I’ve been far to busy to write here lately, but wanted to share this with you: Arpit Mathur has a sweet Flex-built mp3 player that shows off a little of what Flex can do when building a mashup that combines media, storage, and identity (in this case Box.net, Flickr, YouTube and Amazon). He built this in very little time, so it has a few quirks and bugs, but hey, it’s a proof of concept. They’ve been featuring it at Adobe Labs over the weekend. Check out FlexAmp here (Flash 9 required).
Tag Archives: design
“Eclipse: Beyond the Geeks”
Shelley Powers, in one of her last Burningbird posts, shares a terrific short tutorial to help you get started using Eclipse for producing web pages.
“the more it starts to look like real life”
Slate: Paul Boutin: A grand unified theory of YouTube and MySpace:
When trying to rope in the movie and TV studios, YouTube should point to MySpace, where A-listers like Eminem peddle their wares alongside unsigned bands and lip syncers. MySpace makes it easy for musicians, kids, and grandparents to post their own pages by removing the technical hurdles. I created a profile page in three minutes, complete with an auto-play jingle. I’d planned to upload an MP3 of a band I used to play in, until I found they already have their own MySpace page. Clicking “Add” instantly copied the song from their page onto mine. Another one-click tool imported my Gmail and Hotmail address books so I could mass-invite everyone to join me.
MySpace isn’t that much easier to use than Friendster, or than other shared-user-content sites like Flickr (photo sharing), del.icio.us (bookmarks), or Digg (tech news). But it mixes multiple publishing models–blogs, photos, music, videos, friend networks–into one personal space. Most important, it doesn’t presume to know what your goals are. The site’s management ditched their early focus as a home for musicians when they realized Margaret Cho and my crazy friend Kenny wanted spaces of their own. Next, MySpace may let marketers set up profiles for brands. That’s a great idea–the same people who’ll bitch about Snickers having a page will add Wikipedia as their friend.
I think MySpace’s popularity has to do with its puppylike accessibility. A typical page looks like something a Web-enthralled high schooler might have put up in 1996, but with more pics and a soundtrack. I agree with design guru Jesse James Garrett, who says the site’s untrained layout sends a “we’re just like you” message to newcomers. That encourages them to experiment with content genres the site’s designers didn’t build into templates. If tech builders want to hand the controls over to their users, shouldn’t they presume they haven’t thought of everything? Apple’s iWeb publishing system is easy to use and way more attractive than MySpace, but we’d have gotten old waiting for Apple to invent a Lip Sync Video template.
The secret to success is to make everything one-button easy, then get out of the way. If you think collaborative architecture matters more, click the charts: The same Alexa plots that show MySpace and YouTube obliterating top sites reveal that Flickr, Digg and del.icio.us have plateaued with audiences barely bigger than Slate’s. Photos, news, and other people’s bookmarks just aren’t as interesting as bootleg TV and checking out the hotties. The easier it gets to use, the less geeky the Net becomes, and the more it starts to look like real life (emphasis mine – Karl).
‘Perfectly proportioned’ websites may be the worst
…a study by Paul van Schaik at the University of Teesside, UK, has found that the golden ratio does not benefit all designs. Websites with golden proportions can be harder to extract information from, he says.
Van Schaik put 98 students into five groups and asked them all to answer questions using information on five separate websites. He recorded the time it took participants to answer each question, together with the number of web pages they looked at to do so.
All the sites had a navigation bar with links to other sections of the site on the left of the page and a frame for content on the right, but the sizes of these two sections differed for each group. The pages of one group were divided according to the golden ratio, while the websites of the other four groups gave over less space to the navigation bar.
Those in the golden group answered the questions slowest, taking an average of 15.8 seconds to answer each question – 3.5 seconds longer than the fastest group. The golden ratio group also took 2 seconds longer than the next slowest group and had to visit more pages to find the information required.
“It has been suggested since antiquity that the ratio is aesthetically pleasing,” says Van Schaik. “But we found that not only is it not liked in web pages, it is also less efficient in terms of accuracy and speed.”
Please help me test a CSS menu
I’m testing a css drop down menu for use here and for use at Philly Future. Can you help me by letting me know if this works for you and what browser/browser version/OS you are running?
The menu appears as a bar just beneath this page’s header for now. Don’t sweat the colors – they are temporary.
Quote viewer in AJAX…
I switched the implementation of my quote viewer from Flash to Javascript last night for fun and education. If you view source, it’s there for you to find in gory detail, but here it goes for the lazy…
In the header of this page you will find tag that loads the script that enables the quote viewer:
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="/widgets/quoteview/quoteview.js"></script>
At the top of the script you will notice two variables, one sets the number of seconds I want this quote to auto-refresh (set to -1 to disable) and the the next indicates where to find the XML document that contains the quotes I want to display.
Methods in the script will load a random quote and refresh a div element on the page:
<div id="quoteview"></div>
To kick it off, I call a method from the script:
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="/widgets/quoteview/quoteview.js">quoteViewXmlRequest();</script>
And that’s it 🙂 I’m a server-side developer by trade so if you care to take a look at this and critique, it could be helpful.
Yahoo Rethinking homepage complexity
This according to PaidContent. Take a look at this comparison of Google and Yahoo thru the years.
In other Yahoo! news it joins MSN and Google in working with Chinese authorities to diminish individual freedom in the pursuit of commerce.
Motherhood and Apple Pie
lesscode.org: Motherhood and Apple Pie [@lesscode.org]:
The internet is not an accident. The internet was not bound to happen. There was no guarantee that the internet would reach its current state as a side effect of emerging digital processing and communications capabilities. We did not recover complex alien technology.
The internet, that place where all eventual business will be transacted, all content and media will be distributed, all correspondence will be exchanged, all history will be recorded, and all pornography will be is being admired, has a design – and its meant for exactly these purposes.
Many of the principles that led to this design are still with us today, although I would challenge you to ascertain them by observing the mainstream technologies being peddled by leading vendors, publications, and analyst firms. Those who rose to power in a much different environment, where the short-term profits of disconnected, dead-end business software was deemed more important than laying a fertile ground where millions of new ideas (and hence new profits) could bloom.
But the dead-end has long been reached and so these industry leaders have turned their attention to this new place, built on principles and values very different from their own, and have somehow reached the conclusion that this thriving ecosystem must be re-arranged such that they have somewhere to place their baggage. Instead of embracing the people, principals, and technologies that gave rise to this phenomenon they have chosen to subvert its history and to implant the ridiculous notion that it is â€Ŕincapable of meeting the stringent demands of the business community.â€?
Not only have these business radicals claimed the internet as their own but they have also somehow gained the confidence of all the worlds industry in their ability to deliver a new and sparkling internet, one no doubt capable of reproducing the complexities and flaws that plague existing mediums so as to make it feel more like home. They’ve brought their own principles and agendas, asserting them as obvious and correct while ignoring the wisdom we’ve gained and shared and gained and shared over years of collaborative practice and observation of working systems at this scale.
A great essay. I don’t agree with some of his conclusions, but it and especially its source material are must reads.