Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox: April 1, 2013 Mobile Usability for Cats: Essential Design Principles for Felines…

Other findings:

• Rapid double and triple taps are common among felines, especially kittens; any response from a multi-tap should be even faster/louder/blinkier than from a single tap.

  [...]

• Swiping is expected to work from any and every direction, so ensure that your targets are extra responsive and include corresponding sounds.
• Animation is especially important, including blinking. In fact, if your site or app doesn't animate, it's pretty much useless.
• • This is a revolutionary finding, considering that blinking has been contraindicated in web design ever since it was #3 on the list of top-10 design mistakes of 1996.
• A sensory-activated "pause mode" is highly suggested, as nearly half the cats randomly stopped what they were doing to lie down on their devices and stretch, nap, or self-groom for extended periods before resuming their tasks.

[Via MetaFilter]

HTTP Status Cats.¹

[Via MetaFilter]

1. To do: edit WordPress configuration to include local copies of the appropriate images in error pages. ↩

Kittywood Studios: this explains so much.

[Via James Nicoll]

I did not know that:¹

French law requires that a purebred dog or cat – that is, an animal belonging to one of the breeds listed in the Livre des origines français or the Livre officiel des origins felines – be given a name beginning with a prescribed letter of the alphabet, determined by the year of its birth, rather like the way British car registration plates used to be organised. The alphabetised system began in 1926, with Z omitted. In 1972 the Commission Nationale d'Amélioration Génétique further regularised the system, and K, Q, W, X and Y were also taken out of contention. [...]

1. #376 in an ongoing series. ↩

Ten Obscure Factoids Concerning Albert Einstein:

10. His Cat Suffered Depression

Fond of animals, Einstein kept a housecat which tended to get depressed whenever it rained. Ernst Straus recalls him saying to the melancholy cat: "I know what's wrong, dear fellow, but I don't know how to turn it off."

[Via Interconnected]

Simon's Cat in 'The Box'.

(Previously. And again.)

[Via orbyn.blog]

The internet¹ treats sleeping cats as damage, and routes around them. Just ask Tim Bray, enjoying an evening pottering around writing an application for his phone:

Eventually, Ant built my Android app out of 14 lines of Duby, and I needed the USB cable so I could ship it to the phone. The phone was handy but the USB cable was across the room, and my elderly female cat has earned a few evenings of undisturbed lap time.

Then I remembered that my laptop has a Web server and my phone was on the same home LAN, so I copied the .apk over to /Library/WebServer/Documents/whatever.apk and did an ifconfig -a | grep 192 to find my address and then pointed the phone's browser at http://192.168.1.57/whatever.apk. The phone installed the app, I proved to myself that it worked, and did some further enjoyable tinkering, all while routing round the cat.

Alternatively, as per a comment on that post, this may have been just one more manifestation of the Cat Gravity theory.

1. Pedants will note that Tim Bray was slinging files around on his home network, not on the internet proper. They'd be right, but 'Tim Bray's home intranet treats sleeping cats as damage' didn't fit the original quotation as neatly so I fudged it. Sue me! ↩

17 seconds of concentrated cuteness.¹

[Via Chocolate and Vodka]

1. Yes, it's a kitten video. An awesomely cute kitten video. And your point is…? ↩

The biter bit.

It's the surprised expression on the dog's face that does for me every time…

[Via GromBlog]

Sage advice from Robert Brady:

If one is swinging a cat with any sense of urgency, one should ideally have a short stiff cat and a large target.

Yes, there is a story behind that line.

The playground pile-on from The Matrix Reloaded, reenacted by puppies!

[Via Making Light: Particles]

If Housepets Were Libertarians.

[Via The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century]

Robert E Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian, knew cats:

The life of a cat is not numbered by nine. Usually it is short, violent and tragic. He suffers, and makes others suffer if he can. He is primitive, bestially selfish. He is, in short, a creature of awful and terrible potentialities, a crystalization of primordial self-love, a materialization of the blackness and squalor of the abyss. He is a green-eyed, steel-thewed, fur-clad block of darkness hewed from the Pits which know not light, nor sympathy, nor dreams, nor hope, nor beauty, nor anything except hunger and the satiating of hunger. But he has dwelt with man since the beginning, and when the last man lies down and dies, a cat will watch his throes, and likelier than not, will gorge its abysmal hunger on his cooling flesh.

Brrrr…

[Via Artw, posting to MetaFilter]

How to Tell if Your Cat is Plotting to Kill You.

[Via GromBlog]

Simon's Cat in 'TV Dinner'.

(Previously.)

[Via Progressive Gold]

Cat versus theremin.

[Via Progressive Gold]