English | Deutsch English | DeutschIf you are a web-standards or web-accessibility purist then you have been given quite a lot of reasons to put your hackles up with the release of iPhone (yeah, Steve doesn’t use an article so I’m not going to either). You see, people are releasing sites that are iPhone-specific and even employing dastardly mechanisms to sniff your browser and only serve their wares to those wealthy enough to shill out $600 for iPhone.
THE NERVE!
People are crying foul, relating this practice to the early days of the web when companies blithely released Internet Explorer-only sites. The web-standards movement has made much progress in the last few years to stymie this practice and the prevailing thinking has been that most …
For those who haven’t seen it, go check out Microsoft Surface.
First Reaction: “Now that is cool.”
Second Reaction: “Wait, haven’t I seen that before?”
My second reaction was both true and an unfair poke at Microsoft. Yes, I have seen this type of technology before, most notably Jeff Han’s research. But Microsoft is not the first company to take direction from a nascent research sector and run with it (I’m looking at you Apple). With the pending release of iPhone and general buzz around multi-touch technology it makes perfect sense that Microsoft is headed in this direction.
How close are we to realizing any of the goodness displayed in the sample videos? I would …
I spent Thursday and Friday of last week up north in Portland attending and speaking at the annual Webvisions conference. Webvisions is a regional conference now in its seventh year that promises to provide “a glimpse into the future, along with practical information that you can apply to your Web site, company and career.”
Photo courtesy of Patrick Haney
The last conference I attended was SXSW and it is now clear to me that SXSW is its own, special thing that cannot be contained by the mere term “conference.” Webvisions does not exist on nearly the same scale, but that has its advantages. The accessibility of the speakers and general easy …
What can we learn from a street musician flopping in front of a busy commuter crowd in Washington D.C.? Tons, if that musician happens to be Joshua Bell, recipient of the Avery Fisher Prize.
On January 12th, 2007, the Washington Post set Bell in a busy commuter station as a street musician to see how the crowd would react to having one of the greatest classical musicians on earth delivering a free concert to no one in particular. The resulting article’s findings are astounding.
Bell was virtually ignored.
Aside from this being a fascinating cultural experiment, there is an excellent lesson embedded within it that designers of any ilk should heed: context matters more than …
One of the elements lauded in flickr’s interface is it’s general goofiness with the written word. Each time you log in, it greets you in a different language then the last time.
“Hala smadden!”
When you click a button, it doesn’t say “submit” it says “get in there!” These interface tweaks personalize the system, make it seem more friendly to the user. Such decisions are absurdly easy on the technical end but can be difficult to make from a business standpoint. Does it make our brand too lackadaisical, not serious enough? Personally, I really appreciate the small touches, which is why I really enjoyed finding this gem from Google on Digg today. …
One of the elements that draws me to develop for the web is astoundingly close-knit and open community of designers and developers. A natural side-effect of such a community is the rise of an A-list, or rockstar group of designers who get an inordinate amount of attention and adulation. Personally, I don’t object to this behavior because those who have taken or been pushed into the spotlight are nearly all excellent ambassador’s for the craft. They have no issue sharing methodology or inspiration and are constantly giving back to the community at large.
It is for this reason that when needed, the mostly silent community can come together and have a potentially great impact. Recently, …
I spent a lot of my time at SXSW this year sitting on panels discussing the mobile space. I did learn quite a bit, but the thing that I found most intriguing was the difficulty people are having distinguishing the various mobile spaces, particularly the difference between mobile applications and the mobile web. These two practices are fundamentally different and must be mentally separated by our community. The mobile web is about re-purposing current sites or creating stand-alone sites that are meant to be experienced through the phone’s web browser. Mobile application development deals in applications written to run directly on the phone. These spaces are vastly different and have noticeably divergent challenges to overcome. …
When Apple first added the airport express to its line of products, they seamlessly integrated the experience of connecting remotely to your stereo. As an unabashed admirer of their products, I picked one up fairly early on and was quite pleased with it. At the time I had only one device but did hear some rumblings about multiple adapters and Apple’s inability to play through multiple sources at once. The grumbling quickly faded to the background and I forgot about it. Recently, I picked up a second device and hooked it up to my network, discovering Apple had fixed the issue and enabled multi-speaker environments. After my pleasant surprise faded, I quickly noticed a …
I have always been fascinated with ESPN.com. As a lover of sport, it is my de-facto source for information. As an interested observer of web-design principles, it is nearly always a place to look for examples of how a gigantic internet presence is attempting to solve the problems we all face. Some of the decisions made are absolutely questionable, decisions like auto-playing video content on the homepage, but some can offer valuable insights.
It seems that every few months the little corner of the blogosphere inhabited by professional web designers/developers blows up discussing the issue of acceptable resolution sizes. At this point, the defacto standard seems to be 800×600 but many are lobbying and many more …
Ok, it’s certainly not boring, but I like to draw you in and then refute my titles. It’s sort of a dirty trick, but I’m not above it. My article on the state of visual design in the web just went up over at Digital Web. Go check it out and sound off in the comments.
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