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:
A normal (X)HTML page is loaded into the browser.
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).
I have to admit that I carry big shield of skepticism when I circulate exhibit halls. Luckily a fellow attendee tipped me off to OpenLaszlo, an extremely spiffy system for server-side, declarative generation of Flash content. What this means for somebody like me – someone who, despite a lot of background in visual design, would really prefer to work directly with code – is that very sweet Flash-based interfaces can be constructed via XML. Their XML dialect, LZX, impressed me with its elegance and (for XML) relative lack of verbosity. The generation code is Java, which you can either run live on your server or run offline to generate standalone .swf files. They offer a nifty playground/demo for you to check it out.
I recently encountered an amazingly stupid outsourced Adobe.com “how was your support experience” survey. I got to the end of the survey and there was a single button with text above it saying something like, “Click the button below to submit your survey and close this window.”
I looked at the page source – the button does not submit the survey, which is already complete; it’s just a Javascript action to close the window. And the script is broken! So in Safari at least, it does nothing at all. Some poor schmuck is going to be sitting there futilely pounding on the button trying to “submit” the fifteen-page survey he just completed.