Chausse.org

The ironically named “ThoughtOut.biz” has created the MagStay PRO, a handly little plastic widget which prevents Apple’s MagSafe power adapter from accidentally being removed from your MacBook Pro. Which, incidentally, is the entire purpose of the MagSafe connector. But who am I to tell people that they shouldn’t pay $11.99 to de-fling-off-table-proof their laptop.

Filed under Apple, Gear and Gadgets 1 Comment »

The Google maps folks have a sense of humor. Check out their directions to drive from New York, NY to Dublin, Ireland.

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An Event Apart Boston was a great experience. Regrettably, I had to miss two of the talks — the danger of going to a conference two blocks from your office. But what I did see was fantastic. I have an incurable case of speaker-envy. Whenever I’m at a conference, I get an insatiable urge to drop whatever I’m doing with my life and become an expert at whatever the speaker’s talking about. So, Steve Krug made me want to become a usability guru, Jason Santa Maria - a designer, Jeffrey Zeldman, a… well, a Jeffrey Zeldman.

Anyway, a few notes.

1. Eric Meyer, CSS guru, presented a mindblowing way to render a standard HTML table as a bar chart. This guy’s good. Eric’s #1 take-away from his talk was to remember that CSS does not care how HTML elements are “supposed to” behave. (Ever tried adding style="display:block" to a style tag)?

2. Cameron Moll, in talking about the creative process, presented my favorite quote of the event:

“Instinct… is largely memory in disguise. It works quite well when it is trained, and poorly otherwise” — Robert Bringhurst

In other words, all these people who seem to instinctively know the right way to design something, are actually subconsciously calling upon an enormous backlog of experience. This is why “basement-dwellers” often make lousy designers. You need to get out there and have visual experiences (art, books, movies) in order to create new ones.

3. Also via Cameron Moll, I learned how important typography is, and that I know nothing about it. I intend to fix this. I bought the excellent “A Type Primer” for this purpose. Expect a redesign soon.

4. Thanks to Eric Meyer, I learned about the “IE7 Script“, which basically makes IE6 act like a standards-compliant browser with one line of code. Sounds unbelievable, but it’s got Meyer’s seal of approval, so it must be good. Based on a show of hands, most of the other attendees didn’t know about it either.

5. Wisdom from Zeldman: When presenting multiple designs to a client, each design should convey (and be presented as) a different idea or approach, not simply an aesthetic tweak. This helps prevent clients from obsessing over individual details which, if changed, may water-down the overall idea.

Filed under Web Development 1 Comment »

I’m learning me some web stuff at An Event Apart.

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There’s some kind of legitimate scientific research going on here, but whatever the purpose, some folks have created the world’s cutest little dancing yellow squishy Peep-like robot thing. Check out the video of it dancing to Spoon.

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It used to be that to get attention, you had to be the “[X] killer”. Now, you have to be “The YouTube of [X]” The following sites were all found via a Google search for “The YouTube of”.

Scribd - The YouTube of Text Documents

SlideShare - The YouTube of PowerPoint

Teapotters - The YouTube of 3D

Swivel - The YouTube of Data

MyToons - The YouTube of Animation

AniBoom - Also The YouTube of Animation (Uh-oh!)

SingShot - The YouTube of Karaoke

Travelistic - The YouTube of Travel

VideoJug - The YouTube of How-To

And of course…

GodTube - The YouTube of Fundamental Christianity, where you can learn to become a Christian clown.

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Filed under Humor 1 Comment »

I’m sure this is an ancient joke, but it looks so good with Keynote… [from: Presentation Zen]

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I’m now a 100% Mac user (aside from the incident where my mom wanted to show my wife a “how-to-knit” CD-ROM that was Windows-only. I have an iMac in my home office, and i use a MacBook Pro at work. One thing I’m learning about Mac culture is that Mac users are a productivity-minded lot. Contrary to the stereotype that we’re noodling on GarageBand or iMovie all day, Mac users like to get things done quickly, their way.

There are so many Mac apps devoted to this goal. Some examples:

VoodooPad: A personal Wiki tool that lets you do damn near anything.

TextMate: A text/code editor that brings the “customize everything” ethos of Emacs into the modern world.

TextExpander: A tool that lets you create really cool text abbreviations that expand into long chunks of text that you would otherwise repeatedly type out.

Quicksilver: I haven’t even quite figured out what this does, but it’s some sort of major productivity enhancing tool with a cult-like following.

I bring this up now because I came across this great quote from a Mac user stuck working on a PC for a while:

One thing Windows does is make me want to give up earlier. I actually just don’t care if I can’t figure out a good way to do something. This is an exciting new feeling - I just give up and get back to work, and each time, I feel a little more like a real grownup. You know, how you feel after all your youthful dreams have died.

