Recently Apple delivered Safari 3.1 with some very exciting features. While we still can’t use things like multiple background images and drop shadows across all browsers, we are getting to play with the future and I, for one, am loving it. One of the most interesting things in Safari 3.1 is the (hopefully soon to be proposed and standardized as part of the CSS3 spec) CSS Animations. CSS animations allow you to animate just about any property on an element as well as do fun things like rotate and skew. As a demo of this I created a quick and dirty CSS3 fisheye/dock demo. As an added bonus, the demo uses SVG in the img tag.

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Over the past few years designing and developing I’ve come to rely on a number of tools. Most of these are obvious like Photoshop and Firebug, however I’ve come to realize that a few tools I use aren’t as well known.

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This week Eye-Fi launched the Eye-Fi Card combining wifi with a 2GB flash memory card, and we couldn’t be more excited for everyone to get their hands on it. With Eye-Fi, your photos can be automatically sent to any number of popular online photo services (Shutterfly, Flickr, Facebook, SmugMug, etc.) and to your computer all via wifi. No need to dock your camera, sync the photos to your computer and then upload your photos to the various photo services. Just configure the wifi and start taking pictures! It’s that easy!

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Hello,

Writing RPM packages seems to intimidate some, but it can be easier than you might guess. Below, I will:

• point out the online reference RPM documentation
• describe one method of configuring a build environment
• outline a simple specfile (sysreport package)
• describe the process of building the package from the specfile
• introduce a few convenient RPM macros

Here are a few terms:

• specfile a file containing the rules for building an RPM package
• RPM the distributable package intended for the target
• SRPM a special package containing all the source code and the specfile for a given package
• rpm the command-line program used for installing packages
• rpmbuild the command-line program used for building packages

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Originally posted by Jess Kuhnert

I’ve recently been involved in some discussions surrounding ixd issues and attempted to use Yahoo Mail and Google Mail as examples of bad/good interface design techniques. There was a lot of push back because there were no follow up details outlining why one was good and the other bad. A complete analysis of the two applications would take much longer and require more effort than a random blog posting so I decided to focus on one core annoyance I have with Yahoo Mail - its use of ye old “Split Pane” re-sizable control.

Anyone doing any sort of UI development for the past few years has probably at one point or another found themselves implementing a Split Pane view. Even if you haven’t you probably have gotten used to them via programs like Outlook Express or the Yahoo Mail web application below:

Pretty innocent looking right? I mean, geez - it’s a tried and true UI concept that we’ve all been using / used to for years. So, what’s the problem? A good deal of the existing issues are rooted in the current offerings of staple desktop UI toolkits like Gtk, Qt, Windows and Swing. (of course there are many others, but these are toolkits this author is most intimately familiar with) With desktop UI API’s it is very easy to get used to the idea that you have one basic set of tools in your UI toolbox and only branch out from there in cases where customization is really needed.

To get back to the original point of the post, my general peeves with a split view for reading emails are:

• Sizing - The size of the view I care about is never right! When I’m browsing a list of emails I want as much real estate as possible to view them all, I don’t care about seeing any one particular email at that point. When I do select an email and the content within it doesn’t fit into my split view it’s annoying. I don’t care about the emails anymore at that point, I just want to read the email I’ve selected. In fact, I might go so far as to say it’s almost impossible for the view to ever be what I want in this scenario. By nature of the control the size of the view remains static until adjusted by the user, but when reading emails you really need it to change based on what step of reading them you are in. Arghh!
• Scrolling - I know I know. It sounds like a real whiny thing to complain about, but it is annoying. After selecting an email message I must now consciously think about the interface and move my mouse over to the appropriate area before I can actually scroll through the content - otherwise scrolling right there and then would move me up and down through all of my other email messages.
• Claustrophobia - I don’t know about you, but these split views tend to make me feel pretty constrained. All of the scrollbars appearing on the page really start to make me feel like nothing is the right size. Like maybe my monitor sucks and I should get a bigger one? I don’t know. The screen looks pretty large, how hard is it to fit everything on there without an all out assault on the senses from a million different UI controls all telling me the same thing - nothing fits!

The web has changed things a great deal. Without a set of standard UI components in your web toolbox to choose from many people have been able to come up with new ways of doing things that really work for web based applications. Such as Google mail. Instead of taking the tried and true approach that Yahoo has they have branched out to create a solution to the exact same problem with a ui view that is much friendlier:

That is certainly refreshing feeling after my previous claustrophobic view experiences. Look at that, I can’t spot a single scrollbar on the entire page save for the standard right hand window scroll. My monitor must have been lucky in being the right size for this web site.

Ok, so how did they handle actually viewing a message?:

Hey look at that! Still no scrollbars. I’m impressed. There are so many other subtle ui improvements going on that it could probably fill an entire book on the subject, but I’ll outline what I find particularly pleasing in relation to the subject of this post:

• No Scrolling! - Just clear blue skys and all the text I care to read.
• Quoted Text - Even better than no scrolling, when viewing a grouping of emails all related to the same subject you’ll find that only the most recent persons response is viewable when reading the email - leaving all the cruft you don’t care about cleanly out of your way. If you really must see that text you can do a number of things, the least of which is clicking on the simple “- Show Quoted text-” hyperlink that appears inline where the previous email message content will display when clicked on.
• No clutter - There is a distinct lack of irrelevant information displayed on my screen when reading emails. Most notably being the removal of a large list of unrelated email subject lines from my view. That doesn’t mean that I’m constrained. Every possible tool / ui trick available to help me focus on this single email are all at my disposal from this view, as well as the context in which I’m viewing it.

Thank you for taking the time to wade through a subject that I don’t know very much about. I hope it at least gives more people pause before choosing one of their tried and true desktop friends on their next application. Split Panes probably do have their place and purpose, but after using both of these applications I’m not convinced that reading email is one of them. (Most of the content in this post was inspired by the good people at Humanized. )

One of our recent projects was mentioned on the Motley Fool on September 18, 2006!

Against that backdrop are both AdMob and Handango, each of which could profit handsomely from smartphone demand. But I’m a bit more intrigued by AdMob. Founded just a few months ago (!), AdMob has one of the most impressive websites I’ve seen in a start-up. It just reeks of business opportunity. For example, the home page keeps a running tally of ad views — currently at more than 121 million — and a real-time ticker that counts ads as they’re accessed around the globe. So far, AdMob’s network has growth by a monthly average of 98%.

To read the entire articles, visit: http://www.fool.com/News/mft/2006/mft06091819.htm

Here’s a rundown of the case

The problem: A rapidly growing startup acquired funding and needed to revamp the user experience of their application as quickly as possible, affording them the time to make the right hiring decisions for their longer term internal development efforts.

The solution: Our team of web development experts came in and within a month transformed their web application from one of the ugliest we had seen in recent memory to something that clearly demonstrated to their target audience what their service was about.

Innovation: An interesting, real-time visualization of the traffic in their network. Key technology: Dojo Toolkit, PHP