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.

• 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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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.

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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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.

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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.

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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.

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Am I crazy (my mom says I’m special) or this resembles a business-like Facebook? Pretty neat, nevertheless! Check out Linkedin Beta here.

The Comcast affair (and recent China and Pakistan filtering) brings the spotlight on a Pandora box that must not be opened: net neutrality.

Network neutrality basically states that your internet service provider shouldn’t control what you have and don’t have access to on the internet.
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I found an article about static web design workflow by Josh at Tutorial a day. While his process is great for static web sites, it isn’t adapted to dynamic web design, with a PHP/ASP/DotNET/JSP/ColdFusion (yuk) backend that is.

I’ll try to briefly cover every step we — at Quantik Solutions — do to ensure the delivery of a web site that meet the client and the user needs. This being an overview, I will try to develop each step in a separate post later on.

Step 1. Market, history and present situation analysis

This basically consist in look to the client’s past and actual web site, and its competitors. The objective is too get a list of do’s, keepers and don’t, either from the functionalities of the analyzed sites, or from functionalities that are missing from the sites. We analyze available web statistics to get quantitative information about what informations the visitors seek the most and the less.

This step also consist in finding the characteristics the major personas:

• What are their demographics? (age, sex, education, revenue, etc.)
• What is their internet knowledge? (often based on their demographics)
• What information do they look for on the site, in the first 30 seconds, in first 2 minutes, in the first 10 minutes?
• What is their technological profile? (ie. which browser, JavaScript support, Flash version support, screen resolution, etc.)

Step 2. Needs and requirement gathering

Usually — but strange enough not always — the redesign or refectory of a site is triggered by new requirements or new needs. The objective of this step is to get a list of all of them, but also to discover latent needs and requirements, or to convert requirements to strategies. We also try to get an idea of the client’s budget.

For example, a client could require to improve its web sales by 10%.

• A latent requirement could be that the checkout process is simpler, as it has 10 steps right now ;
• His 10% improvement requirement could be converted to an immediate or delayed up-selling strategy.

It might look like rocket science, but all the answers usually come quickly and easily after the market analysis at the previous step.

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Most web applications in this World 2.0 target international users distributed among many different timezones. It is pretty simple to ask the users what their timezone is when they registered to your site. This article aims to solve the case of unregistered users who you can’t ask in a usable way. The solution isn’t perfect, but it’s better than nothing.

In theory and technologically, we could determine what timezone the user is in by:

• Using a geo location database to guess their longitude and latitude, and then find the probable timezone from it ;
• Using JavaScript to read the user’s workstation clock and calculate the probable timezone from it. You can see a live demo here.

Geo location, while pretty simple nowadays with free databases floating around, leaves us with a problem: the free databases are often not good enough to pin point a precise longitude and latitude, which will cause garbage in and garbage out when trying to translate it to a timezone. Moreover, the non-free and precise databases are pretty expensive compared to the added value of timezone detection, and are most likely not worth buying just for this purpose.

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