Today I read an article on pricey burgers and was prompted to launch a slideshow to see pictures of the burgers (@ Forbes Traveller)

Besides making my mouth water and making me wonder if I would every buy a $150 burger, the article also annoyed me with its annoying experience via the annoying slideshow mechanism. There are times when an automatic slideshow are nice - for example, looking through a new photoset of my brother’s kid - especially if there’s a group of people watching at the same time. But how is an automatic slideshow of entries with text that needs to be read a good idea?

Few people read at the same rate, and even a single person will read the entries at different speeds depending on what else is happening on the computer, how interesting the text or picture is, etc. If I finish reading and it doesn’t advance to the next slide, I’m annoyed. If I haven’t finished and it advances to the next slide, I’m annoyed. Except for the miniscule percentage of instances when the slideshow advances exactly when I’m ready for it to advance, this is a lose-lose experience.

For me to read an entry, I need to click “stop” to disable autoadvancement. Then I click “next” to continue to the next slide. Here’s the most annoying behavior - once I click “next”, it returns to autoadvance mode, forcing me to click “stop” on every slide! Grrrrr.

If you want to put something like this in a slideshow format, fine. Just don’t make autoadvance the default setting, because that’s really annoying.

Here’s a nifty little video history of the mobile phone:

@ Viddler

Some of the things that I found particularly interesting:

1. How quickly (I’d say within the first 5 years) the general form factor evolved to being very similar to the common designs that are still in use today.

2. Once designer aesthetics came into play in the late 90’s, it really became a prominent part of mobile phone design.

3. There sure have been some funky looking phone. Both good and bad.