posts by tag

The extensive documentation is a great resource for jQuery. This is just a different way of browsing it.

summize.com is a site that scours the internet for discussions and reviews of a product. I don’t know how legit the algorithm is, but it does a couple of cool things.

Firstly, it sorts the results by “helpfulness” instead of “highest/lowest” ratings. Secondly, it has some really nice (visual) rating scales. At a glance you know how many people rated it and the majority vote (everyone knows red is bad and green is good). It also provides percentages for each piece of the rating when you hover over the sections.

In my opinion, it’s a much better interface than the traditional star rating; however, it also allows you to view the ratings as stars, if you’re so inclined.

I tried to ignore the iPhone, since I’m sick of hearing about it myself (a Google search for “June 29, 2007” had the iPhone as the 2nd and 3rd results), but I can’t help but acknowledge its design. I have no desire to have one for any real reason, as I don’t like phones or mobile technology. However, I am fascinated by good design. If you read 37signals, you’ve probably already seen the iPhone keyboard movie. Despite all of the hype, it really does look brilliant. I’m not willing to pay $500 for a phone (that’s a new lens), but I’d pay $5 to use it for a day. That’s a fair trade, I think. I’m also curious to see AT&T customer base/revenue before and after 6:00 pm this evening.

The $250+ savings sucked me in. I needed a new battery for my existing phone, which was about six years old. Since I was a long-time Sprint customer, I had $175 off a new phone, plus any rebate offered by the phone itself. When compared to the cost of a new battery, a new phone was potentially cheaper. So I chose the new phone and got the Motorola Razr V3M. My reasoning for this phone was mainly because of how thin it was. I don’t care about camera/video, I don’t care about music on my phone, and I don’t care about text-messaging (although, anymore, I think I’d like that more than talking). The reviews came back positive, so that’s what I got.

In this day and age, we all want things to happen now. It’s more of an expectation than a convenience, and it goes down to the milliseconds. Which leads me to the main issue I have with my phone: it’s too slow. I open it up, it hesitates to show me a screen. I hit “contacts”, I have to wait a second before my contacts show up. Speed dial takes about 2 seconds longer than my last phone, which is what I use the most. It’s hard to make an argument that waiting an extra second (or less) for something is irritating, but it is. A few other annoyances include:

• The camera button is placed precisely where the thumb needs to be when flipping the phone open. What’s that mean? I usually turn on the camera (which takes about 4 seconds) just so I can turn it back off (another 2 seconds) before making a call.
• If I miss a call, it will display “dismiss” or “dial” until I answer one or the other. I can just hit “end” to clear it, but it shows back up the next time I open the phone. This issue compares to the cancel or allow Mac commercial—it’s just annoying.
• The ring tones suck, and I’m not the type to download new ones. I just keep it on vibrate all the time.
• There are only two options for including vibration: “high and vibrate” or “vibrate only”. This may be too picky, but ideally, “low and vibrate” would be my choice when I’m not at work.

So there you have it. And just so you know, I’m probably the last person to review a cell phone, because I’m biased toward not having one at all. I just know I’d probably get something else if I could do it over.

I played basketball daily for years and years. Before making a pass, I would instinctively blur the entire scene. I’ve always thought it was a little odd, but ironically, it helped me to see the court better. I’ve since come to find out that this tactic is a desired approach when a simpler view is sought, and applies to much more than basketball.

At the end of the second law in The Laws of Simplicity, there was mention of something that stood out to me: a “blurred approach” to design.

Groups are good; too many groups are bad because they counteract the goal of grouping in the first place. Blurred groupings are powerful because they can appear even more simple, but at the cost of becoming more abstract, less concrete.

Working within the details can isolate decisions. Sometimes a decision is best made from a different perspective—a broad or abstract (even blurred) perspective. It’s often good to take a step back and determine if what you see as a whole feels right.

The best designers in the world all squint when they look at something. They squint to see the forest from the trees—to find the right balance. Squint at the world. You will see more, by seeing less.

