Just took a look at the BBC website ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/Â ) 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.
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.
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/.
Filed under: UX & Usability on May 8th, 2008 | No Comments »
A frustrating thing for any web developer or tester is having to have multiple browsers and multiple versions of such running to properly test applications. That doesnt really seem that bad until you have the lovely task of watching one install over write another etc. Then came along Multiple IE from tredsoft : http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE
Filed under: General News on May 8th, 2008 | No Comments »
Brilliant idea over at Twittersnooze. When you have too many follows to manage and some of them are at a conference or just annoying your mobile inbox - snooze them for a few days and take a breather.
 Kind of like a nice way to give the kids to the grandparents for the weekend without any of the guilt.
Filed under: Tech News on May 1st, 2008 | No Comments »