Archive for the 'Tech' Category

IjADs

Marty November 2nd, 2006

IjAD - Information (Inside joke) Architecture Document

Recently, much of my design work has been involving tools work and CMS, back-end systems, etc. I like the challenge of solving design problems and throwing in U/A standards where I can, but there’s not a whole lot of room for creativity. So, to add a small bit of humor to my designs, I started adding small ‘easter eggs’ (for a lack of a better term).

It’s always subtle things that avoid being overtly ridiculous or NSFW. Must of it has been relegated to finding better usernames: instead of J. User or John Doe, I’ve taken to A. Lien, B. Cirius and D. Lishus. Sometimes it’s a subtle joke word or phrase in the Lorem ipsum… text:

“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Nulla ligula ligula, tincidunt vel, insert nifty web twopointoh phrase here gravida ut, gravida consequat, justo. Curabitur sit amet quam ac enim viverra interdum…”

So, aside from amusing myself and the rare notice by anyone else, it’s harmless. But is it professional? I understand that it does have a childish element to it, and that it might be considered so by others, but the outlet after 8 hours of staring at Visio, Dreamweaver and Photoshop is something that I’ve enjoyed.

So, I’m wondering if there are any thoughts out there among the 4 or 5 readers I have about this? Anyone else put in hidden/secret things within their designs? Many artists have done things like this for ages, such as Shepard Fairey and his “Andre the Giant has a posse” graphic which found it’s way into other pieces of art, or the old Iron Maiden album covers by Derek Riggs, who hid his personal Riggs Logo in the drawings of Eddie, Maiden’s mascot. Programmers are notorious for their Easter Eggs, although they are usually hidden; IADs - being a visual medium - aren’t that complex.

I’m just curious how normal this is among IA’s and related design fields.

Visual vs. Usable Seminar

Marty September 15th, 2006

Last night, GSI Commerce hosted a seminar for AIGA Philadelphia and Phi Chi (the Philadelphia branch of the ACM SigCHI) members, along with Avenue A/Razorfish. The topic was The Visual vs. The Usable, and we were presenting two cases of how we managed to mesh top-notch creative with functional, usable design. Avenue A/Razorfish did the same, talking about how the two groups - often at odds - collaborated on projects to create a better end result. Continue Reading »

AffordableHost … A plague of locusts and lawyers upon you

Marty August 17th, 2006

I haven’t had much time to write, but I’m so incensed over the complete idiocy of this company that I had to spout.

Originally, the problems began when my site went down more and more often over a 2 week period, but culminated with a 10-day outtage.  10 days, NO site, which sucked because I needed to use it as portfolio.  Then came the better news - our bad, but we probably lost ALL of your data.

Technical problems happen, I understand that, but they’re responses became more and more formulaic, little information was forthcoming, promises of uptime weren’t kept and support tickets were given “Check the status page to see new information” - which led to a page with the same information from a few days ago.

I had finally had enough when I asked for a refund of that month’s charges because they had fallen below 40% uptime - which they wouldn’t give me.  They would give me 2 months credit - which was useless since I was dropping them after the repeated outtages and increasingly horrible customer service.  I cancelled the service on May 12th.

Lo and behold, I got charged on June 17 for another month.  Not so fast, I said - I cancelled, so you need to refund those charges.  They told me that they couldn’t (bullshit), so I cancelled again, and had the charges reversed by the credit card company.

Fast forward to today, and I get 2 emails - one telling me that my invoice has been generated, and a second telling me that it has been PAID.  Yes folks, 2 months after I last cancelled, and 3 months after I first cancelled.  It was like being with AOL but without any of the few benefits they offer.  Not only that, I see that they decided to renew my contract at $70+.  Must be nice to just decide to charge arbitrarily.

I have the confirmations of my cancellation.  I have emails from billing saying as much.  But they just can’t get their act together - and when I went to check my account and make sure I removed a credit card, I found that I can’t remove my credit card from their system.  There’s no way to do it.  So, they got this nasty note instead:

I already touched on this on a previous email, but now I’m VERY angry.
I cancelled this account in MAY, and then again in JULY, and yet I am STILL BEING billed.  If you could please pull your heads out of your asses just long enough, you need to refund:

  • My July payment ($6.95)
  • My August payment ($6.95)
  • An annual charge ($71.40)

IMMEDIATELY.  If this sitation is not fixed by EOB 8/17, I’ll be reporting you as a fraudulent biller to my credit card company, have the charges reversed, and report you to the Attorney General of my state.
I’m not really confident about it, but hopefully this THIRD cancellation request might make an impact with you.  And you wonder why you are losing so many clients?

