Archive for 2010
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Names You Can Trust – Steve Krug
Thursday, December 23rd, 2010For a simple, and very useful, Web Design and Usability overview – “Don’t Make Me Think” is the first book to get.
I often suggest specific books, websites, and forums for my students to follow after class. I’ve decided to start a series of posts about these. There are some people who, when I see their name on something, I will always listen to – so this is my “Names you can trust” series.
Today’s name is: Steve Krug. Steve has written many articles and books that are a wonderful resource for web designers and developers. The first book I suggest for beginning web design students is “Don’t Make Me Think” (Amazon has it here).
You can see a sample from the book at http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/dialogbox/usability/
This book is small and an easy read (a perfect airplane book) but has a solid and clear way of introducing usability in web design. After reading his book even the most skittish newbie will have a solid sense of why usability matters and why it’s something that can be added into every design project. This is a good resource for anyone who is interested in how or why usability can be incorporated into design.
The iPhone 4 deal at Radio Shack
Wednesday, December 8th, 2010Advice for current iPhone users on getting the upgrade deal and activating the new phone.
Hi -
I posted a twitter link a few days ago about the deal that Radio Shack has on upgrading to an iPhone 4.
I was able to turn in my 3Gs and move up to a 32gb phone for $125. If you do this (and are a current AT&T iPhone subscriber) and have a previous phone that you can put your sim card in then you will still have a working phone and will get your new one in the mail in a few days. If you don’t have an old phone, spent the $20 on a cheap phone in Radio Shack and you’ll still have your working number – from the outside no one will know that you don’t have “your’ phone. You did back up your phone to iTunes before you went to radio shack, right?
(Rule #1 for all Apple users – never bring in any device without doing a backup first – even if you are going to the genius bar for a new battery, back up first!)
Now I want to let you know what to do AFTER you get the phone. At the bottom of the post is a list with the steps in it. Between here and there is a small rant about the process with a few warnings in it.
Once you unpack the phone ,you will probably have a small piece of paper inside that tells you to sync to iTunes and that activation of you phone can take 12-24 hours. Please don’t believe that.
First of all, that’s absurd.
Second of all, it’s not accurate.
You will want to start iTunes and check for updates under the iTunes menu. You need to be on the most current version. I had a moment when my heart stopped after I did this and connected my phone to iTunes. I got a message that I could not restore my phone from the current backup because “the phone software was too old”. It will let you start a new one instead of restoring – don’t.
Go to the iTunes menu and check for updates with the phone connected. You will get a nag screen that the iTunes is current and then you should get a firmware update from 4.1 (which is how the phone ships) to 4.2
If your phone is still saying “pending activation – this may take a while” like mine did, you may be tempted to call Radio Shack – don’t. I did and the advice I got was giggle-inducing. You see, the version 4 phone has a smaller sim card in it. I was told to put my old sim into the new phone. When I told them the sim was the wrong size and the phone HAD a sim in it (You can cut the old sim – don’t. It has a perfectly good sim inside already). I was told to call 611 to get to AT&T from my new iPhone. However until you activate the new phone you can’t make calls with it. After hanging up, and shaking my head, I called 611 on the phone that had my old sim in it – the phone that I had been using for the last two days. You will end up needing to talk to the rep from a land line or different phone because your call will be disconnected when the new phone is activated – but calling from your sim gets you to a person with your account active, fast. Once I explained what I wanted the rep was able to help me with everything including resetting my voicemail password (I forgot my pin).
So.. the short version is this
- Sync your phone to iTunes before you go to get the new phone
- After filling out all the paperwork at Radio Shack to get a new phone reset it to factory specs (Settings –> General –> Reset)
- Update ITunes
- Sync your new phone and update to get the firmware to 4.2
- Call 611 on another phone to get AT&T to finish activation.
Done, Done and Done.
Need to scale video for a website?
Sunday, December 5th, 2010In going through my posts and trying to clean up tags and categories I came across a few posts I want to move back to the front again – re-post really. So, a few times a month I will add some comment and re-post some information. – like this…
Putting video on a website is more tedious than hard. There are resources for getting a video onto a page, post, or sidebar but you usually will need to know what the dimensions should be. If you have a large YouTube video that you want in a sidebar, you will need to scale it to keep the correct height/width relationship – if you don’t, you will get distortion.
Try this site – Proportioncalc
Adding a Twitter Feed
Friday, December 3rd, 2010Why I put a twitter feed on my site and a brief tutorial on how (as well as making it validate xhtml strict) –
So, I did it. I created a twitter account and put the feed on the main navigation page of my site. The question of course is WHY?
I have been thinking about how I could both make my site easier for me to update and make it more likely that I will actually post real content and no just throw in links (like I’ve been doing for 98% of the time I’ve been up). I decided I would use the twitter feed to add links as much as possible and would make creating actual posts something that would be at least a paragraph or two.
That’s why I did it – here’s how. If you are using WordPress as the underlying structure for your site (like I am), AND you have widgets available in the template you are using, then adding a tweets section will take you only a few minutes.
Step One – First go to twitter.com and create a new account. Create a tweet so you can see if it works when you add it to you site.
Step Two – I did a search for add twitter to wordpress and found a useful page at quickonlinetips.com. I originally chose Twitter Tools but found it was more than I needed and more of a headache to add. I ended up with the criminally simple Wickett Twitter Widget. If you want to install the plug-in, here is the easiest possible way, do this…
- Go to the plugins page on the backend/administrator side of your wordpress site
- Click the Add New button
- Search for what you want and click the link that says “install”
- Activate the plug-in
It’s literally that easy! I picked one that had no detailed settings page so I was able to add the feed directly into a widget area.
There is a catch! I have a site that uses a valid xhtml strict template. Adding this to my site made the validation cough up two errors. It’s a longer post for another day why this matters to me, but as it does I needed to fix it.
There is a solution! The error are written in a stunningly stupid way and make it seem like the code is missing closing tags – it’s not it’s missing the type attribute in the script tags. Just add type=”text/javascript” in the opening script tag(s) and it should validate fine.
New Content
Wednesday, December 1st, 2010I’ve added a new page to the top navigation. It’s called Tutorials and currently holds whatever videos that I’ve pulled from the main page. I sized them back to the larger original size as well. Enjoy!
InDesign Users – Have you been to the plug-in directory lately?
Friday, November 19th, 2010If you are using InDesign CS3 or CS4 and have NOT been to this site – go there now.
Really, go… I can wait.
It’s pretty good for all versions but many of the hot plug-ins will add CS5 functionality to earlier versions and might help speed things up for you.
Here’s the link – http://indesign.pluginsworld.com/
CSS Tests
Monday, November 8th, 2010Bless you Bruno!
I only this week stumbled upon your page with stunning numbers of tests/experiments in css.
THIS IS IT
Thank you!
CSS3 Media Queries
Sunday, November 7th, 2010Here are several links on a wonderful feature of CSS3. If you have not had a chance to look at Media Queries and you are either a CSS person or might be making mobile content, check it out.
From the Blog
- Photoshop compositing and the never ending road
Sunday, November 6th, 2011 - What is rule one?
Thursday, November 3rd, 2011 - AdobeMAX!
Tuesday, October 18th, 2011