:Web Application Usability

Luke Wroblewski writes that color schemas in nature when used on interfaces have “the potential to distinguish (by helping create a more memorable website), guide (by allowing users to focus on interactions), engage (by making page layouts comfortable and more inviting), and inspire (by offering new ideas for color selection).” Users hate monotonous interfaces for frequently used interface, skins satisfy most of them. But creating skins for each application is very difficult. In MSN messenger, the background of a chat window can be changed to any picture. The images that change daily on top of this blog are also distorted versions of real images. Enabling the interface to change its appearance by sampling a real image will give the users unlimited options with minimal effort.

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: Studio MX2004, Dreamweaver MX2004, Fireworks MX2004, Macromedia Flash MX2004 and Macromedia Flash MX2004 Professional all up for grabs. Fourteen new articles on devnet too. Grab em and crack through them. The new component architecture is the most interesting of all. Information on building new components is here and here. Also loading data across domains is a lot stricter. Update: There have been a lot of searches to this post for “macromedia flash mx 2004 crack”, “macromedia flash mx professional 2004 crack”, “macromedia studio mx 2004 crack” and “macromedia dreamweaver mx 2004 crack”. Well, here is a link to a post which claims to have it.

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Bob Regan posts a breeze presentation Flash Accessibility. In the comments section Amir Dotan says that flash deals accessibility as a seperate entity and the richness of the data entered is lost and Eric LoPresti stresses on reducing the complexity in the development process. HiSoftware has two products which check flash files for accessiblity.
On another note, David Crow points to a study analyzing private sector web sites for accessiblity which used the Bobby online accessibility test for ADA Section 508 compatibility.

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Sarah
Allen created a nice
OPML widget for her blog, which shows the blogroll in a small viewer organized
into categories. The Laszlo accordian pane or TabSlider used here
solves the vertical space crunch problem nicely. Microsofts task pane widget
for explorer on the right does the job even better in windows XP. Update: The difference is that, multiple panes can be open on explorer taskpane. But I think both have their advantages and specific uses.

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Color toy is a tool for picking colors. Whats interesting about this interface is, it allows the user to make not one color, but six different colors with the same input.
After Life is a site which sells images of a cemetery. Small movements and interactivity bring the images to life.
Chicago wind data display shows visualizations of the screen scraped MET data collected from NOAA.

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JD points to Russel’s post on cell phones need to save bandwidth while using aggregators.
JD says server based aggregation is the way to go as it saves bandwidth on the server and the client side. But client side aggregation also has its advantages.
One advantage is that, users don’t have to wait while loading the data as it is already on the client. The wait time may not matter for text downloads, but is of significance for heavier downloads like videos. One solution to the bandwidth problem is having the updated sites ping a site like weblogs.com and serving the recently updated list throught a service like blo.gs or blogrolling to the client. The client has to visit only the updated sites and download the data before the user requests it. This solution may not work when the client is charged per downloaded data and server based aggregation may be better in that case.

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A new P2P telephony software, Skype, is offered by the company that brought you Kazaa. One disadvantage is that, no one knows what spyware will come with this installation. But the advantage of p2p telephony offered by skype is, clients that are NATed or are behind firewlls can initiate the calls. Clients on publicly routable IP addresses will be able to proxy to NAT’ed nodes and route calls. Also, call quality is increased by keeping multiple connection paths open and dynamically choosing the one that is best suited at the time. Update: The best thing about skype is the voice quality. Lot better than Y! or MSN. Call me by clicking here.

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Actor Jack Palance, in his Oscar-winning portrayal of Curly the trail boss in City Slickers, said “the secret to happiness is , pursuing ‘one thing’, with the challenge being to find out what that thing is for you.” Macromedia INTO documents videos of people describing what their ‘one thing’ is. Tim O’Reilly’s video is featured. But, it requires you to upgrade to Flash player 7.0 Beta (some swfs which load data from different domains will not work with this player)

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Ever wondered what goes into those Ads which provide powerful 30 seconds experiences? This site, Landscapes of Capital, has ads related to technology and commerce. It also provides detailed explanation for each ad and explains how they tie in their brand to our ‘worldviews’. Most explanations have ads embeded in them, here are some. Ericsson, FedEx, Lotus, First Union, Visa. Via PeterMe.

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Text is an accessible format that is accessible by a large number of people. Most of us like visualizations more than reading through text, but disabled users have problems going through graphical elements. Computers also cannot handle graphical data well. All data, if translated to text does not only benefit disabled users, but also computers. It is even better for computers if the text is in standardized structures. Digitized text is searchable and findable.
Most books don’t find their way into google. I wonder if amazon could digitize all the books they sell and make them searchable with out publishing the whole book on the internet. Also, Why can’t NYTimes allow only google spiders to crawl and index their archives?
The captioning on TV gives rise to an interesting application. TVeyes scans the captioning for a specified keyword and sends you an email with a brief transcript. Now all I need is an Email2RSS service that publishes all emails from an address to RSS to get the results into my aggregator. Ray Ozzie also talks about email to RSS. Eightlinks has an implementation of Email2RSS in Perl.

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