No Mod Required

(What a terribly “bloggy” thing to do. I’m down to do bloggy things from time to time, so there you have it.)

• People who think copying a design outright is cool. The Digg design category is full of Photoshop tutorials that fall into this category. They’re not as much about techniques as they are about recreating a specific look. I worked with someone once who literally told me to “look at Apple and Digg and see how they do it.” I took that to mean, do something like Apple or Digg. Not that that’s a lot of fun, but as it came out in the wasn’t what he meant. He literally meant “look at how they round the corners or do their gradients,etc.” and copy them exactly. That was one of those conversations that I just let die because following it through to its end would have been more trouble than it would have been worth. Needless to say I didn’t do the design stealing

  Not surprisingly he’s a big fan of those Photoshop tutorials. “Make a web2.0 badge?” Woopedeedoo!

  This same guy treated me like an intern, by the way. I have a web resume that trumps his five times over, and his idea of groundbreaking design was to copy fucking Apple, but I couldn’t be trusted to tie my own shoes. It was pretty funny.

• The idea that opening links in a new window “keeps people on your site.” I’ve heard this from clients for eight years now and it really shows no signs of slowing down. What’s interesting about it is that it’s invariably a request from less than web-savvy clients, so it’s not like they all studied up on best practices before building their site and just got bad info (possibly from the same source.) I guess it’s just “common sense.” Common sense is the devil.

  Interested in why this is a problem? Here’s a mighty fine article- Beware of Opening Links in a New Window

• Speaking of the Digg Design category… at one point it was really cool and filled with actual design articles. Nowadays it’s a lot of Photoshop tutorials, Flickr links and random noise (some of which is cool) with maybe one actual design article a day. I’m still subscribed, so it can’t be all that bad, but it just used to be a little more thought provoking.

  For an example of the sort of link I used to see more of, check out- 3 Reasons Why Snap Preview is Ruining Your Blog, and Hurting Your Readership. Perfect example of the sort of thing I want to see. A little bit of design, a little bit of usability and a code complaint that I can pat myself on the back about (the click capture issue he describes with the snap preview is something I solved* recently.)

• Perma-Beta. If there’s one thing about the whole web2.0 thing that bothers me (other than glassy buttons and reflected logos) it’s permanent beta. Just roll the dice and call it a release already.

• Places that live in the nasty tweener realm of understanding that IA and Usability are somehow important to successful design and development; but not understanding (a) what that really means and (b) that they’re professional disciplines that need to be handled by people with experience and expertise. Cases in point:

  • producers and sales people doing wireframes when there’s an IA on staff
  • acknowledging that “wireframes would be nice” before starting design on an interactive project but saying “we don’t have time” and then wasting time adjusting the work flow in fully rendered Photoshop comps

  The former is like handing off a Photoshop document to a Producer and saying “give me cut up graphics and compliant xHTML” and expecting it to turn out well and the latter is just ignorant of what “process” means.

• Could the Internet Explorer 7 adoption rate be any slower? I’m desperate to be rid of IE6 and I’m still only seeing 25-30% of IE users using IE7. At this rate I’ll be old and gray before I can put IE6 to bed.

I think that’ll do for tonight. I’ve typed enough.

*it’s actually a super hack, but it gets the job done. In my case at least, the problem is the div that contains the tool tip sits on top of the actual link text. Because of that there’s a shield of sorts between the mouse and the link text that prevents the user from normally interacting with the link. Here’s how I fixed it:

• I inserted an empty anchor tag into the tool tip
• I set its display to block
• I positioned it inside the tool tip where the link would be
• I gave it a decent height and width
• I then wrote the link’s href into that anchor tag to mimic the correct behavior.

I’m doing some longer form writing and I want to be able to work on a central document whenever the urge strikes. So, I signed into Writely for the first time with the idea of actually using it for its stated purpose (as opposed to just testing it out.)

Anyway, I noticed a little link at the top right that said “Beta Meter 62%.” Clicking on it I was greeted with this text:

“We realize it’s quite popular to stay in beta test indefinitely. But, it has always been our goal to end beta at some point. The question is: Are we ready yet? Let us know what you think!”

There were “Yes”, “No” and “Cancel” submit buttons below.

I don’t know about you, but I wanted to give them a little round of applause. In this era of perma-beta, to see someone actually wanting a proper release of their application is practically boldness personified. I know it’s just nomenclature, but saying “this is a real release” means you’re more willing to stand up and say “I know this works” and shouldn’t that be the point? To build web apps that work as intended?.