If you've been on Twitter over the past day or so, you may have noticed some big changes to the way the site shows users' lists of followers and followees. Instead of just showing names and icon, these pages now display more detailed information, including location and most recent tweet. All of the actions you have available for each user are collected into a compact drop-down menu, so you can mention, direct message, block, follow or unfollow the user quickly.

Several users have correctly pointed out that the new design makes Twitter look a lot more like an iPhone-optimized site. It's definitely an improvement in many ways, but there's one small quirk I have to take issue with: in the old layout, the appearance of the "direct message" link next to a username gave a quick visual indication of whether that user was following you. You can still figure this out by clicking the drop-down menu, but it's definitely not as efficient as before. On the other hand, the new design does a great job of showing who you're following when you browse another user's list.

Password masking - the practice of replacing the characters a user types into password entry field with bullets - has been widespread on the web for a long time. Jakob Nielsen recently wrote a thought-provoking post suggesting masking is hurting more than it helps, and that it's only being kept around out of habit. I'll try to make the case for and against masking here, and let Download Squad readers weigh in on the subject.

Down With Masking:

Masking ruins the user experience. When users can't see what they're typing, they're likely to make mistakes and second-guess themselves. Did I forget my password, or did I just make a typo? After enough login failures, they'll either stop using your site or call support. As a result, users try to get around the problems of masking by entering a simple, insecure password, or by copying and pasting their passwords in. Why are we continuing a practice that undermines user security and adds uncertainty to the user experience? Masking has got to go.

Masking Forever:

Masking doesn't make users feel insecure, it makes them feel more secure. It was instituted for a reason: to keep someone who might be reading over your shoulder from reading your password. Maybe this has become less of a concern over the years, but masking has picked up some new, equally important uses, too. What if you're screensharing with a coworker or recording a screencast that happens to include your site's login process? Users have come to expect masking. When they run into the rare site that doesn't use it, they get nervous that their password might be sent unencrypted. Part of good design is giving users what they expect, so keep giving them password masking.

So, readers, what do you think? Take the poll, and let me know in the comments if you've got better arguments for or against.

There's a minor uproar happening on Twitter over Microsoft's plans to continue using Word to render HTML email in Outlook 2010. Fixoutlook.org reports that nearly 8,000 people have signed a petition via Twitter to encourage Microsoft to change its mind and support web standards before the new version of Office leaves beta. To back up its claims, the site links to an HTML email message rendered in Outlook 2000, and the same message in Outlook 2010: the new version looks a whole a lot worse.

By sticking with Word's rendering engine, which Microsoft started using to render email in Outlook 2007, Microsoft would also be sticking designers with outdated font tags and tables, instead of the latest CSS hotness. According to The Email Standards Project, Microsoft's reason for doing this is to allow Outlook users to use Word's prepackaged design tools and email templates, and have those render correctly for other Outlook users. Microsoft itself is worried that rendering through a browser could slow performance and lead to inconsistent appearance across different HTML engines.

Google's blogging about making the web faster, and they're backing it up with Page Speed, a Firefox add-on that makes sure your webpages use best practices to load as quickly as possible. Page Speed was quietly launched earlier this month on the Google Code blog, but now it's mentioned on The Official Google Blog, in a post that lays out some factors that slow down the web, and how Google thinks they can be fixed.

The Google plan for a faster web includes stuff like HTML5 support, more performance diagnostic tools like Page Speed and Yahoo's YSlow, and greater adoption of broadband. So, what are some of the best practices that Page Speed might suggest? Mostly, minor code tweaks like cleaning up your CSS so you only use each declaration once, or removing unnecessary tags from your HTML. There's some more advanced stuff that gets into PHP and JavaScript as well.

One note: Page Speed also requires the Firebug add-on for Firefox, which is very useful in its own right.