I was seeing the forest from the trees; that’s why I would blur the basketball court. And that’s why I often get a better view of a design from standing at the doorway of my room. Sometimes, it’s the simple view that helps the most. “It [simplicity] feeds the mind’s natural hunger to solve puzzles and to find the right gestalt.”—John Maeda

A friend of mine is working on a Rails CMS (called slate) at WVU. I’ve been following the development via slate info, as well as the screen shots on Flickr. I thought I’d take a minute to give praise to the work they’re doing.

First of all, I’m very impressed with the latest release. I personally think the interface is outstanding. slate does a lot of stuff, and from what I’ve seen, every section is intuitive and focused on the task at hand. The design itself is composed of mostly black, white, and shades of gray. This works well, because it’s easy to draw attention when you need to draw attention. For instance, by changing the sub-heading from black to bright blue, a user is subconsciously forced to pay attention—especially if that’s the only thing that’s bright blue.

I’ve never used slate, but I can tell there is an extreme attention to detail. The development schedule seems to be very realistic (even though I’m sure it doesn’t feel that way at times), which is why I think it’s turning into such a great application. There’s no “throwing it together,” so to speak. Every section seems carefully planned and designed down to the very last pixel, as it should be.

All throughout slate (again, from the screen shots) there is a brilliant use of space. Nothing is too cluttered (line-height really makes a difference). The typeface is very standard and somewhat over-sized, which is a good thing. The menus and options are clear, and they’ve gone the extra mile to make the entire interface very user-friendly.

It’s been fun following their development, and I look forward to reading about what’s to come in the future. Congratulations to Chris and Dave (those guys are the only two I’m aware of) on their hard work—it looks like it’s really paying off.

I’ve watched a video about surface computing before, but I can’t seem to remember where (or if it had anything to do with Microsoft). Nonetheless, Microsoft Surface (aka “Play Table”) looks great. At this point, I can’t imagine owning it or paying for it, but I’d definitely enjoy using it. I believe it’s initially only geared toward hotels, retail establishments, restaurants, and public entertainment venues, anyway, which is cool.

Of the hundreds of possible usages, I’d have to say becoming the table top in a restaurant/bar would be at the top of my list. In one of the videos, it shows two people ordering (or re-ordering) food by just dragging their choice to the center of the table. I don’t know that I feel comfortable saying “that’s much better than relying on a waitress,” since that’s one more step closer to total automated service, which I wouldn’t like (most of the time).

If you get a minute, you should watch these three short videos and see what you think.

I’m slowly catching up on some stuff I missed while on vacation. Over lunch I read a post about an interface issue concerning touch screens: when your finger is on the screen, you can’t always necessarily see the very thing you were wanting to touch (unless it’s huge, of course). That seems like a reasonable issue, even though I don’t deal with touch screens too often. Apparently, Apple has an idea to tackle the problem by resembling an invisible interface. Meaning all of the touchy-feely stuff happens on the back of the device (they’re using an iPod in this case), while the screen on the front knows, and reacts, to your activity on the back. It seems like it could be a little awkward to use, but innovation often does seem awkward at first. It’s a cool idea nonetheless. And of all the competition, I’d bet Apple to be the company who could pull it off smoothly.

I didn’t understand it back then, and I still don’t today. I agree, reading from paper is much better than reading from a screen. BUT. Reading websites from paper doesn’t seem to make any logical sense. Books, yes. Websites, no. I also think separate CSS files for printing is the way to go, over a PDF version of a site (just saying that seems wrong). PDF’s are so final and static—not what most of today’s websites are going for.

Don’t get me wrong, I think PDF’s have a very valid place. Especially concerning eBooks, documentation, references, 4+ page articles, etc, but I don’t think anyone can say they get excited when they click a link only to have the browser freeze up for 15 seconds while a PDF opens. Usually I’m just waiting for it to finish so I can close it. If it’s a one-time deal that’s one thing, but having wanting to download a PDF to read a site is entirely different—that’s way too much work. It’s borderline ridiculous (to me, anyway). Personally, I hope we don’t see the ‘prefer reading from paper?’ buttons showing up on more and more sites. And I would be surprised if that became a growing need.

I am far from the party animal; in fact, I don’t drink at all. But I came across The Kegulator and thought I’d share. A good design, good interface, and if it’s anywhere close to accurate, I give it a thumbs up.

