Post Archive

› November 29, 2001

better form elements

I'm a little late in finding this, but these form enhancements from gazingus are worth remembering. So is this method for coding IE styled scrollbars that validate.

Andy Article

Contributor and surfmind genius Andy gets some props with: The Psychology of Surfing

bookmarklets

bookmarklets, favelets, or whatever you want to call a single line of javascript chunked into a link that performs tiny miracles - they seem to remain continually popular. Makes sense, I keep a handfull handy and use them regularly. glish has pointed to a show comments bookmarklet which is really quite slick. I've put links to 3 sites with multiple bookmarklet goodness to grab in the developer reference section (bottom of homepage). Heck, there's even bookmarklets to make bookmarklets. Perhaps it's time to collect the developer tool type bookmarklets, especially some of the newer ones, with browser testing charts and user comment submitions into a new feature?

› November 27, 2001

Congratulations Todd

What Do I know has a fresh new design and is now baked with movable type.

› November 26, 2001

Compliency to Standards Soldiers

It sounds like owen is fed up. To paraphrase the concept: create a motivator so bone crunching that browser makers take heed to standards. A paramilitary arm past the wasp, if you will.
Well there really is only one way that I can see - unearth the financial incentive of complete standards compliance. The problem, in my oversimplified 3 person view (web user|web author|browser software company), is that the web users and the browser software companies haven't the motivator. Web users want the goods, but don't care about the means; and I'm not sure it's their responsibility to give a hoot.

› November 24, 2001

reading design

Reading Design, by Dean Allen (alistapart #128) is an inspiration. In fact I'm motivated to tidy up this site to honor it.

› November 22, 2001

distraction

Here in the states it's "thanksgivings day", the historical premise of this holiday is dubiously questionable at best, and at worst, outright insulting to american indians. But before I get all worked up about the many unfairnesses dealt to american indians - I'll completely switch subjects and distract myself with 956 archived movies.

› November 21, 2001

faketastic worgs donot translimitate

zeldman pointed to an excite sponsored japanese translation of one of his pages, seems pretty neat, I wonder how inteligible the results are tho. Beth from The Study of Design provides a link to altavista's babblefish service which offers several translation alternatives. Both are of the instant microwaveable type which push out a framed page and banner ads - I don't suppose anyone's found a banner free translation system? A server side, php based one would be even greater... oh wait, I guess I should research this before ranting on about it.

› November 18, 2001

ideal cms

my goodness this seems to be only one step away from a revolutionary and ideal content management system setup: Peter-Paul Koch - Edit text. One could create an admin log-in to an exact replica of the admin's website or set of pages, but with this super-wiki inline editing. It seems so intuitive... now to get those edits back to the server... hmmm.

dynamic image creation

I've meen messing around with the dynamic image creation functions of php, try my test out here. I found that Vikram Vaswani's tutorial on the subject to be a great way to get started.

pocketmac

Looks like they are just a couple days behind schedule, but PocketMac is set to be released any minute now - it's the first and only way to synch up pocket pc devices (like ipaq) to mac os devices (like ibook). And, if you're looking for synchronistic reverse multiplicity you could get an ipod and synch it up to your windows os device through xpod.
[pocketmac reminder from pepe, xpod link swipe from bump.]

um. ok?

I'm not sure what this is - just trying out some new fall oriented colors. Do they make you feel queasy? Not to worry, winter colors are right around the corner.

› November 15, 2001

Usable vs. cool, revisited

Flash celebrity yugop shows up on the estimable CHI-WEB mailing list, as an "exercise in frustration". "Assume that the target for this site is people who buy web design services ... Does the site meet the objective of making such a person 'want to buy'?"

The CHI discipline has a consolidating principle that will tend to refine, improve and standardise stuff (widgets/interaction) that already exist, and is less likely to generate new stuff. This is not a bad thing per se, but we should recognise that we need those designers pushing the envelope just like car manufacturers need to keep producing those wacky concept cars, and the fashion industry needs those unwearable catwalk creations. Very little of what yugo's done that I've seen is directly applicable to our day-to-day job of designing usable software, websites, and widgets, but that's missing the point. There is a definite need for imaginative designers like him to keep showing us new ways of interacting with information on screen, which they tend to do better if freed from practical/commercial constraints. (Much of yugo's online portfolio is personal work. I find him quite comparable with John Maeda -- another artistic technologist.) Those ideas may disappear, or take root in the mainstream in some form or another.

What I do object to are designers, with the sole aim of appearing to be cutting-edge, who instantly try to shoe-horn "cool" interaction derived from people like yugo into whatever bog-standard website they're creating, without question its appropriateness -- usually to the detriment of usability. And this happens a lot. And alongside them, certain clients (especially those with internet-savvy X-er market base) who try to get some of the artist/designer's street cred to rub off on their brands by commissioning them for their websites, as I think has happened with yugo too. More of those cases where the brandmeisters win out over the usability folks.

A number of people on CHI-WEB voiced opinions similar to mine. The thread's here.

› November 14, 2001

boxesandarrows

Mentioned in elegant hack's Gleanings newsletter: boxesandarrows.

› November 12, 2001

remember when...

I'm looking forward to nostalgelizing (word of the future) about the days when we had to interface with large objects to create digital design. One step closer.

win utility

Very cool windows utility search bar posted at Joel on Software.

› November 11, 2001

Excuses

[links below are pop-up photos]
I usually try to keep the personal notes to a minimum, but that might be somewhat pointless since much of what's posted here ends up being self referential to some extent. This time I'm going blatantly off topic to share my weekend experiences which included:

scraping an old messy paint job off of this, creating huge clouds of dust and flying debris while running the lawn mower over these, and giving plenty of water/food/love to this.