Fotografix is an amazing example of what creative developers can accomplish in less than one meg. The 680Kb portable application is a very capable image editor and provides nearly all the same functionality I utilize in Photoshop on a daily basis. It was a no-brainer to include in my list of 40 apps you can download in two seconds.

Only a few changes have taken place, but they're important additions. First and foremost, documentation has been beefed up and now covers nearly every Fotografix feature. As far as editing function go, layers can now be merged down and you can flatten an image in one fell swoop. An external paste command has been added as well: control-v works with the internal Fotografix clipboard, while shift+control+v will paste the contents of your Windows clipboard.

The last time this little gem hit DownloadSquad, the developer's server got hammered and the download became inaccessible. Fortunately, it's now mirrored on Freeware Files.

Aviary has added a new tool to its suite of online image editing applications. The company is calling Falcon an "image markup editor" as a way to differentiate it from Phoenix, which is Aviary's online "image editor."

Basically, Falcon was designed to power the new Talon Firefox add-on I mentioned last week. It offers basic image editing tools without all the bells and whistles found in Phoenix. The utility is less than 90k in size, which means it loads much faster than Talon, letting you edit images found on the web or uploaded from your desktop almost immediately. Today Aviary released it as a standalone tool that will work in almost any web browser.

Falcon doesn't support layers like Phoenix. And the tools are all much simpler to use, which could make Falcon attractive to anyone intimidated by fuller featured image editors like Phoenix, or Photoshop.

There are plenty of people out there who would be willing to give Linux a try if Linux UI designs looked more like Mac OS X. Mac4Lin brings Apple's UI design to a Linux install near you, including great details like app icons and even the Dock. It looks like the Mac4Lin project had been stagnating for a while, but it's finally at v1.0, and looking good.

Mac4Lin works on a variety of Linux flavors, including Ubuntu 9.04 and GNOME 2.26, but there's no KDE version (yet). A lot of third-party apps that use GTK for skinning, like Firefox and Songbird, look great in Mac4Lin. An unstall script is also included in the latest version, in case you decent you don't like the OS X look, and you'd rather go back to your default UI.

Now that I've got a full-time work laptop and a second system to reformat every other day I finally have a reason to customize my desktop with some snazzy wallpapers, sound schemes, and icons. I like to keep my desktop lighthearted, so I tend to lean toward cartoony, fun elements.

All of these sets are totally free for personal use, so download away! If you know another great set, feel free to share your links in the comments!

Comic Tiger - Obviously Mac-themed, but the set works well on Windows desktops, too. Created by Fasticon, but no longer listed on their free downloads - fortunately InterfaceLIFT still has it.

Desktoon - I first came across Everaldo's icons when playing with some Linux live CDs several years ago. Desktoon is packed with 31 pieces of hand-drawn goodness. Available from Yellow Icon.

John Watson, the man behind the many fun photo-related web applications at BigHugeLabs was feeling a little down last week, and in response he produced yet another web app. But this one is a little different; while his other web apps often provide inspiration as a by-product of other actions, Watson's latest site, dubbed Ideas, is intended as a source of inspiration as a primary focus.

When you visit Ideas, you are presented with a large search box, beside which sits a button that simply states, "inspire me!" Type in a word, and the site will present you with a series of sets of information that is somehow related to the word entered. If you're feeling bereft of ideas for even a word to enter, a few examples are provided such as love, beauty, sorrow, yes, red, winter, home, africa, kiss.

Depending on the word you enter, Ideas may or may not be able to find examples of the following types:

• Famous quote
• Creative Commons licensed photos from Flickr
• Color swatches from COLOURlovers.com
• Songs from Last.fm
• Related words from BigHugeLabs.com
• Videos from YouTube.com
• Listings from Etsy.com
• Bookmarks from Delicious.com
• Article from Wikipedia.com

What a great way for creative people that are looking for a little boost in the inspiration department to start with a specific word and serendipitously follow a trail to something that may well inspire them.