Filed under Apple, General Computing, Microsoft 1 Comment »

Microsoft’s new plan to boost its search engine usage is to pay “service credits” to enterprises which “promote” the use of Live Search in their organizations.  Companies will earn $2 to $10 per computer which complies with Microsoft’s demands - including the removal of non-Microsoft IE toolbars, or setting Live Search as its homepage.  Will it work? Perhaps.  This sounds exactly like the kind of thing “An Enterprise” would go for - saving  a few bucks at the expense of letting employees use what work best for them.  Is it pathetic? Yes.

Filed under Microsoft, The Internet Biz No Comments »

Hooray, the new layout is here. I’m quite proud, as I designed it completely from scratch - starting from Miklb’s Blank Wordpress Theme. There are a few tweaks to be made, and a lot of new features to come, but I’m glad to once again have a design to call my very own, and to have a “pure” Wordpress site - with all the goodness that can come from that.

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I’ve noticed that some of the most influential and successful bloggers pay little heed to the layout of their site, often sticking with a “default” template. Well, that’s not really working out for me. I can’t stand this default layout I stuck myself with. I’ve broken out the Photoshop, have been reading up on some tutorials, and am working on an all new design. Something very Web 2.0-ey — just in time for it to be cliche! Stay tuned.

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A recent project at work got me thinking hard about how a corporate homepage should be designed. Any designer worth their salt knows that a homepage design needs to be user centric - focused on what users will actually want to do (or what you want them to do) when they arrive.

The simplest approach is to make a list of possible activities, prioritize them, and allocate screen real estate accordingly. More likely activities — or activities geared toward more strategically important audiences — get bigger and more prominent chunks of the page - a sort of “importance equals pixels” policy.

This approach, while definitely a good starting point, is overly simplistic for a number of reasons:

• Content geared toward a technically savvy audience does not need to be as prominent as content geared toward a non-savvy audience. Frequent web surfers are less likely to rely on the visceral impact of bold content to steer them toward what they need - in fact, they may instinctively avoid it.
• Content that does not rely on bold visual impact should make way for content that does. Let’s say your site contains a vast archive of videos. The archive itself is clearly the most valuable content on the site. But you also want to show a single example of one of your videos on the homepage. What gets put front and center - the single video, or the categorical list of content in your archive? Clearly the archive is the more valuable asset, but it does not rely on visual impact to get its point across, and should therefore be less prominent than the sample video.
• If people are accustomed to finding content in a certain area - think hard about placing it elsewhere. Just making something bigger and more prominent will not necessarily make elements easier to find - if people are accustomed to finding them in a certain area. Search boxes are customarily in the upper right hand corner of a corporate homepage. Making it bigger and putting it in the center of the page will actually make it harder to find. More examples - site navigation on the left, “Contact Us” at the bottom, promotional callouts on the right. This isn’t to say you can’t change things up a little, but be sure to put some serious thought into it.
• Content that gets updated frequently should NOT get put front and center (remember, we’re talking homepages, not blogs, here). Counterintuitive, but true. Someone interested in viewing frequently updated content is likely a return visitor. A return visitor will know where to look. The main stage should be reserved for making an impact on first time visitors. Also, a section of news, press releases, blog articles, etc. will by its very nature NOT give a complete picture of what your site has to offer, and could confuse first time visitors.That said, it’s important for a first time visitor to know that you do, in fact, have frequently updated content on your site. For that reason, the optimal placement of such content is slightly “above the fold” - somewhere that a user will notice, but that will not distract from the main message of your site.

One important reason to avoid the “importance equals pixels” approach to homepage design is that it can easily lead you into unattractive layouts. Your company may legitimately be targeting three different audiences of equal importance. The “importance equals pixels” approach will tell you to create content in three equal sized columns. But this sort of layout lacks visual appeal - variation in size is an important tool for differentiating different types of content (in any media - compare this old newspaper layout to this modern one). If you are in this situation, look to design tools other than size that can differentiate the content, yet provide similar levels of visual appeal. This could be done via bolder colors, different fonts, graphical elements, or judiciously used animation.

Remember, size isn’t everything.

Filed under The User Experience, Web Development No Comments »

I’ve been becoming increasingly annoyed at the lack - and disappearance - of commercial stuff from YouTube, due to Google’s making nice with copyright holders. I recently strolled down memory lane and bookmarked a ton of really groovy 70’s era Sesame Street clips. Two days later - gone. More recently, a friend introduced me to the ever-so-twisted “Wonder Showzen” via short clips on YouTube. Again, two days later - gone.

If I may indulge in a rare moment of anti-Web 2.0 cynicism… Is it possible - just maybe - that the foundation of the “user generated video” obsession is really just based on people stumbling across interesting amateur stuff while seeking out popular mass media clips - and that when those popular clips are gone, the walls will come a-tumblin’ down?

I think so.

Now, I don’t think “user generated content” will ever really die, but I think once the bedrock of ripped off commercial clips is gone, so will go the mass audiences - and the bloated media attention - leaving the real “social video” afficionadoes as a far more insular group - performing mainly for the enjoyment of each other, like old school jazz cats.

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