I am sure you will find useful an article Sign Up Forms Must Die written by folks from of A List Apart. Luke Wroblewski talks about making user registration process on the website more smooth and, thus, more user-friendly. First, the user should try your web service to figure out if he really needs it. Just great article, must read!
There isn’t a conversation in our studio that doesn’t take place using a whiteboard. While the reasons for that are fodder for another post, or perhaps a group therapy session, this new interactive whiteboard concept certainly caught my eye.
Johnny Chung Lee, an HCI Researcher at Carnegie Mellon, recently posted some information on a low-cost, multi-point interactive whiteboard that he created using the Wiimote.
His system used the Wiimote to capture movement of an IR-emitting pen device. The Wiimote tracks and relays the information back to a PC. Any surface can be used, including a wall, table top or even your laptop screen. If you use two IR pens, you can even do multipoint manipulation. The video shows it all and you can download the software free from his site.
You may recall that Johnny is the one who wowed us with his hack to utilize the Wiimote to track your finger movements, al la “Minority Report” interaction.
Yesterday I had a 1-day introductory course to TRIZ and Systematic Innovation for Business & Management leaded by Valeri Souchkov, a Dutch expert in TRIZ. Translating from Russian, TRIZ (Teoriya Resheniya Izobretatelskikh Zadatch) means Theory of Resolving (or Solving) Inventor's Tasks.
I would recommend TRIZ, and especially xTRIZ, to every professional, no matter who: a regular programmer or a top manager. It is a very interesting and useful thing of solving problems, or tasks, forcing you to think out of the box.
Bill Scott clued me in to this interesting first post from Theresa Neil on two design paradigms for handling large amounts of data:
“The first is usually more prevalent on the web. The latter usually more prevalent on desktop or deeper web applications. Theresa lists 10 different patterns illustrating Seek and Show.”
She details both paradigm with very nice real world examples.
Some important news if you send to a lot of mobile subscribers, or view emails on your own Blackberry. While existing Blackberry devices and software only support plain text email rendering, RIM has announced that an upcoming software update will add HTML and rich text support to the platform.
HTML and Rich Text Email Rendering – BlackBerry smartphone users will be able to view HTML and rich text email messages with original formatting preserved including font colors and styles, embedded images, hyperlinks, tables, bullets and other formatting.
The purpose of this page is to demonstrate how we measure the audience of a web 2.0 site.
As a reminder, a web 2.0 site has one of the following two following characteristics:
This page has both characteristics.
There’s a really interesting thread on sla.ckers.org talking about bypassing some fairly rigid anti-XSS vectors that allow nothing that looks like HTML. Specifically it doesn’t allow <[A-Za-z] which does limit the vectors pretty substantially. In the process of working through the attack vector Hong mentioned that an attack could surface inside of an end HTML tag. Here’s the example code:
</a style="xx:expression(alert('xss'))">
British Airways is planning to launch its new US-EU subsidiary airline "OpenSkies" with daily flights from New York to Brussels and Paris.
The airline will launch in June 2008 with one Boeing 757 aircraft that will operate from New York to either Brussels or Paris Charles de Gaulle airports. A second aircraft will be added to the fleet later this year to fly to the other EU destination. The plan is to operate six 757s by the end of 2009, all of which will be sourced from the current British Airways' fleet.
