Safari is a fine browser, but I’m put off by its lack of seemingly basic features, like a new tab button. Sure, you can get plugins to solve this, but you shouldn’t have to. However, one thing it does right is colour. Observe:
This image, taken from my GTA IV review demonstrates why colour profiles can cause havoc on the Web and why you should care. As you can see, the Safari image is more saturated and the Firefox one washed out. This is because Safari supports embedded colour profiles, while Firefox does not.
Continue reading →
Published in Websites, tagged colour, Firefox, Safari on 10th May 2008. One comment.
My review of Grand Theft Auto IV is now online at Thunderbolt:
As our alter ego Niko Bellic sails across the Atlantic towards the unknown promised land of America, you can’t help but draw parallels with Rockstar’s own journey. Having conquered the last generation of consoles, they now face an uncertain transition to the Xbox 360 and PS3, where the pressure to exceed the already high standards is enormous. With such a burden, this is perhaps the most important game in the series since Grand Theft Auto III…
Published in Videogames on 10th May 2008. No comments.
Although CSS is not a complex language to learn, the amount of best practice advice out there is overwhelming. It seems like there are essentially two tiers of CSS knowledge; the first will give you to a reasonable understanding so you can make a basic website, while the second will help you progress to a professional level. There are plenty of books that cover the first tier, but not too many that do the second. This is where CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions comes in.
Andy Budd’s book is aimed primarily at those web designers and developers who already have a good understanding of (X)HTML and CSS. It starts with the basics, then quickly moves on to the advanced techniques that you bought it for. The first chapter goes over code structuring, meaningful markup and using appropriate selectors to get the job done, while the second is a recap of the box and positioning models.
CSS Mastery then covers in detail background images and image replacement, styling links, lists and navigation, forms and tables, layout, hacks and filters, and bugs. Budd then includes two walkthroughs of entire designs, the code for which can be downloaded as it can be for the rest of the book.
Technical books can be dull and suffer from a lack of clarity, but CSS Mastery is written in a style which is easy to digest and understand. Multiple alternatives are given to problems like drop shadows and rounded corners, giving you a great overview of which one is most suitable to you.
Although I consider myself to be a pretty advanced CSS user, I definitely learnt a lot from reading CSS Mastery. Sure, there are plenty of tutorials on the Web, but few are as well written and edited as this.
Links:
Book website
The book on Amazon UK
The book on Amazon USA
Published in Book reviews, Websites, tagged CSS on 7th May 2008. One comment.
As you may know, I work at the University of Nottingham Students’ Union magazine, Impact. We produce seven issues per academic year, which works out to about one a month. All of our files are stored on our main Mac Pro computer, which until recently was not backed up at.
This left us very vulnerable, so I ordered Leopard (the newest version of the Mac OS) and an external hard drive. They arrived last week and I installed both on Saturday, just as we were coming to the end of the latest issue’s production. I set up Time Machine just like I do at home and left it to do its business.
So I walk in on Monday to work on the magazine and turn on the Mac Pro. It went to the white screen with the large Apple logo, but stayed there… and stayed there. After 20 minutes, I was getting anxious, but then I remembered that I had just installed Leopard and Time Machine. So I reformatted the hard drive, restored the entire machine from the backup and little over an hour later we were back up and running as if nothing had happened.
This little incident points out a few things. Firstly, Macs are not infallible. Secondly, when they do let you down, it’s extremely easy to recover and get on with what you’re doing. Time Machine is an absolute godsend. Most importantly though, it’s absolutely imperative that you backup your data. Be paranoid about it. We could have lost a month’s worth of work and a year’s worth of archives. We dodged a bullet though and I dread to think about what could have happened if we weren’t prepared.
Published in Software, tagged Impact on 6th May 2008. One comment.
Gamespot has some nerve. I went to read their GTA IV review, only to be shown this:
It goes without saying that GameSpot is a big website, but they obviously have no idea about design or usability. Pop up windows are now universally despised because they interrupt the user experience. They should never be used unless the user is expecting them to appear.
Any content that is going to automatically pop up in a new window when you load a page is not worth reading. It’s as simple as that. Even worse is that you’re not told what you “may” be missing out on. It could be anything, but one thing is for sure; no-one is going to bother to find out.
This is such an elementary error that I almost have pity for GameSpot. Their site isn’t exactly well designed to begin with, but this is a total shambles.
Published in Usability, Websites, tagged GameSpot on 1st May 2008. No comments.
Archives are often something that are left until the last minute and I don’t think anyone really considers how best to create them. Designers often throw together a chronological list of posts and leave it at that. However, I stumbled across a design by Kyle Meyer today that’s a brilliant solution to the archive problem. On his website Astheria, he represents his archive visually, altering the distance between posts to show fluctuations in frequency.
Clever, isn’t it? How is it done? Well all he’s done is dynamically style the list items, altering their top margin according to the difference in dates. I guess that this is done in a custom PHP script he’s written to grab and display his blog content. The rest is just done with CSS.