Ah, the dreaded comment phase! You've submitted your design for a new site, and you're waiting for your client to get back to you with ridiculous last minute changes that probably won't even be communicated clearly. There's unfortunately not yet an app to make your client smarter, but Redmark might make the comments easier to understand.

Redmark is a web-based visual markup tool for designs, so you'll know exactly which part of your work each comment refers to. On the client end, it's very easy to use. Dragging or zooming the design never loses the marker your comment is attached to, so it's always clear which element of a design you're talking about. Just hit "new comment" and click on the relevant spot. Redmark even sends an email notification from the design when a new version goes up.

I got a chance to catch up with Aviary today at a CEA event in New York, and the first thing I wanted to know is when the company will be ready to launch its web-based audio editor. Aviary makes web-based image editing tools, but the company purchased online audio editor DigiMix in March with the intention of launching its own audio production tools. And with the recent announcement that music community site Indaba Music would be updating its web based audio production suite, I was wondering what Aviary had up its sleeve.

So here's the deal. Sometime this summer Aviary will launch its digital audio editing application. It will let users create and mix audio using a web interface. There will be a variety of sounds available to work with, or you'll be able to upload your own audio tracks. At launch you won't be able to record new audio tracks using the web interface, something Indaba Music's new suite is expected to offer.

But while Indaba music's site is built around a community of users who share and talk about music, Aviary is building an application that will have an open API that the company hopes will be used across the web. In other words, if all goes according to plan, you won't just be able to edit audio at Aviary.com, but also on other sites making use of the tools.

In the meantime, Aviary is continuing to move ahead with its image editing tools. The company recently launched an Firefox add-on that lets you right-click on any image in your web browser to edit it with Aviary. The company hasn't begun to promote the add-on yet, because it's still experimental. But it's already been downloaded over 5,000 times.

Long Zheng has been digging around again, and uncovered some pretty stunning high-resolution icons for the myriad of devices Windows 7 supports out-of-the-box.

Many of them are packed in DDORes.dll in your %systemroot%\system32 folder. If you'd like to manually assign one of the icons from the DLL to another shortcut, download IconsExtract from NirSoft (as always with Nir, it's a free application).

Browse to DDORES.dll, select the icons you want to extract (there are 81 in total) , and choose "save selected icons" from the file menu. Someone has also uploaded them to Rapidspread, in case you don't have access to a Windows 7 install.

Looking for more icons? Feedbacktool.dll, Shell32.dll (of course), and wmp.dll are good places to start. If you find some more, feel free to share them in the comments!

One of the challenges of web design is making sure your site renders properly in the most popular browsers your visitors use. Sometimes, this means installing an extra browser or two (or ten) on your system, to preview your page in each one. It might even mean running multiple operating systems. Well, Adobe BrowserLab aims to fix all that by generating previews of a page as it would look in several different browsers, across multiple operating systems.

You can view the previews side-by-side to get a direct comparison between Firefox 2 and 3 for Mac or Windows XP, IE 6 and 7 for Windows XP, and Safari 3 for Mac. There's also an Onion Skin mode that allows you to overlay one version on another, with adjustable transparency. Sure, there are some perfectly viable browsers that aren't included, but the most popular players are all there. It will be interesting to see if Adobe expands BrowserLab to reflect the increasing adoption of mobile browsers.

The free preview of BrowserLab is available now, but it's limited and there aren't always slots available. You'll find a "check status" link on the download site to let know whether you can get in.

Using Psykopaint is as easy as uploading a photo and messing with some of the effects sliders on the side to adjust your brush. Don't worry that there's no way to pick colors, your brush will automatically grab them from your photo. There are sliders for both minimum and maximum, which makes your brush unpredictable and the result more organic. If you set a wide range for brush size, for example, each stroke could end up being a completely different width.

To see what some very serious Psykopainters have come up with, check out the site's gallery. There's some strange, beautiful, and spooky artwork there.

Psykopaint is currently free, but a premium desktop version is in the works.