Recent Blog Posts
Blogs ยป Archive for March, 2007
DevConnections Spring 2007 Day 2
DevConnections Day 2 highlights.
DevConnections Day 1 Wrap: Microsoft Day at a Microsoft Conference
Day 1 coverage of DevConnections Spring 2007. Highlights include WPF/E, Orcas and Entity Framework
Web-based graphics application: Picnik
If I get in the habit of saying “Check this out. It’s Flash and very Web 2.oh!” slap me around a bit, because I’m probably either unwell or being controlled by aliens.
Nevertheless. Check this out. It’s Flash and very Web 2.oh!. Fortunately, it’s also pretty darn slick.
Picnik is a web-based photo manipulation application and I think a very nice example of a quality Flash application development. The interface is simple to use, responsive and has almost all the tools you’d want to correct and polish photographs for online presentation — specifically resize, rotate, crop, color adjustment, sharpen and exposure correction.
There are also a bunch of nicely executed, but probably less day-to-day useful effects under the ‘Creative Tools’ tab that includes borders, color tints, rounded corners and soft focus tricks, just to name a few.
Now if you’re reading this it’s likely you already have a number of tools that handle these functions perfectly well and you aren’t going to switch to an online app just because it’s there. Of course, if you are away from your workstation, it’s nice to know you always have an option at your fingertips.
However, the place I …
DevConnections Spring 2007 Day 0: ScottGu, AJAX++ & Entity Frameworks
DevConnections 2007 kicked off tonight with Keynote presentations from Scott Guthrie, Mr. ASP.NET himself, and Christian Kleinerman, Sql Server Relational Engine Group Program Manager.
Marking your own exam
On the Ixd Discussion List at the moment there’s a discussion being held about the difference between the role of the interaction designer (often written as IxD or IaD) and usability specialist.
In a nutshell, the interaction designer will design user interface behaviours and user interactions on a site, hopefully based on previous research that’s been conducted. The usability specialist conducts research that informs and evaluates these decisions from a user perspective, throughout the development of a site or system.
Many interaction designers will argue that it’s an essential skill to have experience in user research and general usability principals. This seems logical to me. What doesn’t seem logical to me is this: conducting user-based evaluations (or other usability testing) of your own designs.
Is it possible to mark your own exam without influence from business requirements, client pressures and ego? I think it takes a very strong character to do so and I also think there’s something to be said for independent evaluations. Personally I’m not convinced that it’s the ideal way to develop with true user focus, but it seems to be happening out there a bit.
What are your thoughts and experiences?
DevConnections Bound
First, apologies for the recent lack of activity on this blog. I got bogged down with a project of sorts that ate my writing time. That has been wrapped up, so you should be expecting more content shortly.
By shortly, I really mean tomorrow as I will be attending DevConnections 2007 in Orlando Florida, and I plan to post some semi-live coverage here. Stay tuned.
Also, if you happen to be at the conference, don’t hesitate to introduce yourself. I am not as mean as I look.
London Calling: Attention Project Managers!
Q: Are you in London?
Q: Are you a gun project manager/web producer?
If you answered ‘Why, yes I am!’ to both of those questions, speak to Reactive Media promptly about what should be a pretty cool job op.
Reactive’s founders, affectionately referred to as ‘the Tim’s’ (O’Neill & Fouhy) go waaaay back with the SitePoint crew (circa Netscape 3.0!) and it’s a little known fact that Reactive actually built V1.0 of SitePoint.com back in 2000. Since then they’ve grown to become one of Australia’s blue chip webdev houses, with Tim O relocating to the UK last year to open their London office.
A quick summary of the position is as follows:
“We want a person with a combination of raw talent (inbuilt organisational tendencies and full of ideas), enthusiasm, responsibility and a great can-do attitude. We provide a friendly, fun and creative working environment as well as the confidence of working with a well established business. “
“Demonstrated experience as a Web Producer or Project Manager would be ideal (although other Production / PM experience will be considered). “
“The position will include:”
- A job that will be shaped to fit your goals
- A …
PicFindr: Free stock photo and image search
(Reprinted from Design View #31)
Most of us need to use photo stock from time to time and I think this is one of the areas of design that has steadily improved with the passing years.
Firstly, if you have very specific imagery needs and/or a lack of time, commercial stock houses like Corbis, iStockPhoto, and (sometime Design View sponsor) Fotolia.com have the range, and have become cheaper, more flexible (license-wise) and dramatically more usable over the past 3-4 years. Hurrah for competition!
But perhaps the least expected development has been the continued rise of free image resource sites. It seems the breathtaking success of Flickr has helped to entrench the idea of sharing your imagery with the world, and free stock sites like SXC.hu, MorgueFile and Image:After have reaped the benefits in the form of an increasing influx of quality imagery from their communities.
Now, with the release of Picfindr.com, locating free stock imagery just got easier.
You could describe Picfindr.com as a free stock site metasearch application, allowing you to query a handful of sites simultaneously, then review the results in a single window.
Rick Englert, developer of the service, describes …
The real difference between PHP and Python
Posting in the full realization of the futility of doing so, there’s some PHP bashing (as usual) happening on reddit at the moment: PHP vs Python – the real difference, brought on by this mildly amusing image. While I can accept the points – technically it’s actually much harder in handle errors uniformly in PHP and the community is less rich in computer scientists than Python – the corresponding flame war on reddit manages to miss a different point, which is easiest expressed in code.
What’s the most significant difference between these two scripts?
<?php
$hits = 0;
printf (”Hits: %s\n”, $hits);
$hits++;
And a web.py controller (absolutely no criticism intended – picked it because I like it – discussion applies to pretty much anything non-CGI and, in fact, this is really nothing specific to Python either)…
#!/usr/bin/env python
import web
urls = ( ‘/.*’, ‘counter’ )
hits = 0
class counter:
def GET(self):
global hits
print “hits %s” % hits
hits += 1
if __name__ == “__main__”: web.run(urls, globals())
Depending on how you deploy the latter (i.e. …
SXSW Interactive 2007: Final Wrap-up
(Read coverage of day one, day two and day three of the SXSW festival.)
And so the mother of all festivals comes to a close. Here are some highlights from the final day:
- Web Typography Sucks
British typophiles Mark Boulton and Richard Rutter teamed up to deliver my pick for the best panel of SXSW, capturing the status of typography on the Web along with a stack of tips that everyone who works on the Web can do to improve it. I was expecting the content to be relatively basic, but it was in fact thorough, practical and delivered with both passion and authority — a potent combination.Here are some of the main points:
- Many pages fail to maintain a vertical rhythm. The analogy Richard used was that of music — music is divided into bars of equal length, and so text should also strive to achieve a similar cadence. He introduced a formula that can be followed to help in achieving correct line height in ems (see the presentation slides for details).
- Mark talked about whitespace and the fact that it is not arbitrary. (Unfortunately he didn’t elaborate on how this translates to a fluid …