• The Kegulator

Ever since its inception, this site has carried somewhat of a blur. I don’t know if anyone has noticed, but the combination of colors was making me feel like I needed to rub my eyes as if I just woke up. That’s a little hard on readability (even though most of you are probably coming through an RSS reader). Anyway, after class this evening, I took some time out to sharpen those dull colors just a bit. Nothing major, just a few HEX values darker in some cases. I also made a few other insignificant CSS/template changes while I was at it (such as a new comment form, clickable portfolio images, etc.). So if things are looking a little weird, you may want to refresh your browser to get rid of that dull CSS stored in your cache—just a heads up.

I always sketch out design ideas on paper before I do any markup, as it helps to have a reasonably structured layout in mind. I’m often reluctant to use Photoshop to mock up a design, since that in itself takes a bit of time (although it does help with color). Plus, for work, putting some thoughts on paper is a quick-and-dirty way to show my boss a few designs I have for whatever we’re working on. I guess you could call this paper prototyping. A List Apart recently had an article on paper prototyping, which is a little overkill for what I would ever do (as I’d never use scissors), but there are several good scenarios for how something as simple as paper can help your design process. And personally, I think it’s fun.

Have you ever closed a tab and didn’t mean to? Personally, I do it all the time. Not quite as much now that Firefox has the little “x” on individual tabs. Anyway, if it does happen to you, you can use CTRL+SHIFT+T to reopen the last closed tab. That’s a must-have feature for a browser that supports tabs. I think it’s been out for as long as the browser existed, but I never knew about it until today (CMD+SHIFT+T for Mac users).

Over the weekend, I spent a little time tidying things up a bit. Honestly, I think this has been the longest run for me and a single site. It turns out, a few of the original design ideas don’t really fit anymore; namely the archives and tags. Originally, both sections had a vertical list that had nothing to prevent them from reaching the core of the earth. For the archives, I’m now letting you view titles for a specific month. And by not loading all of the archives at once, it seems to help slightly on load time. As for the tags, the same problem existed. Plus, it wasn’t feasible to have them spread 750px (or so) away from their corresponding entry count. I’m debating an optional tag cloud view, mainly for two reasons: 1) that sort of visual understanding of the common topics may be useful (I’m kind of curious as to what it might look like) and 2) a tag cloud would be a good way to practice more Ruby code, as I’ve never written one explicitly.

And last but not least, I’ve finally found some time to incorporate the Syntax library. And I owe Chris Scharf for that (via his implementation)—thanks, Chris. For Textile, I had originally written a view helper to convert the text from the database at the instance of the view (to_html(content)). But after reading Chris’ post, I started using the before_save callback to save out the textilized text into another column. It’s much cleaner to say post.body and post.body_html depending on which one I need, rather than wrapping a helper around it each and every time. Plus it works nicely for Syntax, too. If you use Chris’ method, you should give credit back to him for posting how he did it. And while I’m in confession, I’ve temporarily adopted his CSS for the highlighting; I really do plan on changing it, though. In due time, I suppose.

I’m a sucker for charts and graphs. I found something from IBM yesterday that kept me entertained for a few minutes: Many Eyes. It lets you submit data sets, then use their visualizations to see your (or someone else’s) data.

And while I’m at it, another interesting (but almost disturbing) visualization is BreathingEarth. It shows the CO~2 emissions from every country in the world, along with birth and death rates. And the data is in real-time. If I were into data analysis, I think it would be fun to come up with creative ways to present data (assuming I could write Java applets and Flash movies).

Sometimes flash development intrigues me. I’ve played with flash before, and I’ve found it to be fun but challenging. I know it does a lot of the (what seems to be difficult) fancy things for you, such as tweening and custom motion paths, but it’s still challenging. I’d like to watch someone work on a site such as http://www.thibaud.be/, just so I could see how difficult it truly is. I don’t think I’d ever consider flash for a site, but there’s a part of me that would like to be proficient at it. Proficient enough to build a basic site with good flash practices, at least.

This portfolio is clever and fun to look at. Try spinning one of the tags around. Or throwing one across your screen. Then open a couple, look through them, and close them. Notice how they go down to their respective spot in the line-up? I think that’s awesome. And I don’t know if you noticed, but if you happen to click on a tag that has an embedded flash movie, while the movie is loading, the preview image is wiped out. Cool stuff. You simply can’t do those kinds of things without flash.

