Web teams and the organisation
Zeldman’s latest post, on the position of web teams in organisations, has such a resonance with me at the moment. Unfortunately from what he says it is a widespread occurence. In-house web development is often lumped in with either marketing or IT, both resulting from an ignorance of, or unwillingness to understand, what web developers actually do.
Posted: Wed 4 Jul 2007 ~ filed under General Web ;
NY Times Dictionary
Whilst reading an article on the NY Times I came across their somewhat hidden dictionary feature. I’d double-clicked on a term I didn’t recognise, intending to do a right-click Google search, when a window popped up. I’d almost dismissed it before I realised it was a ‘feature’.
Apparantly, this has caused some annoyance among those who idly click their mouse as they read, or highlight words as they go, even so far as the creation of counter-scripts and ad-blocking techniques. Plus I bet it confuses the heck out of new-to-the-web people for whom the NYTimes may be the first port-of-call. Whilst I do think it’s a neat feature, love the discoverability of it, and may be great for assisting understanding, perhaps there should be a toggle somewhere in the member centre (I had a look and could see one)?
Posted: Thu 28 Jun 2007 ~ filed under General Web ;Usability ;
Safari on Windows
One of the big announcements to come out of WWDC was the release of Safari for Windows. It’s still in beta but seems perfectly workable, although it is a bit frustrating that to open a new tab you have to remember a key combo or right-click whilst on every other browser it’s a double-click on the tab bar. I think I’ll definitely use it for a while on Windows as it seems to have some neat features, but whether it’ll replace Firefox (with its super-useful extensions) as my default is another thing.
Posted: Mon 11 Jun 2007 ~ filed under Apple ;General Web ;
Mona Lisa in MS Paint
This is some pretty amazing stuff, I can only think the guy was using a tablet or similar. The core of it looks to be the framework he sets up at the start.
Posted: Tue 3 Apr 2007 ~ filed under General Web ;
The Machine is Us/ing Us
If you’ve ever struggled to explain how the web has changed and where it is going to someone, point them at this video. In under 5 minutes it gives you a fantastic impression of what Web 2.0 really means.
Posted: Tue 13 Mar 2007 ~ filed under General Web ;
Joe Clark’s Micropatronage
Joe Clark is one of the most enthusiastic people I’ve heard talk about accessiblity. When WCAG 2 came out he was the first to point out issues with the documentation, and must still be among the few who have read all WCAG 2 documents. His commitment is especially evident when it comes to multimedia accessibillity (I still remember him gathering a posse to go and see captioned films after @media 2005).
Now Joe is starting a research project to establish a set of standards for captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing. It will also develop training and certification and even create specialist fonts to use. Now all this costs money and Joe is looking for funding to enable him to go out and get the $7 million Canadian the project will need over the life of the project. He’s after $7,777 to enable him to devote all his time to fundraising for 4 months - so this is subsidence living - and is asking for help from the development community to help achieve this target. When you consider the size of the community and the sum needed I’m sure he’ll have no problem getting there, and having seen Joe’s enthusiasm I’m sure he’ll manage to get the project funding too.
Head over to the Open & Closed Project to find out more and donate.
Posted: Fri 10 Nov 2006 ~ filed under General Web ;Standards ;
Checkout Retail Manager
From the same chaps who’ve recently launched Disco, that smokin’ disc-burning app, comes Checkout. This is a nice looking and well-featured point-of-sale application, including stock and order management. Having used a few of these myself, this seems pretty much sorted from what I can derive from the screenshots/screencasts on the site. It’s really for the smaller businesses at the moment though as you can’t network copies together, so you’d be reliant on one till, however it is ideal for small online stores where all your transactions are postal and can be handled by a single computer.
Posted: Sun 5 Nov 2006 ~ filed under General Web ;
TextMate gets all spooky
A nice touch from TextMate - an auto-update gives the icon and project background a Halloween makeover.
Posted: Tue 31 Oct 2006 ~ filed under General Web ;
Microsoft Releases Internet Explorer 7
The day has finally dawned and IE7 is now in the public arena. Well, sort of. Microsoft has included it as a high-priority update, so you will be prompted to install it. However there is an opt-out for those who cannot move to the new version for whatever reason and they have even released a blocker to prevent it being downloaded for companies who need to remain where they are. Read more about the release over at the IE Blog.
Posted: Thu 19 Oct 2006 ~ filed under General Web ;Standards ;
Geek-up your toddlers
Fed-up of the trainset? You can now extend it and add geek-points at the same time. Brio have brought out Brio Networkers, characters based on your computer’s innards. There’s an email hub, a search-bot, a CD-burner and a recycle bin; plus of course the enemy - viruses and pop-ups. Bonus is that it links up to existing Brio-style railways so you aren’t starting from scratch.
