Michael Richard Murphy » Design

FlickScreen and Collecting for Creativity

Michael R. Murphy — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 01:27:43 +0000

People who rely on their creative juices to make a living have always ‘collected’ inspirational items. Images, textures, toys, etc. get stored in the ‘bank’ for later use.

In the past I’ve made several unsuccessful attempts to keep track of website designs that I like. But simple bookmarking has never really worked for me. I rarely make the effort to go back and organize the bookmarks so I always end up with one giant list. Saving a URL doesn’t really take a ‘snapshot’ of the inspirational design, sites get redesigned, URLs change, etc. So my already unmanageable list can eventually be filled with designs different than those that originally inspired me or invalid URLs. There’s got to be a better way.

Matthew Smith, author of the recent Digital Web Magazine article about collecting for design was having similar problems with screen captures. So he approached a Cocoa-programming friend of his who came up with FlickScreen. FlickScreen allows for convenient uploading of screen captures directly to your Flickr account.

FlickScreen runs in your Apple menu bar. A dropdown allows you to choose between uploading a capture of your entire screen or just a specific portion of it. Users can easily enter titles, descriptions, and keywords for their captures and even put them in specific sets. It takes about 10 seconds to classify and upload a capture. All without leaving the page.

The “New”

Michael R. Murphy — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 15:36:18 +0000

Well, here is the new “design”. I opted to go the theme route because I find I get bored with a design by the time I’ve got it all fleshed out for Word Press. Besides, like I said, I’ve been pretty busy with paying work lately.

Over the last few weeks I’ve upgraded Word Press to implement some security updates as well as take advantage of some widgets and plug-ins available for more recent versions. The Recent Reading and My Flickr sections of the footer are new to the site.

I’ve also updated the directory structure and moved some things around a little. It’s been tested locally but please let me know (in the comments here) if you click on something that doesn’t work as expected.

As I mentioned in my previous post, Coming…soon(?), this website also has a new home with Bluehost. They came highly recommended and they offer RoR hosting so hopefully you’ find some posts about Ruby here in the near future.

O/S and Browser Testing

Michael R. Murphy — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 10:17:55 +0000

One of the difficulties of web development is that no O/S or browser renders designs in quite the same way. It’s time consuming (and sometimes impossible) to get your design looking just so for every possible combination. It’s also hardware and software intensive. Not everyone has access to PCs running Windows 98,XP,and/or 2000 plus Macs with OS 9 or OS X plus Linux or Unix machines,not to mention the plethora of browsers available on those platforms.

Drum roll please…until now. I stumbled across browsershots.org yesterday and it’s wonderful!

Enter the URL you want test in different platforms and browsers and browsershots.org uses distributed computing to snap screenshots in your choice of browser/platform. Those screenshots are then uploaded for your viewing pleasure. Problem solved.

Yahoo! UI Drag and Drop library

Michael R. Murphy — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 00:46:21 +0000

I’m pretty excited that this week I added some pretty cool drag and drop functionality to an application I’ve been working on. I talked about Yahoo!’s UI library here a while ago and finally put it to use.

I’ve been converting a PowerPoint presentation and exercises used by Human Resources to train new hires into a web application and drag and drop seemed like the perfect design for a term matching exercise.

The application isn’t available outside our corporate network but I hope (I use that term loosely given the frequency of my posts lately) to post some examples of what’s possible at some point.

I don’t want to downplay my Javascript skills but Yahoo! has made it pretty easy to implement these libraries. There’s a downloadable zip of dependent files for each library that developers link to in their applications. After that,the API provides you with the methods for adding whatever interaction you like. I was able to put together a passable application in an afternoon and now it just needs some polishing and finishing touches.

Check out Yahoo!’s UI Library and create!

Extreme Makeover – The Student Loan Corp. Edition

Michael R. Murphy — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 10:31:56 +0000

The Student Loan Corporation is pretty good about employee appreciation. They put on about 6,very nice,internal events a year that differ in themes. There’s always a holiday party around Christmas time but throughout the rest of the year they mix it up with events like an Olympic-themed series of games,a Casino Night,Spring Break,etc. Pictures from these events get posted to the Internal Events page of the intranet. A screenshot of that page is below:

What you can’t tell from that picture is that most of the images are animated gifs. Between all the movement and the differing,non-matching,background colors,I go into convulsions everytime I see this page. When it was time this week to post the latest round of pictures,I couldn’t take it anymore. It was time to spruce things up a little so I took an hour or so to do some spring “cleaning”:

Now each event is linked to by a ‘polaroid snapshop’ of an icon representing it rather than a dancing turkey or swinging medal. I like its cleaner,more professional look. What do you think?

CSS Floats and Absolute Positioning

Michael R. Murphy — Fri, 26 May 2006 09:43:24 +0000

Just yesterday I made what I thought was a simple change to a layout. It had a horizontal navigation at the top (an floated list) and two floating content areas below it taking up approximately half the screen each.

For some reason,when I removed a menu item from the end of the navigation,all hell broke loose in Firefox. The left-hand float moved right and the right-hand float bumped down under it. Amazingly the design still rendered as desired in Internet Explorer so I didn’t put a whole lot of detective work into it. The site would only be accessibly on our corporate network where Firefox is almost a four letter word. But it did bother me that removing that one item (which should have no effect on the floats) broke everything so badly. Alas,I still had bigger fish to fry and other problems to focus on so that was going on the back burner.

