Web Developer 2.0

RSS Feed Homepage

Articles: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Web app without makeup: The design iterations of TeamSnap
2007-06-26 11:58:00
Like Lohan straight out of this week’s rehab, a web app can look rough first thing. Andrew Berkowitz knows this and takes us through five iterations of a single screen of web app Teamsnap, as it blossoms from “ugly and unusable” to “just feels right”.A nice peek into the design process behind a web application. It's good to have the details of why changes were made rather than a just a series of images showing the development of the design. The discussions that drive the development process are vital and it's nice to get an insight into how they affected the decisions that were made.Read the article.
More About: Design , Makeup , Tera , The D

Help me to resize my widget
2007-06-22 14:39:00
Despite the slightly cheeky post title, this is important (to me anyway).I'm building the spec for an application which creates an embeddable widget. I want to work out what the most common sizes for embedded widgets are so that we can think about how to format the content.At present I'm plucking figures out of the air but 200-250 pixels wide for a sidebar and 400-600 wide for a content area would seem to be sensible estimates. I know that the widget should resize but the basic size will govern which content is (or isn't) displayed and how it is formatted.Looking at some examples of embeddable widgets, the sizes are:Compete.comSmall (310 x 170)Medium (460 x 188)Large (658 x 268)Alexa.comconfigurable up to 400 x 300Yahoo financesmall (160 wide)medium (200 wide)large (250 wide)x-large(300 wide)The Yahoo widgets are generally always in a portrait format and mostly designed for use in a sidebar. The widget that we are building will more likely be a landscape format so has more in com...
More About: Widget , Resize

Minty fresh finance
2007-06-21 13:00:00
I've recently been working on a little piece of software for my own use which lets me get a fast & loose overview of my finances with a bit of forecasting thrown in. My system has a high tolerance to gaps in the data because sometimes I just want to type in the balance from my latest bank statement rather than enter each item individually. Obviously the more data you give the system, the more acurate the information returned is.I had thought about spinning this into an online application, and then I found out about Mint and BudgetPulse. These both appear to be entering this online personal finance management arena so I've signed up to try out each of them and see if they will stand up to my slap-dash accounting practices.As I can only judge by the design and functionality of the holding sites so-far, I have to give the lead to Mint, however BudgetPulse may have a less polished presence at the moment because they're piling all of their efforts into building the best applicatio...
More About: Finance , Fresh , Finan , Fina

Seven Reasons for Code Bloat
2007-06-08 11:16:00
This is an interesting and entertaining slideshow from a talk given by Christian Heilmann at the Web Standards Group London's recent meetup.Christian's presentation is focussed entirely on front-end (html,css,javascript) development. He highlights the lack of structure and control which is prevalent in this area and gives some good suggestions for curing common problems. He also has a good sense of humor. Thanks to Paul for highlighting this one.
More About: Code , Reasons , Sons

Inspiration strikes from the strangest places
2007-06-07 01:34:00
Today I was setting up a product blog for bcToolkit and in order to save time and effort, I decide to create the blog on Blogger. This blog runs on blogger but is hosted on my own server so I'm restricted to the classic templates which get converted into static html and FTP 'ed to my server.The bcToolkit blog gave me a first chance to play aroung with the new templating system that Blogger introduced a while back.Blogger lets you drag and drop widgets around within defined sections of the template, you can also edit the template XML directly. The XML allows you to define your own widgets to use within the page. I've not yet discovered how new widgets interact with the drag & drop interface but maybe I'll get a chance to play further sometime. The point is that Google/Blogger have devised a nice dual system that allows for both high-level editing and serious technical tinkering.I realised after a while that the widget system is structured in much the same way that XSLT uses t...
More About: Inspiration , Places , Stra , Strike , Lace

Google Maps Street View
2007-05-31 12:08:00
Google have started adding in a new feature for their maps.Street view adds a photo panorama view for various points along selected roads. When I say "various points" I mean every 10 meters or so, when I say "selected roads" I mean just about any road big enough to drive down.As well as being able to spin around to get a feel for the location, you can zoom in or out and click on arrows to navigate along the streets.At the moment the street view is only available in Silicon Valley, Las Vegas, Miami, Denver and New York as far as I know.
More About: Google , Google Maps , View , Maps

