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8th March
2010
written by Hamish

The Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of Mobile Web Application Best Practices. The goal of this document is to aid the development of rich and dynamic mobile Web applications. It collects the most relevant engineering practices, promoting those that enable a better user experience and warning against those that are considered harmful. W3C invites implementers to complete an implementation report template. The group also published today a Last Call Working Draft of Guidelines for Web Content Transformation Proxies 1.0, which provides guidance to Content Transformation proxies as to whether and how to transform Web content. Comments on the latter document are welcome through 11 March. Learn more about the Mobile Web Initiative.

8th March
2010
written by Hamish

So you want to tell the world everything you do? Seems that people are tweeting about all sort of stuff… i am not a massive fan but have had some clients who want there own look and feel.

I have put together a multilayer photoshop document so you can see what i belive is best practice within the twitter environment.
NB – this is for screen res of 1280 X 1024 and above.

Download the PSD document here | 1.14Mb

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16th February
2010
written by Hamish

Just found a web service that allows you to send large files up to 2Gb

http://www.mailbigfile.com/pro/

15th February
2010
written by Hamish

Sick of Alt Print screen? not a fan of paying for Viso?  Just stumbled on these awesome Firefox add-ons which can replace Viso and print screening…

Screen capture – Aviary
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/11587

Viso replacement  – Pencil
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8487

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10th February
2010
written by Hamish

It might not be a facebook killer as it has some limitations at this stage although any new products out there do cause the current main stream apps to rethink what they do… Hopefully this doesn’t lead to facebook having another interface  change.

(this is first product i have notice from google with out the word “beta” in the logo- http://www.google.com/buzz )

Some general stuff (from Googie’s mouth)

  • No setup needed
    Automatically follow the people you email and chat with the most in Gmail.
  • Share publicly or privately
    Publish your ideas to the world or just to your closest friends.
    Inbox integration
    Comments get sent right to your inbox so it’s easy to keep the conversation going.
  • Photo friendly
    See thumbnails with each post, and browse full-screen photos from popular sites.
  • Connect sites you already use
    Import your stuff from Twitter, Picasa, Flickr, and Google Reader.
  • See updates in real time
    New posts and comments pop in as they happen. No refresh required.
  • Just the good stuff
    Buzz recommends interesting posts and weeds out ones you’re likely to skip.

My thoughts - (correct me if i am wrong)

  • No setup needed
    Only if your with gmail already….
  • Share publicly or privately
    Nothing new here
    Inbox integration
    This is a plus! i hate face books email system – if you put more than a few links you have to do a human test
  • Photo friendly
    This is a plus although only if you have been already used other things like flickr, google photos and so on…
  • Connect sites you already use
    facebook does this…. snore
  • See updates in real time
    I dont like this – wave has a similar feature – i like to have about 30 seconds to realised i spelled annual leave wrong (true story)
  • Just the good stuff
    Sounds like another awesome spot for adverts
Summary – well do we really need it? probably not… the plus side is that it might make facebook rethink a few things like the email, photo limitations.
I think some people might like keeping facebook seperate to there email.
Any who – lets see this develop.
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10th February
2010
written by Hamish

Just found this lovely little toolbar add on for Firefox to test accessibility.

http://wave.webaim.org/toolbar

7th February
2010
written by Hamish

For the development Sydney New Year’s Eve web site they wanted the abiliity to be able to add alearts to the site via multiple entry points (web, sms, web phone).

With limited time and no budget also i really didn’t want to build something from scratch (more so why would you?) i took twitter and turned it into an alert system which any one with a mobile phone and acocunt passwords could update.

All i did was repurpose a Twitter widget so that it would do exactly that – see screen shots to the right. The only catch is that the twitter account must be clear unless the alert will appear.  So if an alert was needed to be sent out you would have to log in and delete the alert afterwards.

See the code working here

Dowload the code here


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6th February
2010
written by Hamish

Another consideration when designing a web site is what size do you design for? The type of site and who it is for will determine most of this although in general you should have ready made up standards.

My rule of thumb is to design for screen resolutions of  1024 x 768 although make sure you that have certain elements display correctly in 800 x 600.

The “certain elements” include Navigation, H1, first line of copy within the page fold and branding.

I have put together a chrome which has a few of my rule of thumb positionally as a guidance.

Download PSD chrome | 721 KB psd
Download PSD chrome Zip file | 84 KB Zip

6th February
2010
written by Hamish

Every lost your phone contacts? When i first got my Iphone – somehow I managed to wipe the sim card clean…   Instead of manually entering all the contact details  i built a contact form which out-puts an  xml file. This file is easily manageable/editable and quickly able to be imported into my iphone via Gmail contacts.

View an online demo here

Download the source code here – 22Kb zip

Notes:  Needs to be in an ASP friend environment.

4th February
2010
written by Hamish

Have found from several sources with varied summarized stats on browsers and resolution that overall IE is dominate as a collective although as individual browsers (6 – 8)  holds less market share than that of  firefox.

It also shows that IE is dropping in ussage over the years – down 30% 2004 – 2010. Where on the rise are the primary competition Firefox, Chrome and Safari respectively.

Where i work  our stats show that the market share of IE is around 15% per version from 6 – 8, firefox is around 30% and the rest falls into safari, chrome and so on…

If i was to pick and choose the stats id want to show someone for designing a site – they would be the ones below;

Browser Statistics Month by Month

2010 IE8 IE7 IE6 Firefox Chrome Safari Opera
January 14.3% 11.7% 10.2% 46.3% 10.8% 3.7% 2.2%

Display Resolution

The current trend is that most computers are using a screen size of 1024×768 pixels or more:

Date Higher 1024×768 800×600 640×480 Unknown
January 2010 76% 20% 1% 0% 3%

OS Platform Statistics

Windows XP is the most popular operating system. The Windows family counts for about 90%:

2010 Win7 Vista Win2003 WinXP W2000 Linux Mac
January 11.3% 15.4% 1.4% 59.4% 0.6% 4.6% 6.8%

thanks to w3Schools

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp

Also – more info > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

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