There has been alot of talk lately about Rich Text Editors (RTE). There are alot of of them out there. FCKEditor, TinyMCE and xStandard are just a few. Recently Yahoo launched their own RTE. (Seems a little slow to me). EXT just announced they would have a RTE in their 2.0 release. (That 2.0 release…
For a while I was writing the book, but the more I worked on it, the more it was looking like a regular old programming book. I really don’t want to write a programming book. I want to write a User Experience or Interaction Design book. That is what I know best. Sure, jQuery is…
I recently described what I do as “OXO is to kitchen utensils as I am to Websites.” Oxo has awesome designs. Check out their description of universal design. I love their stuff. They are fun to use and make me feel like the product cares about me as a human being. Even if its just…
I just read a blog post by Ben Nadel stating “Don’t let great be the enemy of good”. At work, I am constantly struggling with “What can we do quickly and what would be perfect?” As a UX Designer, I know that even the slightest flaw can be a pimple right on the nose of…
Katie printed out an article for me, from the New York Times entited: Technology’s Untanglers: They Make It Really Work. There are several misconceptions here. Ones that I think are fairly widespread. For the record, I am NOT a usability professional. I am a UX Architect. If you prefer UI Designer or Web Designer, that…
I was looking for a site that used a particular UI element called a “slider”. Sliders are horizontal or vertical bars with an indicator on top. You slide the indicator back and forth to tell the system a particular range or value. These are useful in specific circumstances, but don’t get used all the time.…
I had never installed a blackberry (crackberry) server before and really hadn’t thought much about it. Apparently, it’s a pretty complex architecture. The software, which installs on the exchange server, has a zillion options. From a UX standpoint, this thing is a disaster. I imagine this is because there are so many configuration options for…
Having trouble getting past a certain point in my presentation for AjaxExperience 2007. In the presentation, I have ranted and raved about the creative process and interaction design. I have nice illustrations and fancy transitions. All is well. Now, I want to transition to the part where there is jQuery. I want to show examples.…
jQuery 1.1.3 just got released. It’s 800% faster on average than 1.1.2 and still 20k. It also hase a few bells and whistles which will make my life easier. One thing I wish I had last month is a negative selector like $(“div[@id!=test]”). The exclamation point helps because I can say do something to anything…
I just finished buying my first photograph from iStockPhoto.com. I am totally impressed with their user interface. The entire experience was solid. The information architecture seemed coherent. Everything about it has subtlety and grace. Compared to the competition, it head and shoulders above the rest. Plus the pricing strategy was great. You buy “credits”. Then…
Netflix, a few weeks ago, finally introduced Drag and Drop on their Queue page. I have already used it a bunch of times. Bravo, Netflix. It works very well for what it does. It has a nice transparency when a row is in motion. Plus several visual cues to know what is happening. However, it…
For a long time, I have not liked the functionality in the image zoom implementations out there. Usually I use HighSlide. It is probably the best of the bunch. It zooms, drags around, has great styling with lots of options. But it doesn’t dim the screen and it doesn’t have easing on the zoom. jQuery…
An engineer friend of mine needed some help on CSS. He was extremely frustrated with the CSS. As I fixed it, he looked at me like I was performing black magic. I asked, “Isn’t programming like this?” He said, “No, programming is more deterministic.” This made me think about all of the HTML/CSS I have…
jQuery just announced launched a new plugin area. This is an area that I have had particular interest in for some time. The jQuery plugins really are needed to do any advanced UX. Once you have a taste of great UX, you just can’t hold back from every detail. Anyway, I looked at the area…