Facebooked!
2007-05-29 17:39:00
I've finally been sucked into the Facebook scene, I was quite happy to use del.icio.us for bookmarking, Flickr for photos and Blogger for blogging. I set up a Myspace page ages ago but the site was so ugly and clunky it made me angry so I've pretty much avoided large scale social networks since then (other than linked-in for business networking).Now it seems, everybody in my company is a Facebook addict so it's my duty to be aware of what Facebook is all about.I do have other reasons to get involved - Microsoft and Facebook have teamed up to offer tools for developers to use the Facebook API through Visual Studio and Popfly.

Microsoft Launches Popfly Alpha
2007-05-22 11:33:00
Microsoft has been watching all the cool kids very carefully. Popfly is a tool to make it easy for people to start creating stuff with Silverlight - Redmond's latest attempt to usurp Flash*.They've obviously learnt from Yahoo Pipes that people want to easily build stuff with the data that's publicly flying around the Internet.They may be able to do a certain amount of catching up with Flash on the installed user base front - they will probably include the plugin with Windows automatic updates. In the meantime I'm happy to try stuff out for them. Here's a quick clone of TwitterVision which took me about 15 minutes using Popfly.Link to Test - I took out the embedded Version due to some technical problems (It's still in Alpha so we can't expect everything).It's not the greatest but considering how long I spent on it there's potential to build great things*didn't they have a DHTML/SVG builder thing called liquid FX or something? This is going back a good few years and many web...
More About: Microsoft , Micro

L337 Katz0rz
2007-05-21 22:54:00
This is a serious etymological look at the development of leet-speek, a good read and worth it just for this image:A Special In-Depth Analysis by David McRaney - L337 Katz 0rz

bcToolkit - Advanced tools for Basecamp users
2007-05-18 22:52:00
I've been busy over the past week preparing a new web application.bcToolkit is for companies who use Base camp for managing projects but who want easy access to high level reports.The application began as a solution to a simple problem. My Managing Director had exported a Basecamp time report and was having trouble sorting and filtering the data in Excel. I had been looking at the Basecamp API documentation and decided to build a web page to create a task/time report for any project in our account. This proved so useful that I started to get requests for other reports - such as a report of everybody's time recorded for each day of a month.We've been using these reports for several months and I thought that there might be other Basecamp users who would appreciate them so I'm tarting up the UI and adding lovely big dollops of AJAX goodness.We are planning to start a limited closed beta in a few weeks time so anybody interested in trying out my latest creation should head over to th...
More About: Tools , Users

Extreme Social Networking
2007-05-11 19:48:00
An idea that came up during a conversation today: "Extreme Social Networking " Maybe one day we'll see this in the X Games, imagine the commentary;"The German's pulled off an amazing double Facebook but the chinese competitor's answered that with a super fast Google Maps/Flickr/Twitter mashup...but here comes the Swede out of a MySpace thrash and it looks like he's going to completely YouTube the rest of the field."...we found it funny for a while anyway...
More About: Social Networking , King

24 Hours of Flickr
2007-05-04 14:55:00
This evening I'll be emptying the memory card in my camera in preparation for 24 hours of Flick r . It's coming! 24 Hour s of Flickr: A global Flickr community eventWhat happens around the world in one day? In a word ? life. Here on Flickr, our members are sharing the world that they see: snapping daily moments, recording history, telling stories, capturing beauty.To celebrate this global community, we invite you to join us in 24 Hours of Flickr, a day-long global photo project. On May 5 2007, grab your camera and whatever else you need, and chronicle your day in pictures.Join the 24 Hours of Flickr group to get ready for the big day. After the big day, post your best photo to the group. We'd love to see the group photos on a map as well, so make sure you add your photos to the map using the Organizr.Remember! We want the photos here to illustrate one day in the life of the Flickr community ? May 5, 2007 ? so, you can only submit a photo taken on May 5. (You'll have until May 21 to...