The website is great too and well worth a look. Who knows, this could give us the first generation wise to the dangers of viruses.
Posted: Fri 6 Oct 2006 ~ filed under General Web ;
Bookroll
There's been a surge in new web development books being announced in the past few weeks, so here's a quick run-down.
Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance
A welcome addition, especially in light of the upcoming WCAG 2.0 release. A replacement on the shelves for the good, but aging Accessible Web Sites from the now defunct Glasshaus, it will hopefully be covering the accessibility issues of some of the newer techniques such as image replacement and oh I dunno, ajax? Looking at the contributing author list this looks like it will be a good read.
Ppk on JavaScript
This is one I'm waiting for, having made my merry way through Jeremy Keith's DOM Scripting (for good, not evil), I've been wanting more, but also wanted to avoid polluting my clean js knowledge with old-school techniques. Ppk says this is definitely a sequel kind of read so it should work out quite well.
Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design
I missed Andy's talk at this year's atmedia - damned 2 tracks! - but this may make up for it. It looks to be a 'think past the restrictions of CSS' vibe. Not much info apart from that, so we'll have to wait and see.
Building Scalable Web Sites
Cal Henderson did a great stint at the Carson Summit and I hope this book follows his presenting style rather than the more dry style O'Reilly is more known for.
Learn web design the right way
From all the reviews I've seen this is the book to buy anyone you know who is just getting into web design. Something we've been missing and one I'm going to recommend.
HTML Mastery
Another Friends of Ed book, this time by Paul Haine and I'm guessing a non-official companion to Andy Budd's CSS Mastery.
Designing With Web Standards, 2nd edition
A green cover for the new edition. Question is, will it still be referred to as 'the orange book'?
Posted: Tue 27 Jun 2006 ~ filed under General Web ;Standards ;
Reboot the BBC
It’s a pity the BBC didn’t get this sorted to coincide with the general CSS reboot of 1st May, but it is nevertheless a cool project - not least as the winning design gets to have their design as the real homepage for a day.
This competition does raise some interesting points though.
The related blog states that :
It’s your homepage, (it’s your BBC) and I want to offer everyone the opportunity to feedback to us what they want it to look like.
OK, but I think it’s a safe bet that the submitted designs won’t have any meaningful user-testing behind them (though I’d like to be proved wrong) and so will refect the opinions of the designer. Granted the BBC might be able to derive some usability metrics from looking at common themes within the designs, such as highlighting a certain section of the site.
Also worth thinking about is that the BBC homepage is an international page. How will the submissions reflect the 2 versions of the page - the UK side and the world side? (Some of these questions might have been answered in the FAQs but the site has been largely unavailable all day.)
I’m looking forward to see the designs come in, might even get around to doing one myself.
Posted: Thu 27 Apr 2006 ~ filed under General Web ;
More Stuff to Read
Dang it! As soon as I start getting my RSS reader under control, along come 2 sites which are sure to demand my attention.
From the talented hands of John Oxton comes Bite Size Standards, a multi-author site which aims to give good advice but in manageable “while the kettle’s boiling” chunks. I especially like the further reading references at the bottom of each post to let you delve a little deeper if you’re hankering after more depth.
Then there’s Vitamin, a web magazine from Carson Systems which visually reminds me of UX Magazine, but has a wider remit and appears more hands-on. Vitamin has a stack of great content to launch with, and no wonder, just take a look at that author list/advisory board. I’m off to cull some of my RSS feeds to make room in my day for all this stuff.
Posted: Tue 18 Apr 2006 ~ filed under General Web ;Standards ;
Eolas hits
The Eolas vs Microsoft case has finally hit home. Microsoft released the updates for IE today, including the patch to require an extra click for ActiveX controls. Microsoft however have given us an extra 2 months by including a hotfix which delays the impact until June. So if you haven’t updated your code, now would be a good time.
I’m with ole Tim Berners Lee on this one. Good on Microsoft for not backing down to patent extortion, far too much of that malarkey goes on as it is, though whether it’ll end up doing them more damage with the community than good we’ll only see later down the road. Eolas, can’t you see you’re antagonizing just about everyone out there?
Posted: Wed 12 Apr 2006 ~ filed under General Web ;Standards ;
Microsoft Expression
Microsoft has announced their new development software, called Expression (and so the inevitable death of Frontpage by June 2008 - yey!). It is a set of graphic, interactive and web software which is aimed at the Windows application and web developers. I don’t know about this one, can it be good enough to pry away creatives from their Macs and Adobe products? Does anyone have time to learn another product? The first 2 packages are available now for trial, I’m going to have a play with the web segment when it comes out, but I have a feeling it’ll be one of those trials I end up removing rather than upgrading.
