Archive for October 10, 2012

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Stripe’s Pop-up Window

Harrison Weber:

Stripe has done a simple, but beautiful thing: it turned the garbage that is the average payment form and made it suck less. The button alone may not blow you away (if you’re a designer, it may), but the fact that something this gorgeous has the potential to become wide-spread makes us excited.

The problem is that with the Stripe interface appearing in an <iframe>, rather than as a distinct Web page, there’s no way for the customer to know that it’s legit. You can’t tell whether it’s a secure connection, which domain is serving the form, or whether there’s a green extended validation bar.

Kindle Paperwhite

John Gruber:

It’s good that you can use the touchscreen to turn pages, but why not include dedicated page-turning buttons as well? The e-ink Kindles are designed to do one thing really well: display long-form text. Page-turning is at the heart of the Kindle reading experience. An active Kindle reader is going to go to the next page hundreds — in some cases, I’m sure, even thousands — of times every week. There should not just be buttons for page-turning, but great buttons. Buttons exquisitely designed and engineered to be perfectly placed and delightfully clickable. The problem with using the touchscreen to turn pages is that you have to move your thumb, from the bezel to the display and then back to the bezel after tapping, each time. With page-turning buttons on the bezel, like on the old pre-touchscreen Kindles, you never had to move your thumbs while reading. Not having to move your thumbs is one way a dedicated e-reader could hold an advantage over tablets like the iPad and Kindle Fire — a missed opportunity here.

Also, page-turning buttons would reduce the number of fingerprints on the screen and let you turn the page while wearing gloves.