Mind Meister goes live
2007-05-03 22:45:00
MindMeister is an online mind mapping tool. I've been using it for a few weeks in the public beta and found it to be a great piece of software. The Ajax-powered interface doesn't get in the way of working, once you learn a few of the keystroke shortcuts you can very quickly brainstorm a concept without getting bogged down by the UI.The other great feature of Mind Meister is the collaborative aspect - you can share a mindmap with one or more collaborators and see edits that they make as they happen. Skype has also been integrated so its easy to have a brainstorming conference even when the participants are spread over any distance.I just need something like this to integrate with Backpack and I'll have all the brain-dumping tools I need.
More About: Mind , Live , Goes

What goes on tour...
2007-04-26 00:32:00
Here's an example of the way that the web and social networks have made cultural changes.For sports teams going away for a tournament; the phrase "what goes on tour, stays on tour" used to be sacred. These days, there is a growing trend for people to share videos and photos on sites like myspace, flickr and Youtube. "What goes on tour, goes on Youtube"Possibly not the best thing to do when you consider this report from the BBC:Bosses check workers on web - Bosses are starting to vet potential employees by searching the internet for blogs and myspace entries.
More About: Tour , Goes , On Tour

Marketing BS or straight talking?
2007-04-25 10:25:00
Is it just me or does anybody else have an internal marketing BS sensor?Maybe I'm too cynical these days, but as soon as I hear marketing speak, I switch off and stop listening. It's the same with TV advertising, I rarely remember what product and advertisement is for - my mental walls go up as soon as the marketer tries to cajole me towards "buying into their brand identity".I read a short interview in .Net magazine with Roman Scharf - Co-founder and CEO of Jajah. What became immediately apparent to me was that every answer he gave had the tone and content of a sales pitch. The interview might as well have been a full page advert. Looking at the short bio given for Mr Scharf, I was unsurprised to see that he had a background which included marketing and PR.So, let me stick this in your mental microwave and see if it defrosts:Is traditional marketing hyperbole still effective in a world where consumers are increasingly empowered when it comes to researching a product or service?
More About: Marketing , Talking , King , Stra , Mark

Web Design Survey
2007-04-24 12:04:00
A list apart are running a survey to try and find out more about the people who make the web.Design ers, developers, project managers. Writers and editors. Information architects and usability specialists. People who make websites have been at it for more than a dozen years, yet almost nothing is known, statistically, about our profession. Who are we? Where do we live? What are our titles, our skills, our educational backgrounds? Where and with whom do we work? What do we earn? What do we value?It should be interesting to see the spread of ages and job positions now that we've had over a decade of making the web.
More About: Web Design , Survey , Sign

FOWD 2007 - "Finding Your Creative Vein"
2007-04-20 01:25:00
As I mentioned yesterday, The first session at FOWD was presented by Brendan Dawes from magneticNorth. He reminded me of something that I'd almost forgotten from my art-school education; the fact that inspiration is everywhere, and sometimes we miss it for looking too hard.Brendan gave us the example of Reinhold Messner, the first man who ever climbed the Everest without oxygen. He took a risk in order to see if the experience was worth it, even though he could have died in the attempt. As an analogy, Brendan compared the interaction between the mountaineer and the mountain with the interaction between the designer and the user interface. We should be prepared to take risks from time to time - on the web we can always change things that don't work - after all, nobody ever died from design risks on the web.Great web sites/apps are often defined by the user experience. This is the transition from one state to another. On the web, this could be the user journey from landing page to c...
More About: Creative , Your , Find , Vein

Great job to all at FOWD
2007-04-19 01:47:00
I got back from London earlier after a great day at the Future Of Web Design conference. Unfortunately, due to travel arrangements I couldn't stay for the final session - even worse, I couldn't go to the after party.Ryan and his team at Carson Systems organised everything extremely well, the venue was great, as was the weather outside.So many good speakers, it's hard to pick out a favourite.Brendan Dawes kicked off the day in fantastic style with a presentation on finding creative inspiration citing everything from TV game shows to rubbish on a train.I'll post more thoughts from the day once I've gone over my notes but all in all, the scope of the presentations was broad enough to avoid repetition and narrow enough that everything seemed relevant.
More About: Great