At work, we just got a new MacBook, and my boss let me take it home for a day or two. So far, I love it. It is so amazingly smooth, fast, and intuitive. Everything I thought should happen, did. Remember, I’ve only spent a minimal amount of time on a Mac, and that mostly came from taking Stat quizzes during my undergrad. So I knew nothing. I absolutely love the two-finger scrolling available on the touch pad—it makes navigating so much easier. I may even be able to use it without a mouse. And the view of all open applications was awesome (not sure what it’s called, but the F9 key). And the slide up feature (F11? F12?). And the Doc. And the entire thing.

Aside from loving it, I do have a couple of issues. They’re not really issues per se, but more like questions/concerns. So here they are:

Shiny screen—I’m pretty sure there is an option to choose the “xbrite” type of screen or a regular screen. For me, I think the screen was a little too shiny. Rather than viewing the screen perpendicularly (for lack of a better word), I had to angle it a bit to get rid of the glare and see the true colors.

Testing in IE—If I were to get a Mac, I would move all web development work to it, but I still need to be able to test on IE (mainly IE6). I’ve read about parallels, but I’m not sure how it works. And I don’t know if IE for Mac has the same rendering as IE for Windows (a.k.a. painfully wrong). Anyway, specifically using Rails, migrations, and subversion, it’s no big deal to update and run it on a Windows machine, but I would imagine there are better ways.

Safari’s bold-ish text rendering—This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and I’ve read that Safari handles type beautifully, but it looked a little “bold-ish” to me. Is that just how it is? And how does Firefox work on a Mac? I would assume it’s fine, but I didn’t install anything other than what’s already there. Safari seemed to handle everything perfect, so I don’t think there are any issues using it, but I’m very partial to Firefox these days.

Photoshop—I’m guessing it’s extra to get Adobe Photoshop on a Mac? Someone once told me it came pre-installed as part of what you buy, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Unless I just didn’t see it. Anyway, it would be hard for me to not use Photoshop when building a site, but I’m not attracted to the thought of buying it extra, either.

Overall, I’m sold on the Mac. Now I just have to figure out how to come up with an extra $3,000, and decide if I want a desktop or a laptop (right now it’s 60/40 with the laptop in the lead). Until then, I’ll keep dreaming. Oh, and Amie was right. I did end up posting about the MacBook… I just couldn’t resist.

If you spend a lot of time on a computer, keyboard shortcuts have probably become intuitive. The “shift + end” to select complete lines. The “alt + f + s” to quickly save your progess. And more commonly, the “ctrl + x” and “ctrl + v” to cut and paste. These are common among desktop applications; but now that some web applications are mocking desktop applications, keyboard shortcuts have found a spot there as well. When used for true benefit, I think keyboard shortcuts add a lot to an application. Take Google Reader for instance. There is a lot (for me) of content coming and going, and it’s tedious to use the mouse repeatedly. Luckily, they have an exhaustive mix of easy-to-use shortcuts. Especially useful: the j/k combination, with a touch of u. Use j/k to navigate next/previous, and u to expand to full-screen (good for the longer posts). There are many more if you’re interested. With something like a feed reader, I think it’s important to be able to get through feed’s quickly; these shortcuts definitely help. I think Rails has an easy way to incorporate keyboard shortcuts into an application, but I’m not positive on that.

37signals has established themselves on the web by creating very user-friendly project management tools, and by implementing them under the “less is more” approach. Now, I think they could build just about anything they wanted and it would be adopted by tons of people. Essentially, they know what “cool” is. They are indeed an interesting company, and I really enjoy reading their posts. Especially the new series, “Design Decisions.” They take a design decision they’ve made, break it down and explain why they’ve made it. It’s entertaining to read how the big-timers (although they’re a small company) contemplate a new design—even if it is just the menu of a page. I believe they’ve only posted two for the series so far (1 and 2). If you’re into web (application) design at all, you’d probably find it interesting to see how a really successful team breaks down a design.

