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Previewing without making the commitment to click has become a hot thing in software and I think it’s wonderful.

Those of you who have started to use Vista will notice the preview if you hover over the minimized windows in the taskbar. It’s a very useful since clicking on those minimized windows to see what it actually is was a common task for me in XP. And it’s actually live, you can watch a live thumbnail version of your media player playing your happy feet movie.

Snap has taken this same idea to the web. As Sid points out it’s now standard on wordpress hosted blogs, so you’ll be seeing a lot more of it. This basically lets you see a visual preview of the page the link is going to take you to so you can then make a better decision on whether to actually click or not.

Now I’m still undecided about this, I think this is very useful in some situations, this would be for pages that don’t describe the link destination well in their text, so you know when you click on my brother, you’ll know whether that’s gonna take you to my brother’s blog or a picture of him without a shirt at the beach This type of linking happens a lot on blogs especially snarky ones that are trying to make a particular point at the time, so it’s good in some cases.

However, you can really only see the basic page layout, you can’t possibly make out the text and it can be annoying if you’re scrolling through a page and you get what is essentially a pop-up. There have been negative comments on it as well, you’ll see a good summary of the bad points in these posts.

Now moving on from snap in particular, what else can we do with this idea … I hate spam, I think everyone does. I have many web based mail accounts and almost all of them get spam. The spam filters form the email providers have gotten better but I still get spam. Sometimes the spammers are quite good in the social engineering aspect and I’ll see a From name and a subject that could actually be not spam but I’m unsure. If I could just hover over the link (to the spam email) and then see a preview of the mail, I’d immediately be able to tell if it’s spam (the huge Viagra image) or not. Can someone implement this? The technology is a little different, its basically a tiny browser in a pop-up but with no functionality. As far as I can tell, Snap uses images usually cached from before so it wouldn’t help here but you get the idea.

It’s still not going to the spammers site (to get him/her advertising money), its still within your provider (Live / Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail) but it saves you a click and seeing a full size version of spam versus a small one which should be less offending.

How hard would this be to create? request the page (I guess you actually have to since its dynamically generated and an image of an old email is pretty useless), turn it into an image and resize it to be smaller. How fast would it be and can we make it optional, a right click ajaxy option? And after all this is it worth the trouble?

So the moral of the story is previews are good, but web people (at least the hardcore techies) tend to be very anti-pop up so implement previews when its useful.

Keywords: snap, preview, vista, wordpress

This entry was posted on Friday, January 26th, 2007 at 11:08 am and is filed under tech, complain. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.