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…
Busy weekend as usual. Worked more on the book. It’s moving along. In the book there are lots of “examples” that I am mocking up. I find myself making them way too complicated. I believe that any page can have dozens of small details that make it smooth and perfect. Each one is small in…
Ok, I couldn’t help myself. I installed Safari for Windows. It was a beta! I couldn’t resist. Almost immediately, I noticed a few annoying things which bother my User Experience senses. There was no top bar. I use that top bar. I resize with it, I double click on it to maximize and minimize. Why…
I noticed a quote from Bobby Knight. Most people have the will to win, few have the will to prepare to win. I thought it was a cool quote, but then I played tennis last night. It was some of the best tennis I have ever played. It was with my new Wilson 6.1 Team…
A news article on Ajaxian led me to this post about this article (PDF) from Microsoft. It talks about A/B testing and how important it is to success on the web. The article even cites the legendary Avinash Kaushik whom I had the pleasure of working with at Intuit. The best line in the article…
I use special characters in HTML all the time. Cutting and pasting from MS Word is especially problematic because many systems choke on their characters. I usually use the html special characters and just look it up on sites like this. However, I recently saw this site called HTML Entity Character Lookup. This site is…
So I have been up and running with Lunarpages.com for a few weeks now. So far, so good. Actually, that isn’t 100% true. My site seems fine, but the Marketo site has had issues. It has gone down for 5-20 minutes several times during the last few weeks. When it’s up, it’s fast, but these…
Way back in 1995, I used to keep a list of all of the Netscape Plugins. Back then, there were so few, that it was easy. We eventually got an intern, Puck. What ever happened to Puck? Wow, Puck was a trip. Anyway, it eventually got out of hand and we gave up. Now my…
Wow! This is unbelievable. Check out the new preview of Google Maps – Street View. Here is a picture of the old Koko Interactive offices. This is where Katie and I lived when we first met. It has El Camino Real. I can’t believe they did this. I believe that within 10 years, we will…
I skipped Memorial day festivities this weekend to focus on writing the book and preparing the presentation for AjaxExperience 2007. I was pretty productive, but felt I could have been more so. It was hard to maintain focus. There was always the waiting distraction of food, break or sidetrack. I felt like SpongeBob Squarepants when…
I am working now on my Ajax Experience 2007 presentation. Title: jQuery for Designers. You can see my bio and presentation abstract on their site: http://ajaxexperience.techtarget.com/west/html/speakers.html#GLipka The presentationis moving along, although I definetely feel nervous. I haven’t spoken to an audience in a long, long time. I feel passion for the subject, but it’s been…