow readers of liquidicity, we are surprised. Genuinely surprised.

People print our posts.

We never realised that many of our readers actually like to have a real, physical copy of some of our posts to (I guess) stick on their wall, put in their scrapbook, hand out in the street, or do anything else with.

In all honesty, we never designed liquidicity for printing, and only rarely print posts off ourselves. So today, we decided to see just how bad liquidicity looked on paper - horrendous! The navigation bar showed up as an unordered, un-styled, empty list. The sidebar showed below the content, running over several pages. The default font was, gasp, Times New Roman, and the rest was just bad.

Worst of all, for even short posts at least 3 sheets of A4 paper needed to be printed due to the unordered layout spiralling off down the page. What a waste of ink and paper.

We immediately got to work on a new printable style sheet. Now whenever you print a post on liquidicity, your discerning eyes will be met with a centred, red, bold title, a well sized font, a focus on content, organised comments, and nothing else. No sidebar, no category links, no "digg this" - nothing that isn't needed on a piece of paper. All in a lovely paper friendly font: Helvetica.

So, all we can say is... find your favourite post and hit "Print"! But not too many times, because we really do like trees.

Many thanks to Stass for pointing out that people actually print stuff off once in a while.

Only a small post, but I just signed in to Google Mail and received a loading bar progress indicator.

No need to stop the press, but it's a whole lot more useful than the old "Loading..." message.

I hope they do the same with file attachment uploads as well. Progress indicators are a much more user friendly display of loading times than just a spinning icon, or as previously on Google Mail, writing "Loading...".

Hint: Always aim to explain to your users the progress of whatever operation they are waiting for. Progress bars are a simple and efficient way of doing so.

Check the GoSquared Support Wiki for a run down on official and not-so-official web banner sizes.

You can use the example images as you wish. Give your readers an example of what ad sizes you offer if you want.

Hope this helps if you ever need a reference!

Gary Jones from BlueFur contacted me today about a new project they're working on call BlueFur Jobs.

The aim is simple- to turn Wordpress into an easy to manage job board that anyone can host. It's not quite ready, but you can try it out here. The best thing about it is when it is 100% ready for prime time they're going to release the code for free so we can all enjoy the benefits of their blood, sweat and cheers.

I wrote about the project over at GoSquared Discuss earlier today, but I thought I would promote it to liquidicity so everyone can see what a great piece of work this is.

I tested it out briefly and first impressions are great:

The Great Stuff

* Posting of new jobs is really simple
* Useful RSS Feeds for each job category
* Instant preview of job post
* Clear division of job categories at both top and bottom of page
* "next" and "previous" job categories at bottom of page
* No sign-in necessary
* Overall really simple to use

Improvements That Could be Made

* First and foremost - a search function would make it much easier to find jobs. Especially if the number of jobs reaches into the hundreds.
* People may not be over keen on their email address being posted out in the open. Perhaps hiding this with a coded image or a hashed code would be better.
* Greater focus on "job description" to ensure enough detail on what the job is about is given. Perhaps allow basic html formatting (bold, italics, bullets etc.)
* On posting a new job, clicking "preview" would ideally scroll the page up to where the preview text shows.
* Indication of new jobs to returning visitors with an icon or formatting.

To Make it Kick-ass

* Link "location" field to a mapping site like Google Maps.
* Allow people to sign in to post jobs without having to fill everything in again.
* Ability to share a job with friends by email.

All in all, BlueFur Jobs looks to be an awesome job board, and we are really looking forward to seeing it develop.

Drop a comment to help them out - they are looking for as much help as possible while they develop it.

Courtesy of the always fabulous Joy of Tech.

Inquisitor, the brilliant little search plugin for Safari has been purchased by web giant Yahoo!

In a move that has surprised many, Yahoo! has seemingly made a smart decision here. The Inquisitor plugin is used by a large number of Apple users to get instant search results from the built in search field that Safari comes with. The search field defaults to Google when Safari is first downloaded, enabling both Google and Apple to earn through search advertising from a high number of searches. So Yahoo! will ensure Inquisitor's default search is through them to increase their slice of the multi-billion dollar search advertising market. Thankfully, the default search engine is still changeable via the newly designed preference pane.

Yahoo! purchasing this plugin is not just a sign of good business sense. It is a very clear example of the importance of interface design. Interface = Brand. The interface of Inquisitor is beautiful, and has developed throughout its life. Being a user of Inquisitor from the beginning, it has been great to see it develop into a thoroughly useful, efficient, and beautiful tool.

Let's hope the buyout from Yahoo! will keep Inquisitor at its prime for years to come.

On a side note, David Watanabe has not joined the ranks of Yahoo!, he's still focused on creating his own awesome software.

This is an (unfortunately unofficial) video for a great song by The Bird and the Bee called "Again & Again".

It has been masterfully put together by Dennis Liu and we think it's great.

It really shows off OS X and its versatile, animated interface.

Brilliant stuff.

Found a cool video you want to share with us? Drop us a comment at GoSquared Discuss