Apologies for the downtime
2007-04-14 02:22:00
I forgot to update my billing details with the hosting provider for this site, then I only found out whilst I was away on a training course and couldn't update it until today.Sorry.On the brighter side, I'm now a Sitecore Certified Developer Level 2 :)
More About: Down , Logies , The D , Polo , Logi

To Web 3.0 ... and beyond!
2007-04-02 15:54:00
The whole Web 2.0 meme is getting rather painful to use in context due to the amount of usage it gets from Marketing types who wouldn't know a web 2.0 application if it sold their personal details to Nigerian spammers and emptied their bank account.Nova Spivack of Radar Networks, thinks that Applying version numbers to mark periods in the evolution of web technology makes as much sense as any other way. He's come up with this rather nice map of the technological and social influences that have come to prominence over the lifetime of the web so far, and on into the future. The concept of labelling each decade makes sense, it correlates to the way we think of history in terms of the eighties, nineties, noughties? etc.As for me, I think I'm going to skip Web 3 .0 and wait for Web 4.0 before I upgrade ;)
More About: Beyond

God-like mashup
2007-03-27 12:58:00
I found a link to this mashup of Google Maps and Twitter via Jonathan Coulton's blog.Twittervision is strangely and powerfully hypnotic. Essentially it pops up new twitter posts on a map of the world one at a time.Watching it gives the odd sensation of being able to see in real time, what the world is thinking about. Move over Black and White, this is the ultimate god-sim, where the world over which you have dominion is the one we all live in.Excuse me while I go and pretend to crush puny mortals beneath my thumb, Bwahahahaha!
More About: God , Like , Mashup , Mash

The fundamental rule of web design
2007-03-23 15:18:00
I've been harangued by a forum troll over recent weeks concerning a site that I'm still in the process of re-engineering the posts run along the lines of:Dave - There's a very simple answer. Go on........ ask me what it is.What is the 'fundamental rule of web design?'Again...What is the 'fundamental rule of web design?I'm assuming that the poster is referring to the KISS principle that used to be the major buzzword used by web design evangelists back in the mid to late nineties - I make this assumption because the poster seems to regard phpBB as the holy grail of web forum design; a reliable workhorse to be true, but not what I'd regard as the cutting edge of application design.Whilst this axiom still holds true, I don't believe it should be used as a reason to cripple a web app by limiting it's functionality, it's another case of hiding the complexity. The control options available to the user should be only the ones that are relevant for...
More About: Fun , Web Design , Design , Mental , Men

Come up to the lab, and see what's on the slab
2007-03-20 12:19:00
If you're paying attention then you may have noticed a new link at the top of the page. The Lab is a new area that I've introduced in which I will occasionally be publishing my experiments with web design and technology.Experiment #1 concerns an idea for a flexible and intuitive way to filter items in a list based on ratings - inspired by Digg's comment filter. Please take a look and let me know what you think - is it too abstract?, does it make sense?
More About: What , Hat , Come

Experiment #1 - Sliding filter for user-rated content
2007-03-20 02:45:00
This experiment came about because I was looking at the way Digg allows you to filter comments based on their rating.For those that haven't seen it, all comments can be given a thumbs up or thumbs down changing the rating for that comment by +1 or -1. Digg allows you to set the visibilty of comments based on how they are rated. This is a really good idea, in our increasingly time-poor lives, anything which helps us to seperate out the things worth spending time on from those that are a waste of time is a good thing.The challenge that I spotted was how to provide this functionality with a simpler and more flexible interface. The set number of options on digg become useless if all comments have been rated highly - beyond the scope of their set filtering options.The answer I came up with was to based the filter on the range of ratings present in the list. Secondly to replace the set options for filtering with a sliding scale from "not filtered" to "highly filtered&qu...
More About: Men , Experiment , Content , User , Filter

Simple and intuitive? ...not really.
2007-03-19 17:11:00
I'm going to start this post by apologising in advance to the creators of the two products that I'm using as examples. There is absolutely nothing wrong with them as far as I know and I'm only using them because they displayed screenshots that illustrate my point.Looking at content management systems, I've noticed that so-called "simple and intuitive interfaces" are usually anything but simple and more often than not lacking in the intuitivity department.I think the problem stems from the fact that content management seems at face value to be a relatively simple concept. A system to store chunks of text or html and files such as images or other downloadables. An interface to allow a user to login and then edit or add to those stored items and a display system to output the content on request - Easy!...or not so, if you've ever tried to build or even configure a CMS, you'll be aware of how much complexity the freeform nature of content management cre...
More About: Simp , Real , Simple , Intuit , Really

