Short articles by smart minds worth reading.
Getting back to good habits, here’s another issue of the usability review of the week. I should actually be called usability review of the day, as all the good stuff I came across was published on April 3rd.
Shall you stumble on great usability pages, feel free to leave me a comment and I’ll give it a look.
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Long 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”.
In 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.
Another crazy week, and not so much good usability articles appeared on my radar. Yet, there’s a few, and here they are.
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…!
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.
Fellow 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.
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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On this saturday morning, I’m sipping my coffee and sniffing around other peoples blog looking for gems.
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).
How 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.
A friend of mine was twittering about accessibility, which gave me the idea to write on how to do no-javascript friendly stylish controls such as check boxes, buttons, and radio buttons.
Because graphic designers care more about the look and site designers care more about accessibility and usability, it’s often the developers’ role to satisfy them both. So here are the tricks I use to make stylish controls look cool when JavaScript is activated, and usable when it is not.
Being mainly a PHP backend programmer, I hate to see the design cripple the code. Therefore, I always make sure that stylish and standard controls end up sending the same data to the server.
In this post, I cover buttons, check boxes and radio buttons, and provide a simple PHP helper that automatically generates the code. You might also want to check out the demo page to have an idea of what it looks like.
Recently, I faced the awkward Adobe Flash slowness on Mac and old PCs during the development of the web site of a client of mine.
After doing a little research and testing, I found out that some Mac are especially bad at alpha and scaling, among other things.
This post aims to centralize as much information as possible on the subject, because very little is available on the web and it’s unfortunately disparate. I’ll try to nail the facts and outline solutions.
Please add a comment or email me if you feel I’ve forgotten something or if you made a breakthrough discovery.