These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.
A colleague sent me this link to a collection of parallax scrolling website designs. Some of them are really awesome, especially considering the fact that they are implemented in HTML5 – no flash or other proprietary plugin required. I particularly liked how the car assembles and disassembles on the Smart USA website and how the glass of beer empties and refills on the Smokey Bones website. Unbelievable, creative, and inspirational!
When I came across The Click Test this morning I had one of those “why oh why didn’t I think of this myself?” moments. Both the idea and implementation are very simple, but extremely useful for anyone involved with interface design, usability studies or web development. When you want to try out a design or user interface concept or element, when you don’t know which version works better, or if you want to find out which element stands out for most people, you need a usability study, and The Click Test gives you everything you need to do one quickly. All you need to do is upload your design and ask the question. It will then be shown to a bunch of people who will answer your question by clicking somewhere in the design. You’ll see the results of your study as a heat map of user interaction. That’s it.
There are applications, even in a form of WordPress plugin, that would allow you to do a similar study directly on your website. That’s not news. But heaving a crowd of people to use for your test – now that’s brilliant. Now you can actually test something before putting it on the live website.
Once again Flickr Web Uploader failed me. I had a bunch of photos to upload and it kept getting stuck on the first one, not uploading even that one. So, once again, I started looking around for a simple tool that would allow me to just upload a huge bunch of pictures to Flickr. No bells, no whistles – just batch upload that I wouldn’t need to babysit (my upload speed limit is rather low).
I’m glad to report that I found my dream tool – postr. Postr is a Flickr uploader for Gnome desktop. It is designed to be very simple and straight forward. And, apparently, that’s just what I need. The only minor bit of functionality that I am missing is uploading pictures to a new set. It lets me choose the existing one or none at all. But not to create a new one. Not a major issue either way. I can either create a new set before uploading images, or I can as easily drop all uploads into a new set once they are up on Flickr. Either way works for me.
I’m so glad that there are still people who make simple software for simple people. Hooray for them!
The other day, Twitter announced a new website of theirs – Twitter Stories. Â Yes, of course, that’s a part of their marketing effort and they are promoting their own services. Â But it’s not just that. Â It is an excellent compilation of stories which show kindness, compassion and humanity – things that unfortunately aren’t so popular in the modern world of mass media and dirty politics.
A few of my friends and coworkers still doubt the usefulness of social networks. Â They often see social networks as time wasters that prevent people from actually doing something good with their lives. Â I always disagree with that. Â Social networks are just another set of tools, like knives and hammers. Â What is done with them depends entirely on people using them. Â If people are wasting time of their lives, then they would be doing so regardless of the availability of social networks. Â And on the contrary, if people are to do great things, social networks will be just another tool for them to find the need and the way to help it. Â Showcasing that is what Twitter Stories is all about.
Brian Shih, an ex-project manager for Google Reader shares his thoughts on the new interface. I agree a lot with him. I also think that Google Reader should be integrated with Google+ and other Google projects, but the current version hurts that goal more than it helps it.
new sharing flow around the +1 button has actually made it harder to share. Where you used to be able to click one button, or hit shift-s to one-click share to your audience, you now need to:
- Click +1 (no keyboard shortcuts for you)
- Click the text box that appears that says “Share to G+”
- Then choose your circle you want to share to (or let it default to public)
- Then click Share
Keep in mind that on top of requiring 3-4 times as many clicks, you also now must +1 a post publicly to share it, even if it’s shared to a private circle. That bears repeating. The next time you want to share some sexy halloween costumes with your private set of friends, you first must publicly +1 the post, which means it shows up on your profile, plus wherever the hell G+ decides to use +1 data.
While I’m not too much concerned about privacy, I too find the new sharing way more difficult, time-consuming, and confusing.