I wonder if they’ll get the message THIS time.

Do the Disabled Really Buy Sporting Goods?

Marty June 28th, 2006

While working on a website we are redesigning, I was seeing some minor usability/accessibility issues that I was concerned about. I brought up those issues, mentioning that the site would be significantly less functional in some cases to those with disabilities, such as the vision-impaired and physically handicapped persons for whom using a mouse is difficult. That was when someone asked, “Do blind people actually buy sporting goods?”.

In their defense, the speaker asked the question in good faith, and they were thinking of snowboards, golf clubs and footballs when they said it. It took me only a second to respond perhaps not, and to ask if they had considered sweatpants, baseball caps, knee braces and more. Suddenly, it was more pertinent, and I decided to look into the question - do the disabled really buy sporting goods, or more specifically, do they buy them online? Continue Reading »

IE7 - Firefox’s Evil (and Inferior) Clone?

Marty February 16th, 2006

Okay, after a few days of using Microsoft’s new IE7 Beta, I’ve gotten a handle on the changes, as well as what I like and don’t like about it. Continue Reading »

Noise Reduction (and I don’t mean shooting the band)

Marty February 8th, 2006

Recently, I got into a discussion about what the best noise reduction software for photography was. Aside from the larger debate about whether you should post-process your picture or not (which could be a post in and of itself), I was wondering if there was a clear leader in programs to reduce noise in the shots that I took at higher ISOs with the Nikon D70. The D70 has a well-deserved reputation for adding quite a bit of noise at ISOs greater than 400, which is pretty unacceptable really.

But since it’s there, I have to compensate for it. My wife introduced me to Noise Ninja, and I found Noiseware myself. Both work very well, but were they the best choices? I created a test to compare them, and found that they were comparable, although I preferred Noiseware. Continue Reading »

Internet Explorer 7: Beta 2 Preview

Marty February 4th, 2006

Back in year’s past, Microsoft enjoyed a nearly complete monopoly on the web browser, and nobody really knew what standards were. Those who did were portrayed as geeks, crazies or perfectionists. And the folks from Redmond said “Enjoy what you have - we won’t be giving you anything else until Longhorn in 2005 2006 2007.

Then came a spate of new browsers that did know what standards were, and actually began following them. For MAC users, that meant Safari and Camino; for Windows users, Opera started pushing but it was Firefox that really caught Microsoft’s attention. Suddenly, their domination of browsers plateaued and actually started to drop. At first, it was just those silly designers trying to force their ’standards’ mantra. Then the numbers started to grow - companies started adopting Firefox, as did the government. In fact, millions of people were downloading it and the press started to make a big deal. Suddenly, IE’s ‘quirks’ were seen as fallibility, as bugs, as negatives that other browsers didn’t have. IE became the evil browser, and designers took the lead to shout the praises of these lesser-known but more compliant browsers. And IE’s market continued to wane.

So, Microsoft realized that something had to be done. And IE7 was announced (no, not that IE7), as Microsoft scrambled to hold off the upstarts who were threatening its dominance. Now, they’ve finally released it in beta form so that the world can see that they really do care. Continue Reading »

Don’t let Adobe fool you

Marty February 2nd, 2006

When my wife got her Nikon D200, I was looking forward to using it. One glitch that I hadn’t thought about initially, though: since the D200 uses a different algorithm to encode its RAW files, my version of Photoshop CS2 couldn’t open them. There was a supposed Adobe Camera Raw update, but it was just a beta and didn’t work. Not a big deal - I could wait.

When the final version of ACR 3.3 was released I went out and grabbed it to be able to play with the pictures I took using the D200 - and it didn’t work. I used the directions that Adobe provided to the letter, but no dice. I deleted the plug-in, and tried it again. Still, no luck. I redownloaded the file, unzipped it again - and again could not open the files. Continue Reading »

Hire me.

Marty January 17th, 2006

I’m looking for full-time work again - my contract position has run out of design and usability work, and while I have a couple of projects to finish up, I’m looking for larger scale (and preferably permanent) work that includes benefits, an office, ample free time to be creative, an in-house racquetball court and lender Nikon D200’s. Anyone know of places hiring like that?

