Peyton Crump, ON THE TOPIC OF General and Opinions/Reviews and Tips and Tricks

Dear Scrabulous-

I’m a big Scrabble fan, and I know I’m way behind by just having hooked up with you this weekend. I also know there are people fighting over you (not such a bad problem to have) and I hope you hang around. I like your user interface mostly fine, but I’m wondering if you could tidy up a few small things.

Continue reading "Dear Scrabulous, I Like U, and I Like UI"

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Jim Basio, ON THE TOPIC OF Tips and Tricks

For many, designing and coding for emails can become a frustrating task. With so many different types of email clients that each seem to follow distinct standards, many hours can be spent just to figure out what works. Luckily, there are great resources available for reference.

The following list contains both css and html tips to ensure your HTML emails look great when delivered!

• Great general overview for HTML emails. LINK
• Campaign Monitor offers an excellent guide to email CSS support that covers both web- and desktop-based email apps. LINK
• Premailer is a good tool for checking inline CSS in your email template. LINK
• The Email Standards Project works to improve web standards support and accessibility in email. They have also put together the Email Standards Project Acid Test. LINK
• A great Flickr group with people showing just how frustrating creating HTML emails for Gmail can be. LINK

Additional resources:

• Canspam act
• CSS Support In Email
• CSS and Email, Kissing in a Tree

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Peyton Crump, ON THE TOPIC OF General

Driving home from Viget yesterday, I was behind an old green Volkswagen bug that had Apple stickers on the bumper and a license plate that read “MACBUG.” I dig geeks that like their Macs and express some personality via their cars. The question I had, however, was that if this guy were to go for current design, technology, and performance over nostalgia and bring his “Apple II” car up-to-speed, to which maker/car would he go? Would he stick with Volkswagen, or is there an automotive company/product that fits the Apple/Mac model more closely? I drive a silver 2005 Volkswagen Golf by the way, and I’m not a car enthusiast. Just curious.

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Rob Soule, ON THE TOPIC OF CSS and Tips and Tricks

If you’ve ever attempted to style a button inside IE, you know that it can be a huge pain. On most of our projects, we’ve now started using the button element in place of traditional input buttons due to the ease of styling and consistency across browsers. One of the first things you might notice when you bring your nicely styled buttons up in IE is that, for reasons unknown to me, IE decides to stack the padding depending on the width of the content inside the element.

After spending some time adding a lot of extraneous CSS to the IE specific style sheets, I realized that two simple lines of code fixes the problem.

button {
  width: auto;
  overflow: visible;
}

Those two lines of code will save you countless hours. Go give your button elements some extra love.

UPDATE: July 16, 2008 - Please note that this fix DOES NOT work for buttons contained inside table elements.

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Samantha Warren, ON THE TOPIC OF General

I have been using Wufoo free of charge for about a year now and have been a satisfied user. It wasn’t until last week when I had my first little hiccup that I realized how awesome this web app really is. In case you don’t know about Wufoo it is:

… an Internet application that helps anybody build amazing online forms. When you design a form with Wufoo, it automatically builds the database, back-end and scripts needed to make collecting and understanding your data easy, fast and fun. Because we host everything, all you need is a browser, an Internet connection and a few minutes to build a form and start using it right away.”

If you need anything from a contact form to an online survey, Wufoo is a wonderful solution that drops right into your site adapting seamlessly to your design. Their product, however is not what prompted me to write this post. After having a few e-mails get lost in the shuffle I decided to submit a support request. I described my problem and made it to the bottom of the form fields to find something very interesting: they wanted to know my “Emotional State”.

