Sarath Chandra Pandurangi's Blog

UserScripts are fun, useful and often productive . A lot of sites have small improvements you think could add a lot of value. And just because you are not the author of the site, you need not give up. With some basic javascript skills, you could write a userscript, install it on your browser, and make the site behave.

IE9 has some really cool tech upgrades .Here are a few errant UI features that makes IE9 less than perfect. It almost gives the impression that the UI engineers did not do a stellar job. or IE9 UI is a half baked cake.

Firefox Panorama has a unique way of organizing tabs into groups so that you can work with a loot of tabs (really lot of them). While the Side Tabs experiment is totally disjunct concept, The effective use of screen real estate is key measure in both. With just screen real estate , its still Panorama that wins the battle. Side Tabs seems turned out to be a sore experiment. For one thing, it may be designed only for netbooks. There are other considerations for developers perspective. Many a time, the height is considered variable. The width, however is counted to be under standard 800, 1024, 1600 etc, those of the video resolutions. Many fixed layouts are drafted to work on these width numbers. Free flows however do not have this issue. Now, having Side tabs in picture, it creates two sets of fixed layouts to work with. Firefox Panorama not only tackles width issue in question, also provides a organising benefit. So Which one is it? Most probably Chrome will eventually mimic Pan...

I really like Citi's Virtual card concept . With this service, you never have to give out your real credit card number online. Citi provides you with a tool that can generate a virtual credit card number. You use it for any merchant online. The card number is totally random. Cannot be traced back to original card number. The Tool is of two types. You can download and install it (a flash based *application* - NOT an air app - WHY?) or your can launch in a browser. The install variant is only available for windows (has a specific installer works only on PC ). For macs and *nix, You have use the launcher. NOTE: Donot use Virtual Account Numbers for purchases that require you to show your credit card at time of pick-up (e.g., movie tickets, etc.). I fell in that trap twice. You can talk to the manager, but hey, why the hassle? Now, Why am I, a developer, taking special interest in promoting this? Apart from the general push for privacy, I want to show how poorly designed is the...