01.04.09

Getting more out of images

Been working a lot on trying to reduce the amount of information displayed on/around album art lately. Mostly around how to best display additional information about an album without forcing the user to go to the product page. Sometimes I am of the mind that its probably better just to force users to go to product pages to learn more. So I’ve been experimenting with only showing the album art and displaying additional information on interaction. Ultimately, I’m not convinced this is best for the user, but a friend sent me these two really cool jQuery plug-ins that I thought I would share.

Fullsize – its a plug-in but also a plea to the W3C to implement an additional feature in html to make it easier to display thumbnail and then show the full size without javascript. I’m not convinced this is a good idea at all, but the plug-in he’s got works pretty well.

Sliding Boxes and Captions – This one I can get behind. Slick animations while allowing the user access to additional information. I’m not for hiding everything because there’s no call to action, why would the user mouse over album art unless they know its going to do something? But there are several different ways to approach this issue, as shown in the demos.

Enjoy!

19.03.09

IE8, its alive!

Internet Explorer 8 came out today. The office was all a buzz, most of the conversations revolved around its lack of CSS3 support and whether or not it should start in “Standards Mode”. While all of these are valid discussions, they fail to recognize that Microsoft finally did it right for once. They built a browser that supports all current standards.

I was in the CSS3 panel at SXSWi on Sunday afternoon, and there were 3 companies on the panel: Mozilla, Opera, and IE. When the IE guy came up to speak, the first thing he said was, “I am not here to talk about IE and CSS3.” He went on to explain how IE8 had passed every test out there and was fully compliant with CSS2.1. And you know what happened? People applauded. They were friggin elated. I was expecting people to boo this poor guy out of the room. His message was really that IE is in the present now, and because of that, we can all move into the future together.

I think Microsoft is tired of being the whipping boy of the internet and is ready to be open with the web developer community at large, not just those that use their products. One of the major factors in the IE’s inability to move forward was being able to support old products that Microsoft had made in 90s, and I think they finally realized the segment of society still using those products has really shrunk. Oh, and their constantly shrinking market share.

While Microsoft may be moving in the right direction, they haven’t forced everyone to upgrade yet. IE8 is only available via download direcly from the IE website. And for those of you reading this right now who can upgrade, please do so (here). Otherwise, you might be seeing this in your browser the next time you come back.

17.03.09

SXSW

Just attended SXSW Interactive for the first time. Wow, what an experience. After partying all night and some awesome morning panels, the common theme after stuffing ourselves with food during lunch was, “Damn, my brain is mush.” Plus I got to drink Paul Rudd’s beer with some new friends. Right now I am full of inspiration and motivation, and I’m hoping to get everything that is in my head out in the next couple of days, so keep your eyes peeled for some updates.

26.02.09

New design. New attitude?

Okay, spent two hours setting this thing up tonight. Gotta really start using it now. I hope I can keep up to the expectations of the 2 people who have ever looked at this site.

05.04.08

Safari 3.1 Part 3 – Why Safari pissed me off

Okay, so I have finally gotten to this post. I guess I took the whole week off. I gotta be more disciplined. Anyway…

One thing that angered me about Safari 3.1 was its @font-face support. This allows developers to load fonts that may not already be on someone’s computer and use them anywhere in the site. This could be a totally awesome tool, however, I thought, “Why the hell is Safari trying to become IE?” Read the rest of this entry »

27.03.08

Battling with IE – 4 CSS methods

Recently I have come to the realization that I spend so much time in production that I rarely get to search for things that would be useful, big picture resources/learning for future projects. Basically, I’m bad at keeping up with where CSS and HTML are going. And since I am trying to really push myself to have better skills to contribute to not just my current position, but the world at large, I have found a bunch of great resources. Read the rest of this entry »

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