Archive for February, 2010
Just found a web service that allows you to send large files up to 2Gb
http://www.mailbigfile.com/pro/
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
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
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
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
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.
Download the source code here – 22Kb zip
Notes: Needs to be in an ASP friend environment.
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% |
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp
Also – more info > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
If your in the web game – you’ll know that it isn’t an easy task to get sites to render in 98% of the browsers out there. Before you even start on a site – you need to work out who your target market is in terms of browsers and cut off the rest – aka – “degrade gracefully”. The term degrade gracefully means that they need to work in (are navigatable, clickable) those “lower” browsers although maybe not look as pretty in. W3 seem to have a fairly good record of the most current stats – you can see them here.
Something’s to help you through the browser blues are the following;
Online multiple screen rendering
One bit of software I use is Browser Cam. This online application allows you to test in multiple operating systems in multiple browsers – you need a live page to test this on.
This is well worth the money spent and you can see for yourself for free for 30days.
Desktop testing
As you may or may not know after you update your browser you no longer have the previous version – while this is often good as hopefully they have knocked out the bugs it often removes the only testing vessel you had of that browser…
To over come that there are what as known as stand alone browsers – thanks to TredoSoft who have put together a lovely little package of standalone IE versions from 3.0 – 6.0 you can have hours of “fun” trying to get your sites to work. The also have a version of IE 7.0 standalone although this seems to be a little buggy sometimes (you need to do a restart to get it working as it doesn’t like when its brothers and sisters are running).
Check out trendsofts downloads of IE 3.0 – 6.0 here and IE 7.0 standalone here
Alretnatively i have zipped the pair up and put in one file here – NB 25Mb
I will put some hints and ways around hacking your CSS in IE in the near future – in the mean time – have a read here
Requirements - Full screen image (as a back ground) that scales and will display in any monitor resolution
Solution:
Notes:
Background image for content – I have used a PNG image for the back ground – The PNG will render correctly in IE 8, FireFox 3, Chrome, Safari although older versions of IE (say 6) the PNG will come up as a solid color – no biggie. You can apply hacks to it but seeing though those browsers are on the out and only hold about 8% market share you can better spend your time doing other things.
Browsers tested – It pretty much works on all browsers ( put it this way – it even works on IE 4.01)
Layers - You need to think all div’s like a sandwich (if you will) and by using z-index in css you can determine the stacking order. So what ever you want on the bottom (eg the background image) make sure that you set the z-index to something low or negative (the range is -5000 to 5000 – i think) and make sure the content is at least 1 more than that.
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