From the video-demo the web part looks a lot like most other visual development environments for the web, though it appears to have a rendering engine built from the ground-up to be standards-compliant and that isn’t IE7. Why not? Personally I’d still be testing everything in multiple browsers starting with FireFox. Built-in rendering engines just make me suspicious.
Posted: Mon 10 Apr 2006 ~ filed under General Web ;
Dunstan’s back
Well, not quite yet. Dunstan Orchard is showing off a possible design for his new blog on Flickr. I go with Jon Hick’s comment and say release it now and get posting - you’ve been gone too long!
The white text on black seems to be the trend for 2006.
Posted: Mon 10 Apr 2006 ~ filed under General Web ;
CSS Naked Day
Where’d the design go? Well, it’s CSS Naked Day, an annual event to promote Web Standards. By producing semantic code this site should still make sense with the styles turned off.
To know more about why styles are disabled on this website visit the Annual CSS Naked Day website for more information.
Posted: Wed 5 Apr 2006 ~ filed under General Web ;Standards ;
CNN Subtle Redesign
CNN has made a slight shift in th elayout of its US homepage. By moving the navigation to a horizontal type, they have made more room for their video offerings.
Unfortunately they have run out of room and had to relegate some of the sections to a drop-down listing. I’m sure they could have put RSS, CNNtoGo et al to a ‘utility’ bar and allowed those 5 sidelined sections to have presence in the main bar.
Posted: Tue 28 Mar 2006 ~ filed under General Web ;
Comment Is Free - and political
Comment Is Free, a new editorial blog from the Guardian has just launched.
After following Ben Hammersley‘s posts about building this site I was interested to see how it panned out.
I do welcome the Guardian’s creation of an editorial site where we can read about opinions rather than just the dry facts. it is something which I think has been lacking from online news sites for a long time and I’m sure Comment Is Free will find some big names to contribute over the next few weeks. The addition of open comments to those posts is something more of a risk.
I can imagine the bosses at the Guardian being a little concerned about opening up a blog which will include posts on political subjects to the general public. Politics is one of those subjects which you are always warned away from at dinner parties in case it turns into an impromtu rehash of Bugsy Malone.
has resulted in something of a heated exchange but just like the Newsvine entry on the same subject has one or two well thought out comments which add to the information provided by the main post.
I’m still unsure as to how much goodness these systems will give. You still have to wade through some rubbish to find the good comments on both sites. I think the most interesting thing they will contribute is the potential for providing an international viewpoint on a news event. When the BBC opens up certain stories with a “Have your Say” section it more often than not adds value. This may be because they are able to moderate the posts more fully and I think this is where the Guardian and Newsvine will need to concentrate their efforts.
Posted: Wed 15 Mar 2006 ~ filed under General Web ;
To Podcast or not to Podcast?
Jeremy Keith has posted a Podcast of the Carson Summit using the mp3s from Carson Workshops. He’s done this because Carson placed links to the mp3s and called them Podcasts. Whilst the usefulness of having a podcast for a knowingly limited number of files (when podcasts are more suited to regular postings) is questionable, the point Jeremy is making is that the term Podcast is being used for any mp3 download.
This is something I’ve been trying to drill into people at work. However Podcast is a buzz term and whilst inaccurately used, does tend to fire people’s imagination more.
Posted: Fri 24 Feb 2006 ~ filed under General Web ;
Ajax Patented
Small web firm Balthaser has been granted a patent for using Flash, Flex, Java, Ajax, and XAML over the internet.
I hope this is a non-issue. The guy says he won't enforce the patent himself but will sell it off to the highest bidder.
Am I the only one who thinks that it is ironic that someone who says he's been using this technology since the 1990s, still has a full-Flash site with non skip link?
He sounds like the most annoying bloke ever. "My mom saw me struggling, and one day said, 'Why don't you figure out a way to bottle up that Balthaser magic.'" Urgh. Just the fact that he could even think of patenting something like this earns him the disrespect of all the web developers out there and proves that he just doesn't get it.
I can't see how this will make it past the first legal test. It certainly doesn't appear that he was influential in the development of any of these technologies.
I'm off to patent electricity. I've been using it for 30 years now and I'm sure no-one else has.
Posted: Fri 24 Feb 2006 ~ filed under General Web ;
Measure Map bought by Google
It seems that everyone is getting aquired these days.
Of course the sign of a great product must be when it gets bought before it’s even launched.
MeasureMap is a web analytics service created by Jeff Veen and others at Adaptive Path. Jeff is moving to Google with the product.
I’ve been waiting for MeasureMap to launch ever since I saw hints of the UI a while back and had been wondering why it was taking so long to hit the shelves, I’m guessing this had something to do with it.
The question everyone must be asking is, how is this going to align with the similarly shy Google Analytics.
Posted: Fri 17 Feb 2006 ~ filed under General Web ;