I don't like the form field labels inside the fields:
1. When I go to the login page on my PC or Nexus 7, I see a blinking caret at the beginning of the "Email address" text and I have no idea whether I need to select that text so my typing will overwrite it, or if I should just start typing.
2. When I go to the page on my Android phone, I don't see the "Email address" text at all, just a blank field with no indication of what goes there. I have to tap outside any field to see what that field is for.
I don't think labels inside fields should ever be combined with automatically putting the focus in one of the fields. That forces you to leave the label in place when the focus is on a field, which is a recipe for confusion. Conventional labels are much more friendly.
After I type in my email address (in the .to domain; see my profile here), it shows me a picture of myself as soon as I complete the address. That's cool, but when I hit Tab to go to the next field it says "Did you mean mg@me.com". Huh? Perhaps if you find that you've succeeded in fetching a gravatar, you should not use the "did you mean" message. The gravatar itself is a better confirmation that I've got the right email than any possible second-guessing you could do about domain names.
Also, your blog is pretty hard to read. The text is barely more than 50% contrast, really faint and washed out. Why do modern web designers think text contrast is their enemy?
To fix points 1 & 2, they could overlay the label to the left and have the caret start to the right of the label, like in MailChimp's login page: https://login.mailchimp.com
Oh, that mailchimp page is nicely done. Very simple implementation too: they basically just gave the input element a bunch of left padding and absolutely positioned both it and the label element inside a wrapper div with position:relative.
I'm not a fan of the inline labels either. The main issue for me is when I autofill a moderately long form; once the fields are filled, there's no way for me to confirm that Chrome actually autofilled the right fields without clearing each one individually. (Of course, this is partly Chrome's fault for occasionally filling the wrong fields in the first place.)
I'm surprised to see this design used so much, even by big players that should know better. I placed an order on store.apple.com a couple of years ago, and afterwards, I realized Chrome had autofilled my email address (I think) in the street address field. Of course, I wasn't aware of this until I received the order confirmation, so I had to call Apple to fix it. Two years later, and their checkout form still has this problem.
Re #2: How old is your Android phone? Chrome supports input placeholders. They should have a shiv for placeholder support in older browsers, to be honest.
It's a Droid Charge running Gingerbread. Pretty old! I was going to get one of the Galaxy S3 developer edition phones, but those were only available for a few hours a couple of weeks ago.
BTW I hope you meant shim! :-)
(Edit: Oh, I see that "shiv" is also used to mean the same thing as "shim" in the HTML community...)
1. When I go to the login page on my PC or Nexus 7, I see a blinking caret at the beginning of the "Email address" text and I have no idea whether I need to select that text so my typing will overwrite it, or if I should just start typing.
2. When I go to the page on my Android phone, I don't see the "Email address" text at all, just a blank field with no indication of what goes there. I have to tap outside any field to see what that field is for.
I don't think labels inside fields should ever be combined with automatically putting the focus in one of the fields. That forces you to leave the label in place when the focus is on a field, which is a recipe for confusion. Conventional labels are much more friendly.
After I type in my email address (in the .to domain; see my profile here), it shows me a picture of myself as soon as I complete the address. That's cool, but when I hit Tab to go to the next field it says "Did you mean mg@me.com". Huh? Perhaps if you find that you've succeeded in fetching a gravatar, you should not use the "did you mean" message. The gravatar itself is a better confirmation that I've got the right email than any possible second-guessing you could do about domain names.
Also, your blog is pretty hard to read. The text is barely more than 50% contrast, really faint and washed out. Why do modern web designers think text contrast is their enemy?