For those of you who haven't seen this article from Fast Company, I highly recommend giving it a read. It seems the future is upon us. Jeff Han is a 30-year-old engineer who is changing the world by thinking outside the box. He has reinvented the touch screen interface by turning it into something more real. Reminds me of my favorite inspirational poster: "Vision is not seeing things as they are, but as they should be." Peep the video below.
So the big news this week is that MySpace is now the number one site on the net in terms of monthly page views. Yahoo! was the previous leader, but there was a drop off this month which put them in second. While this is kind of a good thing for ColdFusion - assuming they keep things running smoothly :) - it's a bit misleading for Yahoo! as this exact day was predicted long ago before they even launched the new home page.
But reading a little more into it, one can see that the drop-off in page views can be attributed to Yahoo!'s recent foray into Ajax. Everything from the Yahoo! front page, to mail, news, television, etc., has been getting an Ajax once-over at Yahoo. But what's better for the consumer is not always better for the site - on the surface anyway.
People have been warning that the web is in need of better metrics than the page-view. That has never been more true than now. I can only imagine how some of the better-designed, one-page Ajax sites might show up as a mere blip on the radar screen which can be misleading.
Going a step further, it could be argued that MySpace has stayed away from Ajax on purpose just to pump up their page views. I'll refer you to this study by Mike Davidson of Netvibes.com which points out how MySpace could cut their page views by over 2/3rds if they wanted to. So until traffic analyzers learn to deal with Ajax, take what you read with a grain of salt!
One of the most common usability faux pas I find all over the internet is the lack of developers linking up radio buttons with their labels. Why should we be forced to click a tiny little circle when we should be able to click the actual text for that choice?
It's built into the HTML spec so why don't developers use it? Even some of the biggest sites on the web are guilty of this one. I just don't get it.. it's not exactly rocket science.
Just give an ID to your radio button, like so:
then wrap the text that goes with that radio button in a label tag, as such:
Here's a full example with a few selections to choose from.. notice how you can just click the text to select the choice you'd like:
The full code for that was:
With all of the attention being given to usability in this Web 2.0 world, let's make sure we've got 1.0 covered first.
Adobe Labs recently released a new web application called Kuler for discovering and sharing color schemes.
As someone who struggles with color schemes for sites, this is a really handy tool. I can do the programming, I can do the UI, but colors have always been a challenge. I've used a lot of different color scheming sites, but none that I've found has come close to what Adobe is offering.
There close to 1700 color schemes available already, and I think this site launched pretty recenly. I came across it while visiting labs.adobe.com. The interface (Flash-based but not Flex) is great for selecting color schemes as well as creating them. You can also save your favorites, and even download palettes that can be used in the Adobe Creative Suite.
Good work Adobe and thanks in advance!
Up till now, I've been a big fan of the Prototype/Scriptaculous combination to get some nice web20 functionality built into my apps. I always keep an eye out for other cool libraries, but Scriptaculous provided a nice feature set out of the box, and it's really easy to implement a lot of the solutions. And I think Prototype still has the best syntax for making XmlHttpRequests.
But props go out to Rey Bango for pointing me in the right direction and turning me on to jQuery. I always thought jQuery was just another javascript library until I saw the amazing array of plugins available. There are over 100 plugins to do all kinds of stuff - even one to get back prototypes handy $F() function :).
It seems like most of the neat tools and tricks that Scriptaculous offered, be it autocompleters, in place editing, effects, etc., are all available as plugins. It's always important to have a strong developer community, and with the easy plugin architecture, jQuery has just that. I can already see a whole bunch of things I'd like to try out and implement in my applications.
Props go out to John Resig for creating jQuery and to the many plugin contributors. You've made lots of difficult things very easy!!!
Oh yeah, and it's lightweight too.. Just 15k for the jQuery and many plugins coming in at under 1k. Awesome!
As good of a browser as Firefox is, it's still missing some essential tools for developers. Of course, with the many extensions available, those holes can usually be filled in pretty easily. Firebug is one of those extensions that has been an important part of my debugging process for months now. It overcomes some of Firefox's major weaknesses: Javascript debugging and a view of the XmlHttpRequest object so you can see what's really going on behind the scenes.
You gotta hand it to Joe Hewitt. He's just taken the wraps off of the beta version of the 1.0 release, and it seems that he's managed to take a great tool and make it even more amazing! We still get access to the same great debugging as in the past, but now there's even more good stuff to be had! You can view and edit the CSS and HTML of a page and view your changes live, inspect the Document Object Model of all the objects loaded in the page, execute javascript on the fly.. plus what I think is the coolest: the Net view which allows you to see exactly how long each element and script in your page is taking to load. Very, very cool! Never have all of these tools been so easily available all in one place, and best of all, it's free and open source!
For those of you using an alternate browser like IE or Opera, there's even a lite version available.
Head on over to GetFirebug.com and get it while it's hot! Good work Joe!
Some more refreshes of these tools. The Amazon S3 package was updated to include the full <cf_hmac> custom tag. The previous zip was incomplete.
The Smartermail update includes 3 new methods for managing domain aliases. Thanks to Igor Ilyinsky for coding the new functionality.
Both CFCs are now at version 1.2. You can view full details on each via the Related Posts links below.
I've updated both the Amazon S3 and the SmarterMail REST Wrappers to version 1.1. The Amazon S3 distribution now includes the
The SmarterMail CFC was updated to remove some hard-coded URLs. The address to the web service is now part of the CFC initialization. Thanks to Geoff Bergey for pointing out the problems.
See the Related Posts at the bottom of this message for full details about these CFCs as well as links to download them.
Aza Raskin, over at Humanized, has come up with some code as a less-obtrusive alternative to Javascript alert boxes.
Javascript alerts are not the most elegant solution as they force the browser to stop in it's tracks until the user's clicks OK. This can sometimes mislead a person into thinking the browser has crashed if the alert loses focus.
Transparent Messages were originally conceived by Jef Raskin, one of the original designers of the Macintosh OS, as part of Archy. Archy is a project which aims to create a more "humane" interface betweem humans and computers.
You can download the Javascript code here.
Over the weekend, Ajaxian released the results of their September 2006 web poll which surveyed 865 web users over the course of a week. Here's a look at which server-side languages are driving the AJAX revolution:
Although it didn't make the chart, it should be noted that 2% of those surveyed indicated they use Adobe's Flex Toolkit and another 2% said they use the Flex/Ajax bridge, so Flex is in the picture as well.
As for the most popular AJAX frameworks, Prototype and Script.aculo.us were far and away the winners being used by 43% and 33% respectively. The next closest was Dojo with 19%.
The raw results of the survey are also available.
