But for me it certainly wasn't. Useful wouldn't be on the list of words I would use to describe my interface with U3 software.

To explain: I bought a Kingston 1GB USB Flash Memory stick to put on my key chain. It was mostly to move files (mp3s mostly, but other stuff as well) between my machine at home and my work machine. I went for the Kingston since it was at least $10 cheaper than the other ones at Circuit City.

What did I get for my $10 savings? A nice little drive and some "smart" software from a company called U3.

The drive I like. The software? Not so much.
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(all apologies to, I believe, Bob Ryan, for stealing the title of this post)

The new A List Apart article, Switchy McLayout: An Adaptive Layout Technique, got me thinking about methods to serve content to mobile browsers. To play around with that in a real world environment (without having to wait around for a client to ask) I started to think seriously about how I want to handle serving content for mobile browsers here at Drunkenfist.com. The above article is nice in concept (especially since it works on the other end of the spectrum), but it doesn't do anything to limit the overall file sizes (in fact I imagine it adds to the size of the style sheets) or how much/what type of content is sent to the browsers. What I really want is a low overhead scheme for serving proper mobile friendly pages.
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People ask, I deliver…

I was asked, in a comment, to elaborate on my throwaway line about the interface for LinkedIn being terrible. I started to reply in another comment, typed for a little bit and then realized I'd written a hundred or so words in about thirty seconds. I thought, "there's a proper post in this somewhere" and then moved the whole circus up here. What follows are basically unfiltered thoughts about the interface based on my experience with it yesterday- trying to update my profile and trying to add one person as a connection.
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HFI updated my HFI-Certified Usability Analyst program listing within thirty minutes of me sending in a request. Not too shabby. Now I just need to add a little bio and I'll be Mr. Cool.

Where Visual Design Meets Usability – An Interview with Luke Wroblewski, Part II

"It’s also very valuable to look at the visual design from the perspective of what is absolutely necessary to communicate. Do you really need a different background, font size, font color, and drop shadow to distinguish that content? Would just a background color suffice? A common tendency I see is over designing, such as employing too many different colors and too many different graphic elements, which ultimately result in visual noise or just design-for-design’s sake."

That speaks to the core of the way I look at the web.

(yes, I'll read the whole article eventually. I collect those and the HFI newsletters and read them in one big Usability blur)

(I'm slowly pulling in some old posts from my blog @ raizlabs.)