The second episode of “You’re Killing Me Here!” (usability and design screencast series) discusses various uses of the page title (HTML TITLE element): in particular how you can use it to communicate with users of your web application.
View the Screencast (2.5 minutes)
Some of my co-workers got stuck using a poorly-designed web application that has huge drop-down select lists. Unfortunately the people who designed this web app didn’t forsee the need to actually present the list items in any particular order, so its nearly impossible to find anything.
I made the following bookmarklet to sort all the select lists on the page. It’s probably not much use to anyone else, but at least I got to learn how to make a bookmarklet. Unfortunately it has to work in IE, which has a strict limit on the size of bookmarklets, so I had to keep it very simple.
I just released a new version of my JavaScript tab interface software.
I got to use this phrase in an email today:
In the CSS, if you change a seemingly innocuous bit of code you could break some functionality, so please notify me if you need to change anything.
In retrospect I probably should have said “if you make a seemingly innocuous change”.
Here’s an interactive tutorial I’m working on:
Learn CSS Positioning in ten steps
I’m using it to give some CSS and HTML training today. It uses a customized version of my JavaScript tabs interface and triggers a styleswitcher each time you switch tabs, so you can see the CSS change right on the page.
It’s a work in progress, so let me know if you have any suggestions.
I just released a new version of my JavaScript tab interface software. It has some new features that make it crazy-easy to use, plus I eliminated a memory leak in the IE browser (damn you Microsoft!).
Introducing “You’re Killing Me Here!” a series of screencasts discussing web site and web application design, accessibility, and usability from the perspective of a power-user.
The first episode discusses “type ahead find” in the Firefox browser and the design implications that come along with it.
Internal dialog while trying to figure out how a certain page was set up using HTML and CSS:
Ahh… clever.
Stupid, but clever.
It was using a little trick in CSS to make the page design more flexible, but the end result was that the page wouldn’t look right if CSS was not available.