Siggraph 2003 Web Graphics Expo has interesting stuff. One more thing, I never go through galleries on the web. They always go for bookmarking or for the blog. Why? Is it because we fix a limited amount of time for each page ? Maybe we like information given gradually rather than in big chunks? Jakob Nielsen’s information foraging article makes sense here.
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A neat card sorting tool in flash. More work by Jed Wood here. He also has a neat site/presentation from a seminar he gave at UPA, about flash and usability.
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Danny O’Brien has an interesting rant about Microsoft creating apps only for corporate users, linux for geeks and apple for home users. About Dashboard, he says, what users want from software is not decisions, but information and tools to make better decisions. Right on.
Give me Information and tools, not decisions …
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Macromedia released Contribute 2 which has the ability to integrate e-commerce into a site with Paypal. This version is also including Flashpaper, a printerdriver which prints out pdf’s like flash. I guess it is not a direct competitor to pdfs, but is taking up the niche space of puting any document type on the web. Pdfs don’t perform this part well enough on the web, they rule on the desktop. One handicap of swfs is that, they loose their identity when they come out of the browser, on to the desktop. With swfs doing lots of different things, there should be a way of differentiating between flashpaper, breeze presentations, RIA’s, etc. Making icon previews possible for swfs might also solve the problem. Maybe central will rectify this problem by storing and categorizing swf’s on the desktop, providing icon previews, correct viewing size, etc. Also, searchengine enabling swfs is a big issue here. If standard applications begin producing swfs, instead of FlashMX, they might have a chance of being archived by search engines. But the searchengines need a way to distinguish between all the different kinds of swfs.
Contribute is getting ready to be on all the desktops of corporate users. JD says, “Getting new efforts into wide use early is vital for course-correction before implementing the next step“. It’s success will create the channel that macromedia will use to pump in new technologies on to the desktop. The next version of contribute may even have central with it. To make sure that macromedia gets revenue from all the installed base, it is including the DRM technology by Macrovision’s SafeCast. TurboTax removed the same technology after a backlash from its customer base. Macromedia will probably succeed in pushing DRM because contribute does not have a broad installed base. But making it a widely used product will be a little difficult.
Macromedia Contribute & FlashPaper: …
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has new interfaces with orientation of the handheld as the controller. Their linking of the motions to real world actions is interesting.
for paper prototypers. Lots of common UI widgets in acrobat and illustrator format. MacOSX, win 95/98 and palm controls.
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Some reasons why the scrollbar ended up on the right side of the screen. Via Ultrasaurus. Another question, why does the page go ‘up’ when the scrollbar is pulled down and not the other way round?
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Some reasons why the scrollbar ended up on the right side of the screen. Via Ultrasaurus.
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Jess McMullin and Grant Skinner have a list of thumb rules to keep in mind while designing RIAs. You can also look at my article on Usable Rich Internet Application Architecture.
Usability Heuristics for Rich Internet Applications: …
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Lots of case studies here.
Designing for User Experiences (DUX) 2003 papers: …
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