Posts tagged: DESIGN

Over on the Well, in a what-is-this-web-2.0-thing-anyway topic, I posted:

I’ve been thinking about starting a joke social networking/sharing site called “huester” where you can post your favorite colors, tag them, make RSS feeds of them…

Within a couple hours Jeffrey had posted a link to colorcombos.com. It’s a site that lets you post your favorite color combinations, tag them, make RSS feeds of them… The only thing it’s missing is friending.

Half an hour later Laura posted a link to colr.org. Tags, RSS feeds, and Ajax! They get bonus points for Ajax. And for omitting that last vowel.

This post on the 37signals blog validates something I have been saying for years, and have recently been telling my students to watch out for: client requests that hinge on the word “just.”

As in: “Can you just make this webcam grab into a 16x20 print?” Or, “Can you just make our shopping cart work like Amazon.com?”

“Just” means, “I have no idea how this is actually going to be accomplished, but I would like it to be instantaneous.”

A few days ago, Sourceforge got a makeover:

The SourceForge.net Engineering team has completed the implementation of a new look-and-feel for the SourceForge.net site. This is the first major change to the appearance of the SourceForge.net site in more than three years. This work is part of a planned incremental revamp to the SourceForge.net site. Initial focus has been placed on revamp of page header, footer, layout; and specific improvements to the SourceForge.net front page, project summary page, login page, file release page, and download page. Launched 2005-11-14.

Jakob Nielsen, who you of course know as “the usability Pope” and “the next best thing to a true time machine,” recently published an essay titled “Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes”.

I’m going to run down his ten-point list and weigh his “Alertbox” pages against my blog according to each of his criteria. Now, you might say that this isn’t fair since Alertbox is a newsletter, not a blog, and that he’s been doing it since 1995, long before “blogging” was even a word. I say it’s a “web-based publication consisting primarily of periodic articles” in reverse-chronological order and it’s time to face the music!

I’m way behind the curve on this, mostly because I can be somewhat cantankerous when it comes to Flash. But Scalable Inman Flash Replacement is really clever. Here’s the breakdown of how it works, nicked from the sIFR home page:

1. A normal (X)HTML page is loaded into the browser.

2. A javascript function is run which first checks that Flash is installed and then looks for whatever tags, ids, or classes you designate.

A List Apart, the website for people who design websites, relaunched this past Tuesday (they like Tuesdays) with a lovely new design and, at least as interesting to me, a completely new back-end powered by Ruby on Rails. Check out that stupendous live comment preview! Designer Jason Santa Maria, CSS ninja Eric Meyer and CMS maker Dan Benjamin have all done great work.

Zeldman also includes a capsule history and colophon.

Last fall I posted a blog entry titled “Serving Notice” about the inadequacies of OS X notifications compared to their OS <=9 predecessors, and about my hope that Apple would look to cool projects like Growl for interface ideas. Well, Apple is holding out on me, but good work on Growl continues and the list of applications using it is growing.

One of my favorites is the unassuming NetGrowler, a faceless app which uses Growl to display information about changes in your network connection. If you’re a laptop user like me, often changing networks many times a day, it’s nice to know the exact moment at which you’ve received your new IP; and if you deal with flaky wireless connections it’s good to know whether that IP is real or “self-assigned” (i.e. non-functioning).