Chausse.org

So, Google has launched its own instant messenger system. That’s swell, but where’s the innovation? Google Maps was innovative - hella innovative. But this just looks like vanilla instant messaging. I think if Google’s not careful, they’re going to fall into the AltaVista trap. The quality of Google’s search results are decaying, and yet they seem mainly focused, instead, on developing new products for the simple reason that they, well, haven’t developed them yet. I guess when you’re worth billions of dollars, it’s hard to consider it a waste of resources to mess around with side projects like this. But when this one-company dotcom bubble bursts (and it will), it will probably wish it stuck to its bread and butter a bit… better.

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I’m sure I’m not the first to think of this, but a voice controlled iPod (or iPod add-on) would be quite nice - and could, in fact, save lives. This morning I was listening to my iPod in the car. I had it on “shuffle” mode, sitting in a holder mounted on my windshield.

Anyway, the iPod shuffles into a song - I don’t remember which. Let’s say it was something by the Flaming Lips. At that point, I decided “Hmm, I’d sure like to listen to a Flaming Lips album right now”.

Now, finding and playing an album on an iPod is quite easy when you’re sitting on a subway car or something, but when you’re traveling 80 MPH down Rte. 95, it’s another matter altogether. At that point, I decided: It sure would be cool if I could just say:

“iPod. Album. Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots. Play.”

And, voila, have the album play. Instead, I wrapped my car around a telephone pole and took out two boy scouts and three nuns in the process. Just kidding. But it could have happened. And the iVoicePodThing could have prevented it.

Someone make this. Please.

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CSS-based design has always involved a lot of black magic. Sure there are specs and references available, but even with CSS2, which has been around for years, techniques to actually do cool stuff with it are still constantly being discovered. Learning all the different tricks and hacks necessary to piece together a killer standards-based design have involved hopping from site to site, piecing together techniques discovered by a number of talented individuals.

Recently, however, I’ve accumulated three books that go beyond the basics of CSS and really show you how to use it to its maximum potential the way the CSS trailblazers really do stuff.

First up is “CSS Cookbook” (O’Reilly) by Christopher Schmitt.

This is an excellent starting poing for stuff like “How do I make a fluid 3 column layout?” or “How do I get rid of all that stupid space in my bulleted lits?” Unlike most prior CSS books, this one focuses entirely on what you’re trying to accomplish, rather than on what each individual attribute means.

Whether you have no idea where to start, or made an attempt on your own and just sort of hit a wall (which happens frequently with CSS design), just skim through the table of contents, and you’re likely to find exactly what you’re trying to do, with plenty of well-written examples. If you only get one of these books, get this one.

Up next is “The Zen of CSS Design” (New Riders) by Dave Shea and Molly E. Holzschlag. This book also delves into the techniques used by real-world CSS designers, but it uses the wonderful CSS Zen Garden as a starting point. CSS Zen Garden is a great inspirational resource which provides designers with a single HTML page to which they can apply any sort of CSS tricks they cook up.

By using some of the Zen Garden’s wildly creative designs as starting points for discussing techniques and aesthetic issues, this glossy, full-color book is an excellent starting point for figuring out what exactly you want to accomplish in the first place, in addition to how to actually do it.

The final book I’d like to recommend is one I just discovered, which tackles my number one issue with CSS - the reason I still chicken out and use tables for design. It’s called “Bulletproof Web Design” and it tackles issues like “How do I keep content from mushing together when the browser is resized?”, “How can I make my graphically-enhanced headings not look like garbage when the text runs over into a second line”, or “How do I stop the whole design from completely going to hell if the user changes the browser’s text size?” This is not a good book to learn from, but it’s a fantastic resource once you’ve cooked up a great design, implemented it, and just want to make it, well, bulletproof.

I strongly recommend all three of these books for anyone interested in serious standards-based web design.

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Another year, another “Revolutionary 3D Web Browser“. Yawn.

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Session management is a tricky issue in web applications. If you don’t use session variables, you’re stuck with the nightmare of packaging all your data in HTML forms (tricky even if you’re using the ASP.NET ViewState object). But using session variables has its own set of headaches. Since web applications are never “shut down”, the only way you can assume users are done with their sessions is to automatically close the session after a certain length of inactivity.

Sometimes it’s in the users’ best interest to let the session time out. For high-security sites, this helps insure that if the user forgets to log out when they leave the computer, someone walking by 20 minutes later can’t get into their data.

However, sometimes you just want the session to “stay alive” for as long as the web browser window is open. Eric Pascarello has a neat technique for using AJAX to keep the user’s session alive without refreshing the window (which could erase data entered in a form). Eric’s code has the user click “OK” to renew their session before it times out. However, by removing the “confirm” function, and just calling the LoadXMLDoc function automatically (and, optionally, removing the status bar changing code), you can keep the session going for as long as the browser window is open, without the user having any idea that anything special happened.

If you’re interested in closing sessions to preserve server resources - which you should be, for a web site of any significant size, this is probably not the best idea. But, for an intranet application that will never be used by more than a handful of users simultaneously, I think it’s a very worthwhile usability win.

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It’s not every day you stumble across a fantastic usability concept, a clever implemenation of that concept, and an even more clever improvement on that implementation — all in the course of five minutes. But that’s what I found the other day via some random web surfing.

The Yellow Fade Technique allows incredibly useful and elegantly subtle user feedback regarding changed data. The Fade Anything Technique is a very spiffy enhancement of that technique. Check out the demo page.

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I subscribed to the gapingvoid RSS feed because I enjoyed the cynical drawn-on-business-cards cartoons author Hugh McLeod drew. Somewhere along the line, though, the site became a marketing/branding blog full of genius insights, right up there with Seth’s.

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Apparently, a new blog is created every second. Point that out to the next executive who claims to be on the cutting edge because he’s “thinking outside the box” and setting up his own blog.

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Here’s a handy JavaScript trick that will automatically put icons next to links to PDF’s, ZIP files, etc. Great for web developers who are considerate to their users, yet still lazy.

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Wow, Apple made a two-button mouse… Kind of. Sort of. I’m confused. This new mouse offers the functionality of a two-button mouse, along with some kind of special “squeeze the sides” feature that effectively works like a third button. All in a mouse that looks like it has zero buttons.

The whole reason Apple didn’t come out with a two-button mouse was that they felt the second button would confuse users. So, they’ve “solved” this by providing the same functionality, but with no affordance as to where the two buttons actually are?

I know Apple loves clean design, but Logitech solved the “two buttons but no buttons” problem much more elegantly than by making the buttons completely invisible.

I’ll bet that for a frequent, experienced user, this mouse will be greatly productivity-enhancing — once you get used to it. But Apple technology used to be incredibly easy to use for beginners because of clean design, not in spite of it. There is absolutely no justifiable reason for not delineating the separate button regions, aside from Apple’s design aesthetic, which is diverging more and more from the “form follows function” ideal as time goes on.

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