I’ve started swimming again. The water is warm enough, and it’s at least 80 degrees outside.
Add the swimming to the walking we’ve been trying to do, and the occasional bike rides, and we might just strengthen the old legs enough to be able to go snowboarding next winter and not be sore for two days afterwards…
See? Always thinking ahead…
I had this dream I was taking all these photos in Milwaukee (with my phone, because I don’t have a camera anymore) and I noticed the protective screen on my phone was cracked (possibly due to the fact that the windshield of my car has a small crack) so anyway, I started to disassemble my phone, and all the keys fell out, and then I went to the Cingular store, and there was a geek girl there who fixed all that stuff, but she was busy playing Donkey Kong on some old console system, and I explained that I could fix it because people always said I was a “computer wiz” (that’s short for wizard) and if they just had the parts I would fix it. She told me to come back on Saturday and they would have the parts, then continued playing Donkey Kong on the old console system.
It’s a shame you probably can’t make it to our rummage sale this week, because “geek dreams” describes it. Some of the things I’ll be (trying) to sell include ColecoVision games, and old Nintendo, lots of game controllers, a mint condition manual for using Microsoft BASIC on the IBM Personal Computer, a NeXTStation, a TRS-80, some old Apple ][’s and the disk drives to go with them, tons of computer cables, I think there’s even a Tandy Color Computer, and a tape drive for a Commodore as well. I probably forgot a few thing, but you get the idea…
So if you’re looking for junk… I mean stuff to kick-start your very own Maker Faire just drop me a line and I’ll drop you the details…
Are you a Mac user forced to use a Windows machine while at work? Here are a few tips…
Install lots of open-source software: jEdit, Firefox, etc. avoid those Microsoft applications whenever possible. (I tried using Word and it started to drive me mad!) At least familiar applications will help ease the pain.
Pretend it’s Linux: Ok, I know, it’s nothing like Linux, but you are not going to get the user experience of using Mac OS X. It’s going to be ugly. Just image you are using an old Linux distro with a really crappy window manager. Sure, you won’t really have a nice shell, or everything else that makes Linux (or Mac OS X) what it is. This will take some real imagination.
Create a PDF: Any Mac application that can print, can create a PDF. Not so on Windows… Luckily, with Ghostscript and a little tweaking you can make Windows print to a Postscript file and then convert that to a PDF. A pain, but doable…
That’s all I can think of right now. If you have to use Windows at work, I’m sorry for you. If you’re lucky, you get to go home and use a Mac. Everyone should be that lucky. :)
Well, I managed to attend the Milwaukee Web Design May Meetup, and it was a good time.
It was hosted at Byte Studios in the Third Ward (a block from where I used to work) and about a dozen people showed up. There was a good mix of design and tech, and there were no specific topics, we just sort of discussed whatever was on people’s minds, or answered whatever questions people had.
I’ll most likely be at the next one if my schedule permits. I’m wondering if the group would be open to presentations, there’s a number of topics I’d like to present and discuss…
I plug my iPod in at least once a day to sync it. I would like this to be seamless, but it is far from being so. About half the time my iPod does not show up in iTunes, and I need to quit and relaunch iTunes. This is a pain. More of a pain though, is when iTunes shows me this dialog box:
In case you’re wondering, I “set up” my iPod about 6 months ago. When this dialog comes up, I have a routine which includes hitting ‘Cancel’ and then going into the iTunes options under iPod and resetting things like “Enable disk use” and resetting all the Photo options, and turning on the syncing of Contacts and Calendars. Again.
This is getting painful as hell. My user experience is suffering! Any iPod geeks know of a cure? (Yes, I’ve run the iPod updaters Apple ships to me through Software Update. Any other ideas?)
When a potential customer fills out a form and submits it, they might make a mistake. Hey, it happens, but that’s why your web developers wrote code that will send the form back to the potential customer with a message kindly telling the user what field was missing or filled out incorrectly. When we say kindly, what we mean is that an average human, not a web geek, can understand the language. Good: “The username you selected is too long, please choose a shorter one.” Bad: “ERROR: user_id too long!!!” Which message would you rather see?
I’m also sure your developers took the time to make sure they pre-populated the fields the potential customer filled in correctly so they are not forced to fill them in again. Not just the text fields, but the radio buttons, checkboxes, drop-down lists, textareas, etc. You’d be surprised how many developers don’t do this. Yes it’s extra work, but who would you rather to do the extra work, your developers, or your potential customers? (Hint: The developers should only have to do it once.)
Make things easier for your potential customers. Hopefully this will change them into satisfied customers.
As we mentioned in Business Website Tip #253, when potential customers come to your site, there is a good chance they are looking for information. There is a chance they do not want to watch a video or Flash animation before they are even brought to a page on the site with navigation or actual copy they can read. If you really need to show some sort of video or animation on your site, at least provide a skip button, so the majority of users who want information can bypass the theatrics and get to the information.
The people of the web thank you…
In case it wasn’t clear, the Jargon File’s definition of hacker:
A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. RFC1392, the Internet Users’ Glossary, usefully amplifies this as: A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular.
If still in doubt, get the full definition of hacker.
