Drag & Drop Shopping Cart

Check out Panic.com’s Goods to see a cool drag & drop shopping cart. Pick a t-shirt and a size and drag the image right into a big wide footer area that acts as the cart. Even better,once added,see the image there. As near as I can tell,it’s accomplished all through Javascript and CSS. Smooth.

I can’t remember where but I read recently that it you wanted to see cutting edge work and hot design,that one need look no further than Panic.com. After talking a look at their site,that certainly seems pretty accurate. I’m definitely impressed.

del.icio.us Add-on for Firefox

I downloaded a del.icio.us Add-on for Firefox today. It adds two buttons to the browser that easily allow users to post to or access their del.icio.us bookmarks. It also adds right-click posting functionality and the ability to search their tags right in the Firefox search box. I’ve been using del.icio.us more and more as I discovering interesting reading material during my research at work that I might not necessarily have time to read just then. With my del.icio.us account set up on my home and work machines,I can tag items of interest as ‘new’ and come back to them easily from either location. Although del.icio.us automatically adds itself to users’ Bookmarks folders and toolbars,the extra functionality of this Add-on makes it worthwhile. Highly recommended.

On a side note,the Azerty III theme for Firefox has replaced Plastikfox Crystal SVG as my theme of choice. At least until Plastikfox is available for version 1.5.

Arial Smackdown

Here’s a post on the interesting history of the Arial font and why the article’s author can’t stand it. I know someone who would say the same about Papyrus.

On a related note,here’s Typographi.com’s favorite font picks for 2005: http://typographi.com/001045.php.

‘Cause You Gotta Have Goals

With the new year rapidly approaching,everybody is talking about and/or setting goals for themselves. Here’s two of mine off the top of my head:

• Within 5 years…have my own business with at least two coworkers (I already know who they are)
• Within my lifetime…write a book

Eyetracking research

I found interesting research involving eyetracking the other day at PoynterOnline. When I went to the home page,I wasn’t quite sure what a site about journalism had to do with eyetracking for websites…until I realized the research is specific to news sites. Nonetheless,where a user’s eyes focus on a web page is useful information to designers regardless of the type of site it is.

Worth checking out,there’s very detailed graphs,etc showing the movement of a user’s eyes as they scan a page from top to bottom,highlighting where they spend the most amounts of time. They also spend a good deal of time discussing navigation location,advertising,paragraph length,writing style,image size (dimension),headline format,type size,and more. An interesting read to say the least.

2006

Everybody is making predictions for trends in 2006. Of particular interest to me of course are the predictions involving hot technologies,design trends,etc. While I’ve read recent posts by Andy Budd and Cameron Molla,I’d like to draw your attention to a comment about those posts made by Roger Johansson at 456 berea street and a response to that by Chris Heilmann. Chris is known for writing great articles over at A List Apart and his own personal site http://www.icant.co.uk/.

Chris thinks there is too much concentration on the new hot thing,ruby,ajax,etc and not enough focus on what those technologies can do,ie: using technology for its own sake rather than to accomplish something. I agree. The focus should be on the end result rather than pieces in the middle. Does a client really care if you’re using bleeding edge X if the end product meets their needs? From a project management and ongoing maintenance standpoint,they should probably understand the technology but realistically,end users most likely won’t,so what does it matter?

He also mentions he’d like to see more focus cleaning up the functions of CMS to better use and write cleaner CSS. This was of particular interest to me because of my recent research of the Sitecore CMS.

I think CMS is a great tool for businesses. We had this discussion many many many many times in my old position when it came to visibility on the web and search engine results. We just didn’t have it because we didn’t have fresh content on a regular basis. It shouldn’t be a web developers job to generate content for a web site about skin care or financial products and you wouldn’t expect an aesthetician or banker to be writing their own HTML and publishing content. CMS is a happy medium. The web developer sets it up and gets some templates in place for the general site layout and then writes some CSS rules to enforce branding guidelines. If you’ve chosen the right CMS,for the content authors,it’s as easy as using MS Word to publish. Do you think I’d write here as often as I do if I had to start a new HTML page from scratch? And upload it? And go into my old pages and create links to the new material? Fat chance.

A lot of the mundane details of my current position could be alleviated if we used a CMS. thankfully it’s a small portion but does anybody really want to pay an experienced developer to copy and paste from a Word document into HTML when the document’s author can write it directly in the CMS? Probably not. This would be a huge help in freeing me up to do more productive things.

So,for 2006,let’s concentrate on solving problems not technologies.

Usability testing

So we had our first usability test of the new recognition web app I’m writing and things went swimmingly.

Imagine that,usability testing…with real users. It was a pleasant change for me. We got tons of great feedback and fortunately it tells me that I’m really on the right track.

This is a high visibility project and it can’t be bad when the CEO drops in to see how things are progressing and the Director of HR comes down to participate in the tests. The project sponsor told me today people are pressuring her to get things wrapped up because they want me on their upcoming projects. Not bad for 6 weeks on the job.

Ok,time to stop tooting my own horn and write something useful to somebody.

The Death of Mac IE

As soon as I saw this posting on The Web Standard’s Project web site,I forgot what it was I went there for.

I know plenty of people who will be glad to hear Microsoft’s announcement that Internet Explorer for Macintosh is dead! Microsoft will end security and performance updates for IE/Mac effective December 31^st and they even recommend Safari as a replacement. Happy New Year!

While IE/Mac was actually one of the first browsers to at least partially support standards,it had become the bane of my existance in my old position. Perhaps it was more the expectation by the powers that be that every layout look exactly the same in all browsers than IE’s CSS issues but I really have come to *hate* IE/Mac.

Naturally people will still have to support IE/Mac depending on their audience,especially since it will still be available for download at MS’s site until the end of January 2006 but the sooner it disappears,the happier I’ll be.

IE is dead. Long live Firefox.

Reddit.com

I got turned onto reddit.com when Paul Graham mentioned it in one of his posts. It’s like del.icio.us…but not.

It’s that time of year

This is for all my single,male,college friends who have to spend the next three weeks in the computer labs finishing up their quarters or semesters,whatever the case may be. Wait…I can only think of one person off the top of my head that meets that criteria. I hope he enjoys this.