Well, it looks like there’s another new technology just breaking the horizon that it might be fun to take a stab at: XForms. While browser support for this particular W3C recommendation isn’t 100% yet (does any standard have 100% support?), it looks like this will be the way forms are coded in the future - and given my interest (and job) in application development, anything that affects forms is something I should take a look at. I’ll report back after doing some reading.
Archive for February, 2004
Time to learn
Tuesday, February 24th, 2004When Clients Attack
Monday, February 23rd, 2004The poor guys over at Superfluous Banter have suffered one of the worst fates a creative can imagine - a client took their work and choked the designy goodness right out of it (read their story).
Not being a real freelancer, I don’t run into this sort of situation very often. I’m not free from this particular hell, however; for an internal web application developer like me, it takes the form of having my tools killed in favor of newer, crappier tools.
In my three and a half years at Nextel, at least half a dozen of my systems have been killed when new, enterprise-class tools have been rolled into the company. I can’t think of a single instance when one of these new tools has done a better job of meeting the needs of my tools’ users that mine did. I understand that the demands of company-wide (15000+ users) application preclude a narrow focus on the requirements of relatively small (1000+ users) user groups, but it is still extremely frustrating to have a tool that I’ve worked on for years be abandoned in favor of a system that doesn’t even address the core functionality of the replaced application.
Argh! Just thinking about it frustrates and angers me… Rant over, I guess (until the next system is killed).
Code geekery
Monday, February 23rd, 2004Just found through Dynamically Typed: developer fonts! After a few minutes with each, I’m more fond of Sheldon Narrow (as long as I can avoid bold) than I am of regular Sheldon or of ProFont, but they all look to be handy for extended sessions with HomeSite or BBEdit. Finally, attractive, space-saving, monospaced fonts to be proud of!
Business cards
Friday, February 20th, 2004Justin Goodlett (of skinnyj) talked about business cards yesterday; he’s a collector and has decided to work up a gallery of cards of people in the design business.
Coincidentally, I’ve been doing a lot of skimming through Rockport Publishers’ Best of Business Card Design series lately, and I’ve been getting a bit excited at the prospect of designing a card for myself (I do have cards through Nextel, but 1) they’re not very attractive, and 2) they won’t serve me well if I ever go full-bore as a freelancer). Now that the site design is out of the way, I took a little time this afternoon and came up with this (inspired, of course, by the just-completed redesign of this site).
The Yellow Fade
Thursday, February 19th, 2004Another Basecamp-related innovation from the fine folks at 37signals: the Yellow Fade Technique.
The basic premise is that showing the user what has changed is a good thing; in Basecamp, when a user edits a page, it reloads the page with the newly-changed section highlighted in yellow. After a few seconds (and hopefully after having attracted the user’s attention), the yellow fades back to white.
I’ve been playing with a similar feature in one of the systems I’ve been working on - you can see it in the topmost screenshot here, from January 15th. When you change contexts (system releases) in Mother, a pale yellow box notifying you of the effects of the change shows up at the top of the page. Mine doesn’t fade out, but it’s certainly something to think about for the next version.
(and doesn’t “The Yellow Fade” sounds like a Golden or Silver Age comic book hero name?)