Million Dollar Avatar
2007-03-14 20:55:00
I've been featured on the homepage of this site nearly every day for the past week so it's only fair that I give it a fair plug.Million Doll ar Avatar is an application built by Kevin Fricovsky. He says:I created Million Dollar Avatar(MDA) over the course of 3.5 weeks, starting the week my in-laws showed up to stay in my guestroom (not a bad reason to lock yourself in your office at night - jk ;). I'm also very lucky to have a pregnant wife who just so happens to fall asleep around 8pm every night. So I took the opportunity to build out one of my many ideas and created this site during my free time at night and on a few weekends.The site is kind of a cross between the million dollar homepage idea and a blog community / traffic generator along the lines of Mybloglog. It's a very competent application although I do feel that the community building aspects could be brought to the fore a little more.The homepage wall of avatars is a great way for people to test the appeal o...
More About: Lion

Web Developer 2.1?
2007-03-14 00:43:00
This is the new design for this site, I hope you don't find it too disturbing.I used the addition of the T-shirt store as an excuse to update the site design. The previous layout was the first fixed-width layout that I'd built since about 1999 and I only did it out of laziness. Ever since I've fely dirty and ashamed for creating all that unused browser width so it's back to good old fluid layouts again.There will be a period of adjustment whilst I tidy up the content and tweak the design somewhat (such as add in an IE6 stylesheet) The site homepage will be used as a dashboard into various things including a new idea that I'm also working on (very secret, I may have already said too much).Please let me know if you find anything broken or hanging off the site at an unusual angle.
More About: Developer , Web developer , Develop

Future of Web Design 07
2007-03-12 14:47:00
I've just confirmed that I'll be attending the Future of Web Desi gn conference on April 18th. I'm looking forward to a good selection of speakers and hooking up with like minded individuals.Give me a shout if you're also going and want to meet up for a chinwag.
More About: Sign

Release the Spiders!
2007-03-09 16:31:00
An age-old tenet of web design is that stickiness can be created by delighting your user. In other words, little things that the user finds enjoyable or entertaining creates an association in the user's mind between a nice experience and your website or application.An example of this that keeps popping into my head is the submit button for the Blog claim form on Technorati."Release the Spider s!" is great, using the standard "Submit" would have been just as usable but in this case the wording is slightly more informative and raises a smile - creating that positive association.The only downside I can see is that users looking for a traditional "Submit" button may not understand that this is the one that they need to click. Perhaps "Submit and Release the Spiders!" would be better but not quite as funny - especially when said in a Monty Burns voice.
More About: Pide , Lease , Ease

Video sharing sites, so much choice.
2007-03-09 12:23:00
I just thought I'd drop this pile of links in here. I've been researching the options for places to upload and share branded video content for a client. Here's the list that I've come up with in just over an hour:Beedeo Blinkx Blogcheese Brightcove Broadbandsports BubblePly Clicktv Clipshack ClipSyndicate Coull.tv Currenttv Cuts Dabble Dailymotion eefoof Evideoshare ExpoTV FameWave Flikzor Flurl GlanceTV GoFish Googlevideo Gotuit Graffiti Guba I Watch This Jumpcut Keepvid LiveLeak LiveVideo Lycos Mix Magnify Metacafe Moblr Mobunga Motionbox Myfilmz Openvlog Pawky Podesk Pooxi PureVideo ROO ScreenBites Sharkle StumbleVideo TIOTI Truveo UberChannel Uvouch Veoh VidaVee Viddler Videobomb VideoEgg Videosift Vimeo Vmix VodPod Vringo Vsocial Vurbs WeWin Yashi YouTube Ziddio ZippyvideosAs you can see, there's a wealth of options for publicising your video content. Have I missed any good ones from here?Update - I found some more here via Mashable:Blip.tv Break.com Lulu...
More About: Site , Sites , Ring , Choice