Amazon

Amazon's menu prediction cone

A screenshot of the Amazon menu, with a triangle/cone overlaid demonstrating the region wherein the menu will remain locked to the current item if the pointer doesn't stray outside of it.
A visualization of the mathematical cone that Amazon uses to predict the menu item you're heading for. Cone is not actually visible.

Standard drop-down menus that contain sub-menus very often have no concept of user intent, and this can lead to a repeating frustration that most of us have likely run into: straying off course by even a single pixel can cause the sub-menu to close instantly. Ways around this include adding a delay to try and account for user error, but that doesn’t feel as snappy. Amazon has a really clever solution that accounts for user error yet responds instantly:

At every position of the [pointer] you can picture a triangle between the current mouse position and the upper and lower right corners of the dropdown menu. If the next mouse position is within that triangle, the user is probably moving their [pointer] into the currently displayed submenu. Amazon uses this for a nice effect. As long as the [pointer] stays within that blue triangle the current submenu will stay open. It doesn’t matter if the [pointer] hovers over “Appstore for Android” momentarily – the user is probably heading toward “Learn more about Cloud Drive.”

And if the [pointer] goes outside of the blue triangle, they instantly switch the submenu, giving it a really responsive feel.

So if you’re as geeky as me and think something this trivial is cool, I made a jQuery plugin that fires events when detecting this sort of directional menu aiming: jQuery-menu-aim.

See the source link for more.

I have nothing to hide

I know you are not a terrorist but still you give privacy for understood in many aspects of your daily physical life. You expect it every time you go to the bathroom and close the door, you expect it when you go to the doctor or you confide to a close friend.

[…]

Everyone has things that keep to themselves, things that only say to a special person, things that can be shared with close friends or family, things they talk only to a doctor and so on and so forth.

If in real life we have so many layers, why don’t we expect the same level of privacy on internet? We are giving to Facebook, Google, Linkedin and the others more information about ourselves than we give to our SO or even to ourselves (remember Google is investing in DNA mapping).

Browse Against the Machine

[T]he web looks more and more like a feudal system, where the geography of the web has been partitioned off by the Frightful Five. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon are our lord and protectors, exacting a royal sum for our online behaviors. We’re the serfs and tenants, providing homage inside their walled fortresses. Noble upstarts are erased or subsumed under their existing order.