Just a quick note to let you all know there is a new IE testing tool out there over at : http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage This is another option instead of installing the MultipleIE standalone versions. Hopefully it will be out of beta soon, and also look at supporting other browsers too. It would be a perfect world to have one tool to test all browsers perfectly, instead of loading up different instances all the time. Well done to the team at DebugBar.Have you used this tool? What are your thoughts?
Filed under: General News on June 9th, 2008 | No Comments »
When a major player doesn’t support major browsers what does one think, other head in the sand. Hotmail has been slow loading and throwing un-responsive javascript errors for a long time now in Firefox on a PC using winxp and now it just doesnt load at all. Read more »
Filed under: Javascirpt / DHTML, UX & Usability on June 9th, 2008 | No Comments »
Just took a look at the BBC website ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/ ) and was pleasantly surprised! Personalised information, with docking of news snippets, and a host of other features. If you haven’t checked it out yet take a gander. It is definately the top of its field in terms of user personalisation, beautiful layout, and ease of access to information.
Filed under: Design Sites on June 6th, 2008 | No Comments »
There are numourous ways and Javascripts out there to sort out a scrolling panel. Although when it comes to getting one that works on a Safari Browser in the iPhone when a double finger action is used to initiate the scroll action item - well then it is a bit tougher. Iframes, JS heavy scrolling divs etc are all options out there, but not really what you want to employ. Namely they are heavy and they dont work too well.
Good news is the great people over at Dream-in-Code provided this simple snippet that works a treat : http://www.dreamincode.net/code/snippet132.htm
Just add it to your page, open it on the iPhone browser then put two fingers over the content area and drag down. Presto : light-weight user scrolling on the iPhone. Add in some AJAX for updating mapping, or even just use it to scroll contained content areas easily.
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Filed under: CSS, General News on May 21st, 2008 | No Comments »
Was just reading the article over on Slashdot and found the best link to a UI library to easily create a iPhone enabled site. * The section Using iUI and creating iPhone views points outThe iUI framework, based on Joe Hewitt’s iPhone navigation work, hugely simplifies iPhone web development. All you need to do is include the iUI JavaScript and CSS files along with included images and create your views in a particular structure to have native iPhone behaviour such as sliding menus and AJAX page loading.
Go download the iUI framework and take a look. Easy - well structured and ready to roll!
Filed under: General News on May 15th, 2008 | No Comments »
So, Google is looking to lift their slowing profits by monetizing another product. Google image search is about to introduce image Ads. Good news for people wanting to sell through image ad inventory, but as John over at AOL highlights, there is a copyright ownership problem with displaying advertising with images, isn’t there? Web search results are summaries that link you to the site owner’s content. Images, even thumbnails represent the entire copyrighted material of the artist. Seems that if they display advertising without the artists / photographer’s approval or compensating the photographer, they’re going to have an issue.
If you own imagery - better start looking at doing some inventory checks on google images.
** Quick update. The loophole that Google is looking to use can be found in this 9th Circuit Court Ruling.
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Filed under: General News on May 10th, 2008 | No Comments »
It is a common aim to make your sites faster and leaner and Nate Koetchley from Yahoo! did an exemplar job of providing the grind and grunt of what people have to do to help make their sites leaner and meaner. Check out his slides from the presentation he gave last year. They are highly relevant and at the end of the day a great basis to be working against. http://nate.koechley.com/blog/2007/06/12/high-performance-web-sites/.
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Filed under: UX & Usability on May 8th, 2008 | No Comments »