It’s funny how solutions sometimes present themselves in unlikely places just when you need them. I had cut out reading my regular blogs some time ago to focus on other things but I had a few minutes so I decided to check some out. I’m glad I did since the latest post from Shaun Inman discusses the fragile nature of floats and his solution.

I think I may have found the solution I’m looking for. Check it out,it’s definitely worth a read.

Mother Nature’s Role

Michael R. Murphy — Fri, 26 May 2006 09:24:41 +0000

While writing this recognition application for The Student Loan Corporation,overlapping roles has been a constant thorn in my side.

Application administrators and managers have access to certain functions,such as the ability to approve nominations of different levels,that general users do not.

Managers were relatively easy to handle. Creating an employee table that correlated managers and their direct reports allowed me to move nominations for specific employees to the appropriate manager’s queue.

Adminstrators are a whole different beast however. Not only do admins need to be able to function as normal users and administrators,they can also be people managers. As far as approvals were concerned,it was tricky (but doable) to figure out when a nomination needed to be approved by a specific employee acting as an administrator and when that specific employee needed to function as a people manager. Their role in these instances affected whether or not the nomination moved on and to where.

I solved this problem by creating different statuses to indicate where each nomination was in the approval process. Based on that information,I was able to determine where it should go next. That problem has been behind me for a little while now and it’s been smooth sailing until recently.

Roles are starting to get muddled again now that I’m working on the redemption portion of the application. The idea is that an employee’s accumulated recognition points can be redeemed for prizes. These prizes reside in an inventory maintained by the administrator.

This is where it gets slightly complicated. Because quite a few of the prizes are company branded and the program sponsor is Human Resources,these items are also used for other purposes such as charity give-aways or gifts for visiting executives. The admin now needs to be able to remove items from inventory from time to time for these purposes. Since the recognition program depends upon an accurate count of the items available for redemption,these withdrawals really need to take place through the system. The rub for me was how to determine when the administrator is removing these items as an adminstrator for the purposes just discussed and when they are legitimately redeeming credits accumulated as a normal user. In one instance,this action would mean reducing their accumulated credits for the redeemed prizes while in the other,it would not.

The idea that I’d need to figure this out eventually has been floating around in the back of my mind nagging me. I kept putting it off because I didn’t want to invest the brain power I thought would be necessary to figure it out. Little did I know how short an amount of time it would actually take.

SLC is rapidly outgrowing the available space in their current location so people are tight. I’ve had a tough time concentrating lately with anywhere from 6 to 8 people within three feet of me all having their own conversations and working. Maybe I just have superhuman hearing but there’s this constant chatter than once I pick up on,I can’t drown out,even with headphones.

Anyway,I’m getting down to the wire on this project and this functionality is one of the few remaining pieces so I decided it was time to just knock it out.

Yesterday at lunch I headed over to a trail nearby with the idea that I would get some fresh air (and quiet),focus exclusively on this problem,and come back to work with a solution. I’m proud to report that less than two minutes from the trailhead,I had everything worked out. About an hour after returning to work,the solution was implemented.

I guess the next time I’m strugging with something,instead of putting it off,I’ll just take a walk.

Corporate Challenge

Michael R. Murphy — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 23:27:24 +0000

I’m pleased to announce that this year I’′ll be designing the shirt worn by the local Citigroup companies in the JP Morgan Chase Corporate Challenge. This includes local offices of The Student Loan Corporation,Citibank,and Solomon Smith Barney (my apologies if I forgot any group). Check back for an unveiling of the design after final approval by the powers that be.

IE7 CSS Support and Float Clearing

Michael R. Murphy — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 10:18:08 +0000

I’ve heard that the beta of Internet Explorer 7 has finally been released,so now is the time for developers to step up testing of their work to make sure everything is copacetic.

The good news is that IE will now support transparent PNGs. The bad news (among other things) is that it now parses the comment filter /**/ that is commonly used to hide styles from its older siblings.

I’ve also heard that IE7 isn’t supporting the :after pseudo-element which developers commonly use to clear floats,although that didn’t immediately jump out at me on developer’s checklist provided by Microsoft. Take a look and see what you need to get your sites ready for IE7.

Atlas from Microsoft

Michael R. Murphy — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 02:18:36 +0000

Ajax freaks working in the .Net environment should run right out and download Atlas,a new development framework from Microsoft. I said run.

Atlas integrates client-side script libraries with the server-based services of ASP.NET in order to create some really rich,interactive UIs. I watched a demo in which Microsoftie Scott Guthrie created a simple to-do list with tons of functionality in less than 20 minutes. The mini-application let users sort by task status,insert new tasks,and modify existing tasks all without page refreshes.

Scott also used some new,cool ASP.NET 2.0 methods that make handy things like pagination and alternating row colors super easy. There’s also another new method that makes it easy to display update statuses. As interfaces use page refreshes less and less to fetch data,letting the user know what’s going on becomes more important. Scott demonstrated this new method makes that as simple as drag and drop from the tool palette. Cool.