Daryl Hannah has a videoblog. Sort of… See dhlovelife.com
There aren’t really comments, or permalinks, or descriptions, or much metadata, and the feed is currently invalid. (The length attribute should be the file size of the video, not the length of playing time, confusing, I know…)
Still, I’m a big fan of Daryl (more for her green & organic living than for her movies) so I’ll cut her some slack for all the little issues, and it does say “full site this summer” so, maybe things will change.
I had been hoping that under the hood would be Movable Type, or better yet, WordPress, which would probably make some of the issues I mentioned go away, but no such luck.
So besides seeing valid XHTML served up as utf-8 rather than iso-8859-1, and proper archives, comments, and all the other little things, the content itself is great. Daryl, if you need help with your site, let me know… (P.S. Feel free to use embedthevideo.com)
(Update: The feed should be valid now. Thanks Daryl!)
When potential customers come to your web site, there is a chance they are doing so for information. I know, you think that people just want to be entertained, but occasionally, we want something from you, like a phone number or address. Make it easy on your potential customers, and don’t put your phone number or address in an image, or in a Flash movie, put it in text. Text can be easily copied from your website and pasted into an email, or address book, or calendar.
People appreciate being able to copy and paste text. They do not appreciate having to retype it. You will get the added bonus of having search engines index the text as well, which can help bring more of those potential customers to your web site.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say put it on all the pages of your site. Put it down at the bottom, in the footer. Trust me, people will appreciate this. I know I do…
Lucas Gonze had the following to say:
EmbedTheVideo.com is an entire web site which does nothing but generate a single block of HTML.
Yup, that’s about all it does, and it is insane that it’s so complex. To set the record straight, the site is just over 3 months, and this is how it started: I replied to a message from Josh Kinberg explaining (once again) how to embed video using the Video Popup Linkmaker he put online, and he replied that my semi-serious suggestion (registering embedthevideo.com) was a good idea. Domains are cheap, and I’ve got server space, so it happened.
So if you look at embedthevideo.com today, you’ll see the names of the folks who contributed to make it exist. I mainly fixed a few minor bugs, and supplied a nice URL.
I went to Taco Bell today, and I must say, the place is in need of a usability expert.
I walked in the door, and was able to determine which way it was to get in line, but not everyone could do this. I’ve been to some Taco Bells where you queue up from the left, and some from the right. Why not a standard! I got in line, placed my order, and then was given a ticket with my order number, which I could sort-of read. The number I saw on the ticket did not look like the number the cashier told me. I decided to go with what I thought the ticket said.
While I stood near the pickup area, with about 5 or 6 other people, I managed to block either the soda dispensing area, the entrance to queue up, and the exit (or entry) door. So as more people came in, they did not realize many of us were waiting for our orders and queued up behind us. Once they figured it out, they got in line, and all I could do was keep shifting around to block something else.
Now, it’s a small place, and it’s 1:00 PM, so perhaps this isn’t always how it goes down, but today Taco Bell got a 2 points out of 10 for it’s usability.
Taco Bell Usability Engineer signing off…
(Maybe next time I’ll actually get into the usability problems of tacobell.com)
Over at tinkernet, on the post titled The Sledding, we got the following comment:
I’m very, very impressed that this sort of work is being done; Web Design is getting stagnant with people using just styled block-level elements to produce artwork. The incorporation of SVG into sites excites me a lot. How long do you expect it will take for this sort of technology to be widespread? Obviously you can only speak about WebKit realistically, but if it’s going to take ten years for IE Win to gain (full) support, we can’t design with it. I’m amused by the “Becoming more important” line in the first paragraph. This has been a HUGE problem for years - ever since HTML-2.0 was introduced to be more of a layout language and less of a markup language. For an example, you just have to look at this site. sex partners Why is all the text crammed over on the left side of the page with a big blank space on the right side? Why is the default font tiny and unreadable? Fortunately most browsers now let you override the latter problem.
I didn’t approve the comment. I removed the link, which pointed to what I’m sure was some sort of adult site, but besides that and the ’sex partners’ text, everything else appears semi-legit. Of course there is the fact that it has nothing at all do to with the post it was attached to. So close… This could have been left on another site, on another post, and it would have been relevant, which makes the future of comment spamming just a little more scary.
Well, it’s been over a year since I attended a meetup. I’m overdue. So I’ll (most likely) be attending The Milwaukee Web Design Meetup Thursday, May 11, at 7:00 PM. I think I’ve convinced Jeremy from Design414 to go as well. See ya there…
(Hooray for Meetup.com supporting Microformats…)
I decided to evaluate Sphere, the new the blog search engine. Here are the results.
So far, so good… Well, not really “good” as in “good results” but it works so far.
Next I decided to click on a result. What? Are you freakin’ kidding me? The link opens a new window? Right. Of course! I mean, users might leave your site (which happens to be a search engine) so make sure you open any links in a new window. Seriously, I’ll try Sphere again when they strip out all the target="_blank"’s from their code…
If you’ve got a cluestick and some spare time, stop by the Sphere offices and explain it to them…
(Huh? Adaptive Path was involved with this? What’s up with that?)