Speaking of the D200, I’m just a little jealous of my wife. She’s getting one - at least, she is once Nikon finally starts shipping them reliably. Unfortunately, it’s because of a major mishap we had on her birthday. While out taking some pictures, she slipped on some rocks and *BAM* - cracked her LCD, messed up the four-way controller and who knows what else on her Nikon D70. She was devastated, and after making sure she was okay (she’s banged up, but was more concerned about the camera), I felt horrible for her. We went home to find out that:

  1. the expensive warranty I bought from Best Buy was useless (if there’s visible damage, they won’t cover it)
  2. Repairs will run $250 - 500 and will take 4-6 weeks
  3. That my camera alone won’t cover two avid photographers

So, off we went to Calumet Camera in Philly to see what they had available. She just wanted the body, but they had no idea when those were going to come in. So, we went with the kit - a Nikon D200 plus the highly regarded Nikon VR 18-200mm lens. It will set us back a pretty penny, but at least we have it (for now… ugh).

But back to me — expect some actual updates on my site and on the Blueline Concepts pages. It’s due for a true overhaul, so I’m going to put some real time into it. In the meantime, send me offers!

Other amusements »

Navigation Consternation

Marty July 6th, 2005

I’m in the middle of a contract where we will creating a site that incorporates several departments presentation needs to a varied number of customers. In short, Department A needs to be able to present information to Customer Type A and Customer Type B, while Department B needs to be able to present information to Customer Type C, as well as some information which is share by all Customer types. The data varies between global information without any account specificity, and user-specific transactional data.

The navigation consists of a global ‘frame’ from the parent company (header, footer and left-nav style). Between them is our content (<div id="container">), which in turn has two divs, leftcol and rightcol (I know, so original). We are basing the left navigation - the main navigational element - on the parent site, although we are tweaking the style slightly, customizing the menu items to our site specifics, and most of all making it compliant by removing tables and image-based ‘text’ links. The main content of the page would fit in the right column div, often being fed from another part of the company’s database.

The main navigation isn’t a problem. I’m using nested lists to create a primary and secondary navigation to mimic the table-based rollovers that the parent site has. The problem is that when we reach certain portions of the site, I would need to go to a tertiary level of navigation. Not necessarily a problem in and of itself, although it does pose space problems within the width of the left column div.

Still, it was my recommendation as the most advisable method to go, following this general pattern:


<ul>
<li>HEADER 1</li>
<li>HEADER 2</li>
<ul><li>page 1</li>
<li>page 2</li>
<li>CURRENT PAGE</li>
<ul><li>Option 1</li>
<li>Option 2</li>
<li>Option 3</li></ul>
<li>page 4</li></ul>
<li>HEADER 3</li>
<li>HEADER 4</li>
<li>HEADER 5</li>
</ul>

Simple, aside from spacing problems (32-character option names don’t fit very well). However, the client team wanted to use a set of navigation for that particular page, all within the right column DIV. So, suddenly, we’re left with left navigation, and not-quite-as-far-left navigation. I tried to explain the fact that having to left-justified navigations would most likely be confusing to the user, and that incorporating the navigation into overall navigation would perhaps be more advisable. They weren’t so sure, because they wanted to make sure that the topic navigation was in the face of the user.

After some discussions, it was then suggested that perhaps top navigation within the right DIV (the ‘frame’, if you will) would make more sense. At first, I wasn’t so sure because having two navigational areas - one top and one left - isn’t always the best idea. However, most situations also use this with TOP = primary/global nav, while LEFT = secondary/subject nav - not the other way around. In the end, I created three comps:

1. Integrated Left Navigation
2. Dual Left Navigation
3. Left and Top Navigation.

So, the result? Strangely enough, to me at least, the last choice seems to be the consensus winner. While I had my concerns about offering two separate navigation elements (well, four if you include the header and footer links - but don’t get me started there), it seems to work pretty well. Creating the ‘Inner Nav’ using a top tab-based navigation, if offers a way for the user to focus on the navigation inherent to that particular user-specific system (in this case “Orders”) as opposed to the more global (and generic) navigation on the left side. All of the items that the customer might need to use from within that Order space would be within that inner navigational space - and when they are done, they simply use the global navigation to the left to visit other portions of the site.

From what I know about usability, it seems to fly in the face of good design, but in this case it seems to make the most sense, and actually appears to work fairly well. I’m sure the usability folks will have plenty of words on the subject, but at this point, I’m having trouble finding it.

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