Having followed the Ruby on Rails weblog I’ve known about Bla-bla List for some time now. However it’s appearance on Forever Geek made me figure I’d give the application a shot and try it out for size.
Now, I won’t get into the technical side of the arguments, but Bla-bla List fails to even come close to competing with the experience of using Ta-da List.
Reasons Ta-da’ing beats Bla-bla’ing
- My scroll wheel actually scrolls
- I can copy/paste parts of my lists
- Newly added items don’t appear in seemingly random places on the list
- Doesn’t force new windows on me
- I can use my back and print buttons
- Navigating “up” (Shift + Up) gives me the next sensible part of the hierarchy
- I can go directly to my lists from a bookmark
- Popup dialogs are actually popup dialogs, not something floating inside the window
- Confirmation dialog has buttons in a sane order (Yes to the left)
- My browsers autocompletion and username/password remembering features work
- I can control my fontsize and colors
- HTML > Flash
(This list is naturally also available as a shared list.)
By heavy use of Flash Bla-bla List not only fails to create an application that technically isn’t comparable to Ta-da List, but also fails to provide a user experience that comes to close the one of Ta-da List.