Author Archive

Abominable Chrome Theme

Check out our new Abominable Chrome theme up on the Google Chrome APP store. We have taken our winter mascot and given him his own little home on the web. Since we have a lot of iMacs in the office we gave him a max background image size of 2560×1440 to go full screen if needed.

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Is “Above the Fold” Relevant in Web Design Anymore?

As web designers and programmers we are always cognizant of the “fold” which is a term carried over from newspapers where people would fold the newspaper to make it easier to read. This term was carried over to the web when it became apparent in the early days of the web that since people had monitors that only saw a screen of 640×480 or 800×600, some of the content on the webpage would be out of view and would have to be scrolled to in order to view it.

This rule started the inevitable arms race of trying to fit as much as possible above this magic “fold” in order get it in front of the users eyes. I have personally witness arguments that looked like they would come to blows because of someones content being pushed below the magic line.

Here is a great webmonkey article that goes into some detail about what people who use the web have been feeling for a while.

The Fold doesn’t matter.

People will scroll.

A few of the keys for helping people see and scroll to things further down in the page is:

• avoiding hard horizontal rules, like large blocks of color
• adding whitespace to elements to give them a chance to breath
• Avoiding iframe content or frames that may add additional scroll bars in the page that may confuse users.

Of course, if this old school rule is crumbling, does that mean that the 1024 pixel site width is also up in the air? Current default pixel dimensions of most current monitors on the market is well above 1024×768. (Wikipedia)

How big is your browser window? How much do you need to scroll?

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Adding Images to Your Wordpress.com CSS

Customizing the CSS of your Wordpress.com blog can be kinda tricky but recently we were able to customize one without to much trouble.

Since Wordpress.com blogs are hosted by Wordpress they have some rules around how and when you can customize one of their blogs. The first thing that you notice is that you are constrained by the default blog themes that come loaded with your site. There are lots to choose from so most people will be perfectly fine using these. If you are a bit more adventurous or want to have your blog match your corporate website, you will want to choose advanced editing (editing your CSS). To do this you will need to purchase the “Premium” features. With the premium features you get access to the CSS as well as more storage and the ability to have your own domain name.

While access to the CSS does give you the ability to change colors and move stuff around in your site one thing it doesn’t really give that most “Custom Install” blog software has is the ability to change the images that make up the site. Say you found a great template that works good for you and you’ve change the colors fo the text and changed some fonts and stuff, but the header image is kinda bugging you. How do you go about changing that? Well normally your couldn’t because Wordpress would like to keep that stuff a little more locked down. But you can find a way around this.

Adding Images to CSS using “Advanced CSS”
The first thing that you need to do in order to add an image in Advanced editing mode on Wordpress.com is to upload an image like you will be using it in a regular post. This means using the “Add an Image” tool. Once you have uploaded an image you will be given a link or URL to the image on the wordpress.com servers. You can then take the link and plug that image link into your CSS to override a previous image in your template.

The link should look something like this.
http://yoursitename.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/imagename.jpg

You can then put this link in your CSS:
#header{background: #FFFFFF url(http://yoursitename.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/imagename.jpg) no-repeat;}

This can be repeated for all the images that you need to add.

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Do PowerPoint Animations Work?

Arstechnica is talking about a recent study with respect to the use of animations in comprehension. The results are surprising. I have suspected this for years but never really had anything to back it up. Animations in your PowerPoint do not help as much as just putting the information on the screen.

“Students’ scores, which were a bit below 40 percent correct in the first administration of the quiz. But the animated presentation brought scores up to 71 percent, while the animation-free version got them to 82 percent.”

Before you start animating that PowerPoint think about how your audience will be able to comprehend it.

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Get a YouTube Channel

Does your company have a YouTube channel started? Well if you are like a lot of other tech companies either you have one or it’s on your todo list. If you have some marketing videos, product demos, tutorials or customer testimonials, its a great way to get a wider audience or reach people who want to find out about your products, services or your industry.

The case for a YouTube channel is very compelling:

1. Don’t have to pay for the bandwidth
2. Users like the interface
3. It’s easy to post files
4. You can then embed a version in your site so that they can be found on your site as well

One of the big cons for putting your content on youtube would be that your customers may also find content that is not so flattering as well as content from your competitors up there as well.

