user interfaces

jExcel – the JavaScript spreadsheet

Tables on the web are always challenging. Whether you do them by hand, or with the help of a framework or library, they often carry a lot of complexity, performance costs, and compatibility issues.

Recently I came across jExcel, which seems to be quite powerful, with lots of advanced features, and, at the same time, rather simple to use. The recent release of version 3, brings even more features and improves on the existing ones:

Drag and drop columns
Resizable rows
Merge columns
Search
Pagination
Lazy loading
Full screen flag
Image upload
Native color picker
Better mobile compatibility
Better nested headers compatibily
Amazing keyboard navegation support
Better hidden column management
Great data picker: dropdown, autocomplete, multiple, group options and icons
Importing from XSLX (experimental)

Have a look at some of the usage examples too.

Experiments: Limited Web Experience

Smashing Magazine runs a series of articles by Chris Ashton, a senior software engineer at BBC, in which he experiences the web for one day with a selected limitation. So far he has tried the following:

Use Internet Explorer 8. This version of the browser has reached its end of life on January 12, 2016.
Use the screen reader. While accessibility of the average website has certainly improved in the last couple of decades, we still have a long way to go.
Use keyboard only. This is probably a lot easier for technical people who are used to keyboard shortcuts and custom browser extensions.
Disable JavaScript. In this day and age, I think this will render the web almost unusable.

eDEX-UI – a sci-fi terminal

eDEX-UI is a science fiction terminal that runs on most operating systems. It was heavily inspired by the user interfaces in sci-fi movies, like TRON, Minority Report, and others. While it’s not very practical for the day-to-day use for anyone heavily using command line, it’s a lot of fun to run when there are non-technical people around, staring at your screen.

The installation is pretty simple:

git clone https://github.com/GitSquared/edex-ui.git
cd edex-ui
npm run install-linux
npm start

I think it works even better with a large touch screen, but I don’t have one around to try it on.

laravolt/avatar – plug-n-play PHP library for quick dynamic avatars

laravolt/avatar is a PHP library that helps to avoid those old and boring anonymous face pictures for users who haven’t uploaded or configured their avatar in your application. With library you can use any string – name, email, initials, or anything else you fancy – to generate a dynamic avatar with random color and letters.

Design for Blockchain

“Design for Blockchain” is a collection of articles about user interface and user experience design for blockchain and cryptocurrency projects and tools. Blockchain, due to its nature, is quite a technical subject, so making it friendly for non-technical users is a challenge. These articles are exploring the domain problem.