Published in Design, Websites, tagged CSS, minimalism, organisation on 24th April 2008. No comments.
Here’s an awesome little piece of design; the Word Clock screensaver. All it does is tells the time in beautiful, simple type. It’s a neat idea implemented really well and if you have a Mac, I recommend that you check it out.
Published in Design, Software, tagged typography on 23rd April 2008. One comment.
Co-founder of the Web Standards Project, Jeffrey Zeldman is one of the best known Web development personalities. His landmark book Designing With Web Standards, released in 2003, was updated almost two years ago. I picked up a copy the other day after reading many recommendations, so is it still relevant five years down the line?
Designing With Web Standards, Second Edition is a much larger and more comprehensive book than I anticipated it being, serving as an introduction to a range of topics. It begins by making the case for web standards, showing what’s wrong with (then) current websites and what can be done. It examines why they’re not perfect, but why they’re also the way forward. Zeldman then goes on to explain how websites can be made to comply with web standards.
It’s a book which caters for a wide range of users, from those who have just used the likes of Microsoft Frontpage to seasoned programmers. Zeldman writes in a style that everyone from site owners who are commissioning projects to those implementing them will understand.
Designing With Web Standards‘ main flaw is that it was obviously written for a particular period in Web development and because of this, its age shows. There are plenty of references to browsers like Netscape 4, which no-one uses any more and probably didn’t when this second edition was published.
Zeldman’s book was always going to make itself obsolete if Web standards became widely accepted, and so his appeals to redesign websites are a little futile for anyone picking it up today. This irony merely demonstrates the scale of the Web Standards Project’s achievement though and reinforces its values. Although it may not be need to convince current site owners, for those who are just starting in Web design, this is a superb primer for the technologies, issues and decisions that lie ahead. It may seem a little out of date, but it provides the context in which to appreciate why we use the practices we do today.
Although I began making websites in 2000, I’ve come from using nasty table-based layouts to writing standards-compliant code without really being pushed by anyone to do so. As I’ve grown up and learnt more about programming, I’ve gone from using code generators to writing it all myself. The transition to technologies like CSS hasn’t really come from an awareness of Web standards, but a desire to make things easier for myself. So although I was oblivious to Zeldman’s campaign at the time, Designing With Web Standards is still and interesting read and one that shows just how far the Web has come in a mere five years.
Published in Book reviews, Websites, tagged Web standards on 22nd April 2008. No comments.
All of the information we create and use is either on your computer or in ‘the cloud’ of servers on the Internet. The choice between these two usage patterns is an interesting one. My email is all online via Gmail (although I access it via a desktop application), but everything else is on my own computer. My feed reader, calendar and task manager are all offline standalone programs. I don’t anticipate moving these into ‘the cloud’ anytime soon, but what about bookmarks?
Over the last few months, I’ve noticed that I’ve stopped adding many bookmarks to my browser. If I see something new, I either subscribe to the site’s RSS feed if I like it or simply remember where it is. I use the bookmarks toolbar in Firefox just below the address bar, but I rarely get to sites via the bookmarks menu option. More commonly, I use my Protopage to get to my most visited sites.
I’m thinking of slimming down my browser bookmarks to just my most commonly used ones, then shipping all the rest over to an online bookmarking system like del.icio.us or ma.gnolia. I’m wary of using a Web-based system though; how quickly will I be able to find links? Will the need to tag everything make it a less attractive prospect? It would be really interesting to see a study or analysis of the usability of different bookmarking methods.
Published in Websites, tagged bookmarks, del.icio.us, ma.gnolia on 21st April 2008. One comment.
On the new version of Thunderbolt, there are three news feeds in the right column of several pages. We take news from other sites using RSS, then display it for users to read. However, there’s one problem; if you rely on other people to provide a service, then you can’t guarantee that it will always work.
This issue has appeared a couple of times on the site when the feed from GamePolitics.com went down. This caused the RSS parsing script on Thunderbolt to timeout, sending loading times through the roof. So what can we do about it? The solution is to cache (make a copy of) the RSS feed every so often and if we can’t find the original site, we just display the most recent version. You could do this in a couple of ways; cache the feed yourself or let someone else do it.
FeedBurner offers a free feed distribution and publishing service. Once they’ve ‘burnt’ your feed, you point your users to your feed on FeedBurner (who check and update their copy during the day). The main benefit is the bandwidth you save through offloading your RSS to FeedBurner, but what we’re interested in here is the ability to ‘burn’ any feed you like.
So here’s the cunning part; you set up a FeedBurner feed for the site you rely on - GamePolitics.com in this case - and then point your website to it. So if the other website crashes, you’re not affected because FeedBurner will keep running using a copy of the RSS.
Sending other websites’ feeds through FeedBurner first is a bit like sending your email through Gmail to filter spam. It’s free and keeps your site running smoothly no matter what happens to the website you’re taking the feed from.
Published in Websites, tagged FeedBurner, Thunderbolt on 20th April 2008. No comments.
