I used to use the design of a site as a quick measure for how mature the site was. For a variety of reasons: improving tutorials, better tools, resources like bootstrap, this is no longer the case. I’m pretty happy with the design of this site, and Allison (not a designer) did it in just a few hours.
These are things I note while gauging site maturity:

• Can I reset my password?
• Am I forwarded to the requested page after being bounced to a log in page?
• Are emails sent in multipart/mime format with an effective HTML and plain-text version?
• Is the URL system consistent and meaningful?
• Are there clear links to the privacy policy and terms of service?

None of these elements tend to be priorities while a site is being developed, but they pull at developers to be fixed over time. The more of these things a site has, the longer I tend to believe it’s been around.
What do you look at?

I saw The Hobbit an unexpected Journey last night, it was pretty good. I liked some of the changes from the books a bit more than others, but I think that overall the additional will help cement Tolkien’s universe in the minds of many.

What I hated was the overall movie going experience. It was a relatively full theatre, full of people paying full price for a 3D movie, currently $14.25/person before concessions and taxes. So clearly the room had to contain a few people whose social lives couldn’t sustain 3 hours without txting. There was also a man sitting in the third row who I think was completing his own screenplay on one of the largest & brightest screen cell phones I’ve seen. I heard a few people ask him to put it away, including someone who got up walked down four rows, and tapped him on the shoulder. This seemed to constrain him to only keeping brief notes for the rest of the film, but he very much wasn’t done.

It confuses me that we’re a society so inconsiderate that people do that, but simultaneously so civil that no one started a fight.

— Paul Reinheimer (@preinheimer) January 21, 2013

The pivotal moment for me was when a theatre employee walked in, past the guy on his phone (the brightest thing in the room by far, including the movie screen) sign the check in form on the far wall, then back past the phone user once more, without a word, and out of the room.

Perhaps demographics have pushed so much that the dollar value of guests who want to user their cell phones out weighs the dollar value of guests who find that disruptive; theatres are best serving their stock holders by not stopping them. Fair enough, but I’m not going to give them my money while they gladly accept and embrace people who disrupt what I’ve paid to enjoy so much. For the price of two tickets I can get the Blu-Ray in a few months, turn the lights & my phone off, and enjoy the film uninterrupted.

Also: fancy “Digital Picture” we paid to enjoy froze twice for several seconds during the film, but that was by far a smaller disruption.

I’m one developer on a visualization project using d3.js, which is pretty fantastic. I’m working on the control panel at present, which displays a series of buttons to the end user to allow them to filter out certain metrics in the data set. The buttons do a bit more than that, they’ve also got a nifty horizontal bar in them that indicates what percentage of that data is presently included. So if we were visualizing fast food data, and you filtered out Hamburgers the progress bar for McDonalds might drop down to 40%.

We have a bit of hierarchical data that lends itself well to nested drop downs. When the user hovers over a button for a while, I’ll display the drop down to let them explore the data in greater detail. Things were working well in Chrome, but my :hover pseudo-event never fired to display the drop down in Firefox. I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out why. My buttons seemed quite simple. <button> <div class=“drophead”>Food</div> <ul> <li>Hamburger</li> <li>Fries</li> </ul> <div class=“barchart”></div> </button>

My usual fallback when I can’t figure something out on the web, especially if there’s inconsistencies involved, is to validate. Validation revealed that my divs and uls were not valid children of the button element. Chrome managed to make this work, but Firefox had issues handling pseudo-events for these invalid children, so my drop downs didn’t work. Even though it worked in Chrome now, there was no guarantee that my invalid syntax would continue to function long term. I swapped the buttons out for divs, and asked a co-worker to help with some refactoring as divs don't allow value attributes as buttons do.

W3C Validator saves the day again.