Archive for March, 2008

Facebook LogoLong time no write, I have been really busy in the last two weeks. Big news coming professionally. I’ll keep you posted on this.

Schedule aside, there’s an idea that has been on my mind for quite some time. Actually, since I saw the What happens in the Facebook stays in the Facebook Flash presentation, and after my advertising teacher told us something like : “Advertising on the web is great, because you can track the viewers behavior, including pre and post viewing”.

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category Marketing, Social networks tlacroix Sunday 30 March 2008 Comment (0)

Bunker GameIn this saturday morning, I’m pasting my copy, sipping my coffee and sniffing around other peoples blog looking for gems.

Well, no gems found this morning, only a little single-handed pleasure Flash game called Bunker. Free advice: don’t buy the shitty 400$ shot gun, it really sucks.

category Funny stuff tlacroix Saturday 15 March 2008 Comment (0)

Another crazy week, and not so much good usability articles appeared on my radar. Yet, there’s a few, and here they are.

  • Is Customer Experience Recession-Proof? (03/14/2008)
  • eCommerce Usability Review: Advanced Search Pages (03/13/2008)
  • 11 Ways to Fill Your Shopper’s Cart (03/12/2008)
  • Google to start to implement site performance metrics in SEM Quality Score (03/07/2008)

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category Usability tlacroix Friday 14 March 2008 Comment (0)

As the post title says, TaffyDB is a JavaScript database with a CRUD — Create, Read, Update, Delete — interface. Object oriented, under 10K and compatible with most AJAX frameworks around, TaffyDB is a cool tool to bring your AJAX applications to the next level.

The object usage is quite intuitive… see for yourself:

products.find({price:{lessthan:10},
              type:{not:"Book"}});

products.update({status:"NA"},
                {manufacturer:"XZYDesign"});

products.orderBy(
   ["type",{"price":"asce"},{"quantity":"asce"}]);

I’m definitely going to find a use for this in a project soon. Meanwhile, I’m still messing with it to seize its full power. Enjoy…!

category Programming tlacroix Wednesday 12 March 2008 Comment (0)

Here’s what I stumbled upon this week, on the web, about usability. The reviews are quite brief as this has been a crazy week for me.

  • Jakob Nielsen’s reports usability ROI decline(03/04/2008)
  • Yahoo Automates Usability Consulting (03/03/2008)
  • Study: Introductory Paragraphs and Tabs Don’t Aid Reading Comprehension Online (05/03/2008)
  • Measuring satisfaction: Beyond the usability questionnaire (03/03/2008)

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category Usability tlacroix Friday 7 March 2008 Comment (1)

FirefoxFellow web designers and developers, you all are in the search of tools that will simplify your life and speed up your development and testing. Well here’s my top 5 of the Firefox and IE plugins. It’s the essential toolkit, the cream. I really couldn’t work without them.

5. ColorZilla (Firefox)

ColorZilla allows you to eavesdrop a color from a web page, and sends RGB color codes (as decimal or hex) to your clipboard for you to paste in Photoshop. It also provides you with a color picker where you can adjust Red/Green/Blue and Hue/Saturation/Variance. My rating: 9/10.
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category Web development tlacroix Tuesday 4 March 2008 Comment (0)

On this saturday morning, I’m sipping my coffee and sniffing around other peoples blog looking for gems.

Shift Game The first gem I found is candy. It’s a little puzzle game named Shift I found on Le techno-blogue à Steph! (the game’s in english, but this excellent blog’s in french). It reminds me the Prince of Persia days on my old i8086 with my CGA 4 color screen. Nostalgia! Nonetheless, the reverting action is kind of hard on the brain.

Also, yesterday, something incredible happened to me. Really amazing, and it was about time. Not, not an haircut, but I’m working hard on that one. My cell phone service provider, Fido, now offers unlimited traffic, that is. Now, I only need a YouTube client and I can kiss Videotron’s traffic limit good bye! Just kidding.

Which brings me to a pretty cool application I’ve found a while back on Product Review: WidSets. This is basically a widget platform built on Java MidP2, thus compatible with most smart phones running Symbian, Windows Mobile etc. It runs great on my Nokia E61, but I didn’t have to chance to try it on other phones (nope, I’m part of the iPhone sect yet).

WidSetsHow it works : you open the widget (let’s say TechCrunch), read the actual article (some only contains the abstract), and send an email or add a bookmark if you like it. When you get home, or at the office, you login to your WidSets on a computer, then you can review your bookmark.

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category Funny stuff tlacroix Saturday 1 March 2008 Comment (0)