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Good Design as a Customer Service Tool

My wife and I recently got iPhones after our previous cell phone plan expired. Apple does a really good job of managing the user experience of the purchase, from being able to make an appointment to buy and setup your phone, all the way through purchasing and setting it up.

What I got the other day was the other half of that alliance, which was the bill from AT&T for the phone service and setup. Here is where the process broke down. The world is filled with stories of unreadable phone bills and “Brazil-like” service and billing snafus, but mine is a simple one. The design of the bill.

It’s not that there was anything out of place on the bill, it’s just that it was hard to understand and to follow, and when you can’t follow the process for how they came up with the charges, it makes the total that you have to pay on the bill a little hard to swallow. I was just about to call customer service, when I had a better idea. I would break out a spreadsheet and total up the charges myself to see where my confusion was.

Since there are two phones on the bill, there are of course, two of everything. Add to this AT&T charging us for the service of our previous billing period (November) as well as charging us for our current billing period (December). There are one-time charges for each of us to setup each phone, as well as data plan and text message charges for each phone in each billing period. One more thing and that’s the taxes and fees and you have everything just about covered. This sounds like a lot of individual charges and you can just imagine people staring in bewilderment at their bill when they get it.

Once I got all the charges in my spreadsheet it was easy for me to quickly see that my bill was not really any different than I thought it would be when I bought the phone. What I realized the bill suffered from, was to much detail and not enough summary. While I don’t think there is anything the phone company can do about the detail part of the bill, I’m sure there are all sorts of regulations about the size of the font for each service charge, they can help customers better understand their charges by adding a few lines of summary for each phone.

Currently they have a by phone total for the whole bill, my suggestion would be that they add a summary line total for each phone for each month and a summary line for each months bill. Another nice break out would be a summary line total for “One-Time” setup charges, to make sure the customer knows that these will not be part of future bills. Bonus points for showing an average amount of future bills based on previous totals.

Some simple little lines to better illustrate how the bill is divided up can, save a whole lot of customer service time and headache. Especially when customers are watching their wallets. Not everyone is willing to breakout their Excel spreadsheets to figure out their phone bill.

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The Death of the Mouse has been Greatly Exaggerated

I was listening to the radio recently when the commentator cited an analyst report that said that the mouse, which was invented some 30 years ago, would be fazed out in the next 3-5 years. And with videos like this one from Jeff Han at the Ted conference it seems like its just around the corner. But after shopping for a new mouse the other day at Best Buy, I’m not so sure.

If you ever watched a parent or grandparent use a current computer, you will realize that even after 20 years of ubiquitous use around the computer industry, there are lots of users who still have a problem with how the mouse / cursor paradigm works. Imagine trying to instill a new multi-touch pattern on current and future software and how it impacts the people who use it.

Aside from the years of work people have put into the mouse paradigm, if you have any idea of how computer operating systems are made, you have a good idea how hard this would be to do inside of 10 years, much less to do it in 3-5 years. Remember that it just took 6 years for the largest manufacturer of OSs,  Microsoft, to change its operating system from Windows XP to Windows Vista.

I have no doubt that the touch-screen idea will take off at some point especially thanks to products like Apple’s iPhone, but if you’ve ever used the keyboard on the iPhone you have a good idea how far the implementation has to go before it becomes the dominate way in which we interact with computers.

Everyone wants to be Tom Cruise in Minority Report, but I think we will have to wait a little longer.

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Small Utilities – The Right Tool for the Right Job

The phrase “The right tool for the right job” applies to software as well as working on projects around the house. If you’ve ever tried to take a nail out with pliers instead of the back end of a good hammer or tried to open a can with a knife instead of a can opener you can appreciate this.

I had to do some quick video edits recently and I was hard pressed to find something built into the Windows Media Player that made this as simple as “Save As”. The kind of edits I’m talking about are just as simple as saving out a portion of the time code as a separate movie.

If you look around for a little bit you will find a Windows utility called Windows Media Encoder which includes Media Encoder, File Editor, Profile Editor and Stream Editor. The File Editor portion of this is exactly the tool I was looking for. A really simple tool to save out portions of a WMV file.

The question that came to mind after I used the tool was,  Why isn’t this part of the Windows Media install?

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