BumpTop is a project that applies physics simulation to the desktop in order to resemble the real-world effects of a true desktop. Not a true computer desktop, but the top of your desk, literally. Since a workplace in the physical world generally has stacks and piles of papers and documents, BumpTop reflects that by using piling instead of filing. The piles are generally stacked chronologically since the files you most recently added go on top. However, they’ve cleverly incorporated many tricks to add files in the middle and bottom of a pile. Also, they’ve enabled ways to build “shelves” on the sides of the desktop container. You can literally throw files on a stack or over in a corner for later use. The entire desktop incorporates characteristics like mass and friction, and when thrown into another pile, the other files are displaced as expected. To show significance, you can make files bigger to stand out in the mess. What’s cool about that is they actually act like they’re bigger—bigger objects are heavier and more sluggish to move. The entire interface is “pen-centric” as they tend to call it, which gives a better feeling of realism since the file under the pen tip is the active file. You can draw loops to select files, use commands to step into different modes, open menus, etc. It’s a really, really cool innovation. Personally, it’s nothing like I’ve ever seen before. You should check it out:

• YouTube BumpTop 3D Video
• Quick overview
• Master’s Thesis
• BumpTop project site

I spend a lot of my time on a computer; and a lot of that time is spent in a web browser. It’s important for me to have a nice experience in the place(s) I spend a lot of time… agreed? Well, the Mozilla team thinks so as well.

I don’t have many complaints (if any) over my current version of Firefox (1.5.0.7). It’s by far the best web browser I’m aware of. I like the ideas Flock brings to the table, but it might be too much for me. I don’t need any “blogging” tools and I’m happy with the del.icio.us bookmarklet extension (rather than the star in Flock). To be honest, I probably would use it more, but it was a little buggy when I tried it. I’m not sure if they’re out of beta yet, but that was the extent of my Flock experience. Firefox just feels more stable to me. But in the end it’s a personal choice, of course.

Anyway, back to the subject. The new Firefox adds so much more to an already sweet browser. Here are a few of the changes:

• Google suggest integrated into the search box
• Built-in textarea spellcheck (I really appreciate this one)
• Built-in advanced anti-phishing (lightbox-style notifications)
• Tracks your closed tabs and allows restoring (you can also specify to load previous session when opening—similar to Opera)
• Specify your RSS reader and then the little orange icon in the right of the address bar adds it in with one click (perfect!)
• Visual effects when hovering over tabs (plus a “X” to close on each tab)

I think these changes make sense. It’s not too much, but just enough. There is talk of this being released officially very soon. I’m always reluctant to be one of those early adopters, so I’ll keep waiting for the official release. Good stuff.

I usually like non-Flash-based sites, but this one has me in awe. And it’s not even a complex or detailed Flash design… but I love it. It’s a site like this that makes me think there’s still a place for Flash in web development. And of course, it may have never gone anywhere, that’s just the impression I get these days. Anyway, check it out, it’s called Self Titled.

Oh, and make sure you don’t ignore that little menu on the left, where you can literally, sign the guestbook. I’m quite impressed.

Wasn’t it just today/yesterday when I was complaining about the things I didn’t like with Google Reader? Well, lo and behold, they’ve met my needs graciously. Last night, Google upgraded their reader and I’m thrilled with the new changes. Let’s review what I didn’t like, versus what’s new—shall we? Here’s the basic list:

• Problem 1: inability to load list with desired feeds by default (such as a specific label, or excluding feeds in a black list)
• Problem 2: going to a new page to add a new feed (way too inconvenient)
• Problem 3: previewing a feed before subscribing
• Problem 4: scrolling to the bottom of the page to read (long) feeds (basically, losing sight of the feed column)
• Problem 5: inability to know if there are new feeds per subscription

Now that I’ve mentioned the basic list of issues I had, how does the new reader correct these things? Let’s take a look:

Solution to Problem 1: Get rid of the feed column entirely, and replace it with a subscription list. Not only a subscription list, but a sophisticated subscription list with collapsible folders and the ability to toggle between all feeds and updated feeds—much, much easier. Oh, and the list is constantly working for you by performing a consistent checkup on your feeds via Ajax. A nice touch.

Solution to Problem 2: A fancy little drop-down to add new feeds. When you subscribe to a new feed, you don’t leave your current location throughout the entire process.

