We should be familiar with anti-patterns in user interface design — counter-intuitive or ineffective user interface techniques. Dark patterns are user interface design patterns that intentionally try to steer users into taking actions that are in the best interest of the site owner, not the user. Sadly, users encounter these…
Today Twitter announced that it has added header images to profiles, similar to what Facebook and Google+ have done. In addition, Twitter has updated its apps for iOS and Android devices to use those header images. Twitter explains why it has added this feature: Starting today you can make your…
My Twitter stream and the headlines of sites across the web yesterday lit up with Facebook’s CEO blaming its stock price (failure to meet hyped expectation) on HTML5 (and its failure to make the Facebook mobile experience suck less). Even ZDNet jumped on that bandwagon with a post titled Facebook’s…
I have been working on a slow and plodding redesign of my personal site and am playing around with some navigation ideas. I wanted to create a JavaScript-free and image-free radial menu, an idea I toyed with a couple years ago and abandoned due to the lack of CSS support…
It’s not hard to stumble across diatribes against IE6 (and 7 and 8) users across forums peopled by web developers. As a web developer there is no denying that my desire to play with the new and shiny is hampered by my need to support users on older browsers and…
Currently, up to and including the jQuery 1.9 release (not out yet, but coming), jQuery actively supports the following browsers: Internet Explorer 6+ Firefox: Current -1 version Safari: Current -1 version Opera: Current -1 version Chrome: Current -1 version According to jQuery’s browser support page, any problem [in these browsers]…
Internet Explorer has been the whipping boy of the internet for some time now, particularly Internet Explorer 6. Now it seems Internet Explorer 7 may be the new cool target. Australian electronics seller Kogan has decided to impose a “tax” on users of Internet Explorer 7. The justification from Kogan’s…
Back in September 2010 Twitter changed how its site renders by pushing much of the processing to the web browser using JavaScript and hash-bang (#!) URLs. Today Twitter has announced it is essentially dumping that approach: To improve the twitter.com experience for everyone, we’ve been working to take back control…
A blindfolded photo attempt of my meal, served and eaten in near darkness. Thankfully it turns out that my aim with my fork was better than my aim with my cellphone camera. Two weeks ago our longtime client Olmsted Center for Sight (formerly the lengthily-named Elizabeth Pierce Olmsted, M.D. Center…
StatCounter released data on Wednesday showing that the screen resolution of 1,366 x 768 has surpassed 1,024 x 768 as the most common screen resolution. If you’ve paid attention to the drive for widescreen displays on newer machines, this may not come as much of a surprise to you. I…
TL;DR The iPad 3 retina display means a lot of apps and web sites are going to feel pressure for sharper (bigger) images. Knowing if you need to scale your images, the impact on end users and some ways to mitigate that impact is the right way to approach this.…
The graphic above (and its lengthy alt) is a parody based on a rather neat utility called the HTML5 Please API. You can drop the code onto your cutting edge demo site and it will indicate to a user what browsers support the features within. The code stays current by…