What TechCrunch is trying to do is create a 4x larger version of the iPhone centered around the browsing experience. To do this they need three things: a good price point, intuitive user interface, and beautiful industrial design. They’ve made good progress, but they are clearly not there yet; $299 is extremely close to the full-featured HP 2133-KX869AT 8.9-inch Mini-Note PC (C7-M 1.2 GHz Processor, 1 GB RAM, 120 GB Hard Drive, Linux) for $350. Consumers would probably rather buy a netbook–miniature notebook–than a browser-tablet at the $300 price point.

To improve their price, the TechCrunch team needs to throw away all components adding cost–the external ports, the webcam, and anything else that gets in the way. They’ll have to aggressively negotiate manufacturing contracts. But, if they can hit their original $200 target, they’ll have a winner.

The next ingredient is the killer UI. That’s what made the iPhone into an overnight hit, something Gizmodo reader KVirtanen noted:

Simply think through everything. Make it look and work like it’s worth over 300$ and people will be all over it. Listen to your potential customers when making decisions. Make it so that it almost slips on to your hands and your fingers just automatically finds the on-screen buttons (and maybe also some physical ones). Let people with good eye comment on the design.

This way it’ll be a long-lasting tool, not something you’ll end up replacing after you get fed up with the way it works or after it breaks.

Finally, the design of the case in prototype B sucks. It’s thick and unwieldy. Mike says that “It’s about twice as thick as is needs to be without further engineering – we just built in a safety thickness in case of heat or other issues.” Getting it down to .7″ thick and removing much of the unnecessary border around the screen will go a long way to making it consumer friendly. From the screens, it also looks like the bezel rides quite a bit higher than the screen surface. The iPhone face is one smooth surface, something that make it feel like a quality product a person would want to own.

If prototype C can be profitable at $200, throws away all the components not central to the TC Tablet’s mission, has a great user interface, and looks 100000x sexier than prototype B, I’ll be willing to revisit this headline. Otherwise, competing with the netbooks, it’s doomed.

Update: Sad to hear that due to an intellectual property dispute with their partners, the CrunchPad is dead. I was looking forward to seeing it compete in the marketplace, and die a more noble death.

Here’s the setup. You’ve got a piece of javascript redirecting the user on a click (yes, I know this is a bad idea). Hopefully you got this from a legacy app:

<script language="javascript"><!--
function go(href) {
     $('spinner').style.display = '';
     location.href = href;
}
//--></script>
<a href="defaultAction.htm" onClick="go(this.href);return false">go</a>

Internet Explorer stops animated gifs when there is a javascript event, so if you try this code, it’s going to fail dramatically. What you need (for IE6 and IE7) is a hack:

<script language="javascript"><!--
function go(href) {
     $('spinner').style.display = '';
     location.href = href;
     $('spinner').src = $('spinner').src;
}
//--></script>
<a href="defaultAction.htm" onClick="go(this.href);return false">go</a>

Yes, reassigning the src attribute of an img will cause the image to keep animating, even when in the process of loading the next page. Note–this doesn’t work as well in Firefox. For that, you should either (a) upgrade the application to load data through AJAX, not URL redirection, or (b) use an iframe pointing to the image.

PS, if you need some ajax loading indicators, there’s a bunch!

Bloglines, please stop sucking. It’s been a couple weeks now. I don’t want to have to move to Google Reader. Sigh.

According to Michael Arrington, the major problem with Bloglines is that it doesn’t update feeds with any frequency. But that’s not the only thing; the site itself is slow, hard to navigate, and hasn’t been updated in literally years. Here’s the UI that’s been in use since at least 2006:

Ask, please update me to something modern!

The beta design that Bloglines has been cooking up is nearly entirely worthless; it takes a bad design, and essentially reduces the amount of on-screen contrast. It’s also still pretty slow:

Here’s an interesting, funny blooper from their homepage refresh (it looks like Ask, when they bought them, finally figured out the homepage was extremely ugly):

That’s right, the “screenshot” for their mobile bloglines interface is actually of an iPhone checking voicemail? What?? How is that possibly related to an RSS reader’s mobile interface…

The new wall page, the first page you see when logging in

• The new “All Posts / Wall Posts / Posts by Me” filters are nice.
• Only three posted items in the right bar? It should have at least 10.
• Posted items have a thumbnail and text; without the text, they are mostly blank space.
• There is a ton of blank space between the footer and chat bar!

The new info profile page, tells you about you

• The edit information button renders wrong.
• The “fan pages” have too much blank space with the vertical layout!

The photos page has the best layout

• The photos page is perfect, the spacing is great. There’s little wasted space here!

Note also that on a wide monitor, there is just a huge amount of blank space to the sides of each page. Also, Mashable has their own “New Facebook” review; they conclude stuff isn’t “working as I’d expect.”

The first thing I get, as I type “Obama,” is a list of categories that SearchMe finds relevant. I click on “Politicians” and it takes me to the next screen, the main area for exploring search results:

There are a few features you should note that set the SearchMe results apart from their competition. First, they keep the list of categories you’re interested in just one click away from instant filtering at the top of the results. Second, all of the available space of the page is filled with a gigantic preview of the search results. The title of the website is shown at the bottom, along with the site URL when you mouseover the results. Essentially, their search results are a better version of Apple’s coverflow, applied to websites. Clicking on a preview will take you directly to the page of interest, in the same tab, just like most search engines do today.

Their dynamic snippets code is nice, as well, highlighting the search terms you used in multiple colours. It appears to have been implemented directly in the coverflow-like flash engine, or behind the scenes is coming back as a new layer of image, as it loads only after the high resolution preview has loaded. An unfortunate side-effect of their highlighting algorithm is that when searching for multiple words, like “Calderon de la Barca,” the words will be highlighted separately, even if found next to each other.

Not all their results work well; for example, searching for “China” leads me into irrelevance, regardless of the category I choose, and also brings up this half-rendered view of NBA China, that my own browser renders properly. Other search terms also return odd categories and funny previews, but I imagine that this is something that will improve over time. The big problems for a search engine, responsiveness and interface, are already solved as SearchMe is both lightning fast and beautiful.

If you’re interested, you can go check out their blog or signup to the private beta. Apparently, the venture is Sequoia backed, according to Techcrunch, which probably means it’s serious about being a big web search contender in the future. According to Louis Grey, the searchme spider is aggressively hitting his blog, too. It will be interesting to come back and a year and see how SearchMe has evolved. The most likely outcome for this is being acquired by one of the big four–Facebook, Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft–since it’s hard to imagine unseating any of them in the popular mindset.