Published on
November 3, 2010 in
Art and Development.
Tags: Accessibility, Art, Articles, Development, HTML, Iconography, Interactive, Tools, Usability, User Experience (UX), Video, Visualization, Web Standards.
Drumbeat – Mozilla’s flagship festival focusing on net-neutrality, openness, and freedom of learning and expression – begins today in Barcelona, Spain. After spending an evening scoping out the scheduled events, workshops, and folks involved, here are some of my MASSIVELY cool highlights and things to watch out for in 2011:
Universal Subtitles
I was impressed to hear Robin Christopherson, Head of Accessibility Services at AbilityNet, sing the praises of YouTube’s auto-captioning tool at FOWD 2010 earlier this year. Mozilla‘s new open source tool – Universal Subtitles – aims to help translate even more videos into a format capable of being easily consumed by deaf and hard of hearing users, as well as ensuring that popular search engines – like Google – can access and archive important video content for years to come. View a video introduction to the new Universal Subtitles tool in all its HTML5 glory.
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Experiments with liquid CSS layouts
We all know liquid is important, right? (Doctors recommend 1.5-3 litres per day :P)
Some of you may have been fooled into thinking liquid and elastic layouts died as soon as browsers deployed native zoom a few years back. I’ll assume you understand – with a fair degree of knowledge – the technical and usability ramifications of implementing fixed-width, liquid, and elastic web layouts. If not, then the following should briefly clear the haze:
Fixed-width layout
Dimensions have a fixed-width pixel (px) measurement.
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So you want to display background images on your website?.. Coincidence – me too! Firstly why not pause for a second and refresh this web page for a while and appreciate the lovely photography :P
Mac OSX, Safari 5.0 screenshot
If you’ve tried background images (unsuccessfully) in the past, no doubt you’ve come unstuck with a few of the same sorts of dilemmas as I have: the first culprit being content vs. image legibility, and the second being each image’s responsiveness to the viewport (will the image tile or stretch?; in which case you have to start thinking about tessellation accuracy and file size etc.).
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Published on
July 30, 2010 in
Design and Development.
Tags: Accessibility, Articles, Design, Development, HTML, Interface Design, JavaScript, jQuery, Tools, Usability, User Experience (UX), Web Standards.
Update 16/12/2010
I used this jQuery placeholder plugin to do the job today and it worked nicely.
The new HTML5 specification introduces the form input placeholder attribute, which allows us to define a hint to help users fill out input fields. If you’re using a WebKit-based browser right now you should find working examples of the new input placeholder in use on this page.
Working with form elements, especially labels, can present a dilemma for many…
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I received a wonderful tip-off from one of my colleagues this week via Slashdot. My dreams had come true and along with it sanctimonious giggles for all the people I’ve known in the past who’ve worshiped Internet Explorer enough to waste time and money on supporting the browser’s lack of CSS support, rather than engaging with – let’s face it – more useful and engaging tasks; tasks we should all justify and convince to our clients before a project begins.
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"I'm Balloon Fighter" logo by Polygraph Studios
So over the last few months I’ve been cautiously experimenting with putting in place processes to handle dealing with the routine tasks us deselopers have to handle on a regular basis. I’m not talking new tools, dope apps, or revolutionary sleep techniques, but simple client correspondence.
I would often find myself spending tens of hours on a weekly basis answering emails that didn’t need to be answered
Stuff like:
- Acknowledging new clients with new projects and work proposals.
- Acknowledging friends with new projects and work proposals (they’re very different).
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I’m getting asked this question regularly now. I’m taking it as a compliment and giving my take…
I ♥ (good) design
It’s almost 2yrs since I moved to Bristol – my home – after studying in Leeds (mum/dad – I confess: I never graduated). When I moved to Bristol I had no friends or family here, no job, no contacts, no clients… Not just that, but starting my own business – freelance is just part of [it] – began to cost lose me friends, relationships, and any chance of forging or rebuilding them again. Thankfully this is now the total opposite.
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