Solution to Problem 3: Eliminate the feed preview before subscription. Really, this was unnecessary. Admitedly, I can see the value, but usually a person knows if they want to subscribe. I viewed the preview as an unnecessary intermediate step and I’m glad it’s gone.

Solution to Problem 4: Keep the feeds in an expanding container. I always hated reading long feeds beacause I had to scroll to the bottom of the page, sometimes losing complete site of the feed listing. The use of spacebar helped the issue, but it was still inconvenient. I usually just skipped what I couldn’t see, unless it was really interesting. Now feeds scroll inside of a container, allowing the subscription list to always remain visible.

Solution to Problem 5: Display a count of the new items per feed subscription. I probably get the most satisfaction from this upgrade. Not only are the feeds marked with a count, but they’re distinguished as bold (in case you want to view all feeds). Wait, I’m not done—there are counts per folder (or per tag), too!

Not only are my quirks corrected, but we have a few bonus features as well. Things like updated shortcuts, an addition of a “home” section to show what’s new (including the latest post from the blog), previous/next buttons for easier navigation, a “mark all as read” link, and an option to mark items as read simply by scrolling down the list. Not to mention the ability to toggle betwen “expandable” and “list” views, which might be familiar to all of those gmail users out there. If you think about it, a feed reader is like an inbox. Now you have the option to treat it like one. Plus, the UI has been carefully crafted in my opinion. Have you noticed the subtle difference between (in expandable view) a new item and a read item? I’m a sucker for the subtle things. Overall, I have to say, I’m impressed with this reader and it gives me more motivation to keep up with my feeds. I’ve come across several new things while writing this post, so I’m anxiously awaiting to find more of the new features that have slipped by.

As I stated in my previous post, I’ve been looking into some optimization options for my site. Things like page caching especially drew my attention, but then I realized something. If I step back to a design standpoint and think logically, I noticed a lot of unecessary things going on. Before I continue, I should mention I didn’t make any vast improvements on the slow API request issue, but I since converted my del.icio.us integration into a much easier solution: the rubilicious gem. It’s slightly faster and much cleaner. I tried going back to the flickr gem (since I’m running a frozen version of Rails now), but kept getting “Invalid API Key (Key has expired),” or something along those lines. Both of my developmental API keys for Flickr are, in fact, active. But it looks like I’m not the only one with this problem. Needless to say none of those solutions worked for me.

Back to what I was saying. Since the APIs bog down the site, are they really needed? Well, no, but that wasn’t an option. However, it isn’t needed on every page. I’d say some people read my posts in a feed reader. In that case, if they feel compelled to comment, they probably do a CTRL + click (or a mouse-wheel click) to open a new tab (assuming those who comment DO NOT use IE, which may or may not be accurate) and go directly to the entry. This is much faster for those people. I can see putting popular tags and categories in a common layout for convenience, but it boiled down to a design decision, and I simply didn’t want to. There’s a link to search available in the footer throughout, so that’s close enough.

Finally, I didn’t like the two column layout. So while I was motivated enough to make some adjustments to the code, as usual, I made some adjustments to the CSS. I like the open feel of an entry consuming a page. After all, aside from people like me, most visit sites to read/view content. That’s much easier to do when it’s the only thing drawing your attention. So, I’ve rolled out version 2 instead of starting over. It’s a little out of character, I know, but I’m proud of myself.

When Newshutch first came out, I was amazed. I immediately exported my OPML from my current reader, and started using it. Then, it’s wonderful interface became known by the guys at 37Signals (they have an awesome audience), and they posted about Newshutch on their blog. The traffic to Newshutch immediately exploded and their server started overheating. It became entirely too slow for me, so I jumped over to Bloglines until they got things under control. Bloglines is really fast, but it’s not very clear on navigation and I find myself often wondering, “What does this do?” The Bloglines interface needs a lot of work. Anyway, I decided to check up on Newshutch to see how they were coming along, and not to my surprise, they’re running very smooth. A lot of their complications were due to a lack of optimization of their SQL statements, which was taking way too long to get the data for all of those new users. I believe they now have a dedicated server just to host MySQL, and they’ve tweeked all of their queries to be much more efficient.

So, I’m making the switch back to one of the few readers I can actually tolerate. There are still a couple of things I’d like to see added on to Newshutch, but I’ll save that for another time on a different day.