I clicked on the drop down and asked myself “How DO I feel about this?”, a question I overlooked asking myself earlier in the pending situation. As I scanned the drop-down menu this conversation with myself raced through my head:

“No I am not excited. 
I am delightfully distracted by the Dino in the upper right hand corner of their site, but not excited about this situation. “Rarrr!” Cute.
Confused?
No, I am certain there is a problem. I troubleshot every possibility on my end and I know there is nothing I can do.
Worried?
Well, concerned. What if there is an important e-mail. I know the Chief of Staff has nothing important to talk to me about, but what if someone important like Dooce wants to get in touch with me. Oh, that is concerning.
Upset?
If I have missed something urgent in my e-mail box I will feel upset.
Panicked?
No, There must be a solution.
Angry?
Of course not. I have been using this service for free for a whole year, how can I really be angry?
Worried, Hmph.
I am surprisingly worried about this situation.”

As I made my selection and moved the curser to hit the submit button a feeling washed over me that was unlike anything I had ever felt with a webservice online. I felt like they cared. I felt confident that my problem would be solved. I felt like I was contacting PEOPLE who have beating hearts, and families, who had felt worried about their missing contact e-mails too. How very humane of them!

Shortly after this experience my problem was resolved with a giant clump of e-mails to my box and all was right in the world again.

Now here I am, blogging about an incident that could have gone downhill very quickly but was positively effected by a detail in their User Interface. A drop down menu that ignores corporate jargon, came to terms with the fact there may actually be a flaw in THEIR system, and inquired about my emotional state. Imagine if Comcast asked you how you were feeling when your cable went out. Would you think before verbally attacking that poor overworked repair guy?  I would love to see a Health Insurance provider have an emotional state Check-in as part of their interface. Imagine feeling like someone actually wanted to help you. Why are humane details like this so often ignored online? I challenge UI designers and Information architects to consider this more often and maybe even track the satisfaction of their customers. As Naz Hamid said at SXSW, “Design is in the Details”.

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Erik Olson, ON THE TOPIC OF Flash and Opinions/Reviews

This month’s meeting was small (nine people) but friendly and featured two speakers.  The first presenter, Eric Coker of PStrat, spoke about PHP services for Flex. Eric discussed BlazeDS, an open-source, fast, scalable, Java-based remoting and web-messaging technology that enables developers to easily connect to back-end distributed data and push data in real-time. He strongly emphasized the cheapness of an open-source technology. He also spoke about AMFPHP, PDO or PHP Data Objects and their roles, and light-weight messaging and remoting technologies.

Continue reading "Raleigh-Durham Adobe User Group (RDAUG) Meeting Recap"

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Erik Olson, ON THE TOPIC OF Flash and Opinions/Reviews

Maps have come a long way on the web; having a powerful API will take them even further. Yahoo! introduced a very exciting API for AS3 in late February that proves to be the most powerful map API for Actionscript on the web right now.

With the map API you have a great map engine with the ability to create custom components, overlays and markers while taking advantage of different web services provided by Yahoo!.

Some of the goodies they have included in the release so far:

• Traffic
• Satellite
• Hybrid maps
• Custom Markers
• Geo Coding
• Geodesic Polylines (think of that map in Indiana Jones when he’s flying all over the globe)
• Local Search
• Weather Map
• Flickr Photos

The Flickr photos API is one of the fun new features. It takes the most popular key words based on photos taken and tagged within the cities and areas you are currently viewing on your Yahoo! map. The tags act as markers, so you click on a tag to reveal random photos and even videos taken by people who visited the area. It’s a great way to get an eclectic view of whatever area you’re interested in.

Getting started with the API really is very simple. All you have to do is download the swc and sign up for a free API key. Within about 10 minutes, I had the zoom component and the Map, Satellite and Hybrid views fully functioning.

This initial introduction is limited (for now) to Flex. However, a somewhat simple workaround has come from some talented developers for those of you who are very eager to take your maps into Flash right away.

There are some restrictions to usage. However, it’s fairly generous. The rate limits are based on the number of API calls made per IP address during a 24-hour window. You can think of the 24 hours as a day, but the clock does not reset itself at midnight, per se. Instead, the clock starts the first time you make the API call from the IP. Then, 24 hours later, Yahoo! resets the counters for your IP address.

I’m excited about seeing some great (usable) Flash maps on many more sites.

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