After taking the above snaps, and not being much of a mac guy (just a wannabe mac guy), I was delighted to see that the digital camera's date setting is a day ahead of my ibook - the delight comes in realizing that the ibook is ready and willing to accept what mere humans might label a paradox.

MT 2.1

I've updated to moveable type 1.2, which has a super easy checkbox option to update weblogs.com when this site has been updated. Almost seems too easy. I'm just getting more and more happy with moveable type.

› November 9, 2001

atlanta georgia weblogger party

The first ever atlanta weblogger party kicked off this evening thanks to brushstroke.tv! In attendance were photodude, his girlfriend iscarlett, mr. brushstroke, and whatdoiknow.org.

I honestly wish I had just an ounce of memory in my brain, I enjoyed lots of conversation with Todd, but failed to connect the neurons which have visited his website many times recently. Well, I'm and idiot --> but todd is a genius, just check out his stuff.

Mr. Brushstroke cooked up a fantastic meal and the enviornment was stunning. Now we just need to figure out how to seek out and assimillate rouge atlanta bloggers.

› November 8, 2001

Browsing back through time

I've always been interested in redesigns (on the web and other media) as they happen, especially the big guys. I figure that considering the amount of money and expertise (and corporate ego) that obviously went into something like that, it makes sense to try and learn from it what one can. A before-after picture gives an excellent idea of the decisions that were made.

Some other high-profile redesigns this year were bbc, hotmail, slate, ibm, webmd, latimes, and of course google. Offline, some other notable redesigns have been the Economist and the NRC Handelsblad.

For my own research purposes, I've made many before/after snapshots that I've been planning to put on my own site. Seeing Nathan Lineback's fascinating GUI archive also served as inspiration.

The amazing Internet Archive Wayback Machine, when it sorts out its growing pains, may well have made this idea obsolete, while providing web designers with an invaluable view over the evolving face of web design.

BBC redesigned

The media giant known by Brits as "Auntie" has rebranded its web/iTV presence as BBCi (now there's an original name), and has a new look to go with it. Any readers who visited the site recently may want to go offline and browse the old one from their cache one last time for comparison.

As the nickname suggests, the brand has always had that element of "reassuringly boring". The redesign certainly doesn't try to be groundbreaking, and the modular portal style and text + link-heavy look has already attracted some informal criticism.

As for my own opinion, I think the visually low-key, multi-link portal approach makes sense for the outer layers of this enormous site. If you click deeper, you'll find all the category sub-sites (Entertainment, Science/Nature, the regional sites, etc.) are far more colourful and less busy. In fact, they show pleasing degree of variation within the overall brand and page templates, although this may be more design legacy-related than intentional.

The only thing I have an issue with is the fixed width -- a liquid layout would've allowed them to use a larger font size. But would've been much more difficult to implement.

I'm frequently surprised by the amount of opposition the multi-link (portal) pages get. It's all very well to expect fewer options, but that's also tacitly expecting it to be tailored to your particular interest, something that the homepage of something like the BBC can't exactly do. People don't complain of information overload on the front page of a broadsheet newspaper. The key to making it manageable is clear visual grouping of related categories of information, for which one oft-used approach (by no means the only one) is the coloured-block layout.

I know from experience, though, the above is an issue web designers (and web users) often have irreconcilable differences in preference.

Gestures

Do you use mozilla to surf the web? If not, go and download it - it isn't clunky and weird anymore, it's turned into a great browser for everyday use. And while you're at it - add on "Gestures", an Optimoz product which makes reaching to the top left corner of your screen for the back button irrelevant. With gestures you can set a few options to your liking and then have the following features available by simply dragging your mouse in certain patterns:

Forward in History = Right
Backward in History = Left
Reload = Up-Down
Reload (bypass cache) = Up-Down-Up
Go To Homepage = Down-Up-Right-Down (draw a squarish lowercase h)
New Document = Down
Duplicate Window = Down-Up
Up a directory in the URL = Up-Left-Up
Close Document (window or tab) = Right-Left-Right or Down-Right

and there are more.

› November 7, 2001

Word

Using ms word for anything more than a memo has always seemed clunky to me, but I've recently tried collecting lots of small sub-documents into a master document. The little paper clip tells me that I can control the flow and style of the entire document easier this way. I beg to differ, the feature set involved with sub-document linking seems to be unprecidently buggy and sporadic. Apparently the little paperclip has been sheilded from effective page layout and structuring applications.

info mapping

A clunky but interesting sales pitch type demonstration on the value of information mapping. The stopwatch idea is interesting, I wonder if there are any online usability toolkits which can test responsiveness via a group of remote (but online) users.

› November 6, 2001

ala: 2 November

A List Apart: Working with alternate style sheets. cool.

puff ball

I'll be the first to admit that (especially the last week or so) web-graphics is a bit thin on content. But I fail to understand why this site seems to get linked from lots of places. Perhaps I'm missing something, but it seems to be completely limited in content to moreover news links, pop-under ads, and banner ads. How does this get hand picked and added to a list of resource sites? Isn't this just a marketing shell puff ball with nothing inside? I hope someone will let me know why I'm wrong.

issn

Yea! the web-graphics weblog ISSN number arrived in yesterday's mail. Now this is officially a periodical.

› November 5, 2001

moveable type 1.2

Moveable Type version 1.2 is now available.

› November 4, 2001

e-consultancy

The forums at e-consultancy have a nice setup for discussing thoughts and questions on the industry. I especially like the viewing options and category breakdown.

› November 1, 2001

Sleep

New job is lots of fun, but apparently I'm having some sleep schedule adjustment issues. A co-worker commented on the deep purple bags under my eyes yesterday (no I wasn't wearing a halloween costume). Consequentially my sit down and contribute to webgraphics time hasn't found it's place yet. Judging from past experiences, sometime next week I will get my groove back.