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.
Being a sysadmin and web developer I read plenty of technical documentation – manuals, tutorials, howtos, and so on and so forth. Most of it is usually very dry and boring. Unless, of course, we are talking about Open Source Software. That area is often very human, with plenty of humor and an excellent examples.
Today I came across a very nice website which explains how Git – the de facto version control system in Open Source community – works. The site is called Think Like a Git. Very well structure, with simple, easy to understand language, and excellent navigation.
I’d also like to mention the design separately. So often do technical people end up using generic templates that aren’t very well suited for longer texts, quotes, and code snippets. So often do designers overdo things making documentation nice looking, but impossible to read. Think Like a Git is not like that. It’s beautiful, yet clean, fresh, and simple. My eyes are actually resting while I flip through the pages. Nothing annoys or disrupts my attention. It’s all about Git. Bravo!
A couple of weeks ago Hellenic Bank clients received a notification through their bank mail that the web interface is about to be updated. Â The update was schedule for September 3rd, but I guess it didn’t go as smooth as expected. Â For the last two weeks the web banking was slow, unstable, and unavailable at times. Â Today I finally managed to login and experience the new interface. Â Here are the before and after screenshots for you to compare.
The new interface is far from perfect, but it is a vast improvement over the old one. Â I’ve also noticed a banner advertising the mobile banking. Â That sounded totally like a dream. Â It’s hard to believe that Hellenic Bank even knows what a mobile banking is, let alone is capable of implementing one. I immediately decided to check it out – after all it was as simple as navigating to a mobile version of the website. Â I tried to log into it, but was constantly thrown into a blank white page. Â Not very surprising, but I am willing to give them time. Â Given that there web site is still shaky, I doubt they have time to look at the mobile version of it as well.
Today, I had to create a simplistic tool for one of my side projects. Â What I needed was a quick way to create an image of a specific size, filled with specific color. Â If it was just for me, I could have survived with the Linux command line, of course. Â But there are other, non-technical people involved.
I coded a quick prototype in PHP with ImageMagick, which I called Color Image Generator. Â Once the functionality was there, I cleaned it up a bit and published to GitHub. Â You can grab the sources and use them any way you like, or you can use the hosted version. Â Enjoy!