the tool is called “Glide Effortless”, and rumours about it being a UI wonder and all, I had to try it out for myself.

As normal procedure I always try to scan the site for validity and trust matters, by asking myself a set of rather simple questions; who are these people? where do they come from?, do I trust them? and last but not least what’s the catch? (price)

I was a little confused by the obvious lack of any pricing information, but decided to try and sign up.. All went pretty good.. Hmm suddenly it required my full address, and I mean required as in you have to fill it to continue. Eager as I was I happily typed it in.. And hit next button on the sign-up wizard…

Then it happened, I was asked to choose a product subscription type ranging from free 100mb account to some expensive ones, seemingly only to differentiate by the data storage limitations. Not being a complete retard I choose free account as my first choice, strangely enough this was the last available option – they seem to think free version should be your last choice!!? Not so logical approach since everyone naturally wants to evaluate such a product before buying it (with all the hype this product should sell itself, should it not??).

Then I was presented with a nice screen telling me to give away my creditcard information, even though I had choosen a free subscription, they wrote they needed the information in order to validate my personal information.

Oh well.. The result was that, I like most sane people; hit the “Cancel” button, the wizard closed – and I will continue to try and live happily without this marvel of state-of-the-art oracle of an application…

I did however get a good laugh when reading about their patent pending ui “navigation bubbles”, which more or less resembles 200 game ui’s already.

Glide Effortless

Mozilla Firefox 1.5 beta adds preliminary support for these properties, so that developer can begin playing with it, not however that the reason the properties begin with “-moz-” is that the CSS3 Multi-column specification is still a draft, so therefore they should not be used for real web design yet, unless it can make a clean fallback when meeting non-mozilla 1.5+ clients.

I have created CSS3: Multi-column module demo for Firefox 1.5 beta – which shows some of the wonders of the new multi-column features, as well a some other CSS properties to create a nice flowing page with highly dynamic columns, and pretty stable compared to many of the older methods, but you need to use Mozilla Firefox 1.5 beta – which I would only recommend to Web Developers.

You can also check some screenshots of the demo, showing it’s ability to create as many columns as it can, while maintaining nice readability thru limited line-width.

Don’t believe the rumours, check the demo yourself here:

CSS3: Multi-column module demo for Firefox 1.5 beta

See more code samples at Mozilla Developer: CSS3 Columns.

A List Apart: Articles: Introducing the CSS3 Multi-Column Module

Scott Berkun: “It’s a sad day and a good day. For years I’ve held onto my IE install out of love. I worked on IE 1.0 thru 5.0, and was one of the people that designed much of its UI. But my love for the past has faded. Last week I switched to Firefox: and I’ve been happy.”

Berkun blog: Why I switched to Firefox

* Usability issues with XMLHttpRequest.

* Usable XMLHttpRequest in Practice