Published
January 27, 2011
“Why would anyone want to skip this intro? I think I’ll watch it again.”
“I like when the music blasts as soon as the site loads. It signals to everyone at work that I am going out to eat!”
“I hope the phone number and address are actually images so I can’t copy and paste them!”
I’ve always been surprised at how bad restaurant websites tend to be. I have a feeling that someone created a “great” circa-2001 restaurant site with intro movie, background music, hard-to-read script typefaces, and completely coded in Flash for that “cool, cutting-edge” effect. And every restaurant owner since has been copying that “website zero.” Meanwhile, actual visitors to the site can’t find the basic information they want: location, hours, phone number, and an easy-to-read (and up-to-date) menu. No amount of music, Flash, or “website ambiance” will reduce a user’s frustration. Instead, they’ll just find someplace else to eat.
Until restaurant owners build sites that their customers can use — and they realize that many of them are accessing their sites with mobile devices — the site Never Said About Restaurant Websites will have plenty of fodder. (via Daring Fireball)
Posted in Design, Flash, UI |
Published
January 18, 2011
If you’re a web developer and want to view source on an iPad — for example, to see if iPad-specific code or CSS file is loading correctly — install the View Source on Mobile Safari bookmarklet: View Source from Safari on iPad
Update: Daring Fireball linked to an improved version that’s a little more legible: iPad View Source Bookmarklet
Published
January 7, 2011
For all of the Mac’s (mostly valid) reputation for being easy to use, installing new software on a Mac can be pretty confusing to novices and new users. Zips, .dmg files, disk images: these are concepts many non-geeks often don’t understand.
On the Mac there’s a good chance someone will run a new application from the disk image instead of copying the app to their hard drive. I’ve mentioned before how the iPhone made this issue go away: “iPhone and iPad app installation is easy: find the app you want to install, the icon appears, you move it to the screen you want.” Simple.
Enter Apple’s new Mac App Store which makes software installation on the Mac as easy on the iPhone: Buy an app and it appears right in your dock. That kind of application installation simplicity has been missing from OS X for too long.
Published
January 5, 2011
I was working on a recent project that used a lightbox-style jQuery plugin called Facebox. This allowed me to put both images and DIVs of content into a lightbox-style popover — simply add rel=“facebox“ to an anchor tag and it would activate the popover.
The one thing Facebox didn’t do “out of the box” was automatically make links to images open in the lightbox window. To fix this, I just used a bit of jQuery to add rel=“facebox“ to any anchor tag that linked to a JPG or PNG:
// add rel="facebox" to image links for lightbox effect
$("a[href$=.jpg],a[href$=.jpeg],a[href$=.png]").attr("rel","facebox");
Published
January 3, 2011
2010 was busy; 2011 is starting off the same. That’s great for business, but it keeps me from things like updating this blog. Of course, keeping busy — and keeping clients happy — is more important.
Keeping this blog updated somewhat regularly isn’t an official resolution of mine, but I will try to update it more than once every six months.
One thing I’ll be using it for is for publishing tips (design, development, etc.). These are things I’ve researched and used on a project, and sometimes I need to go back and use the same thing for a later project. Publishing them here has the dual benefit of letting others find and use them (if they find it useful) as well as making it easier for me to find them later on.
Onward to 2011!
Andy Croll writes in the end of :hover?:
:hover as an web interface design tool going forward is going to be less and less important. As to whether this is a good or bad thing I’m not sure.
He makes the point that as more and more sites and web apps optimize for the iPad and iPhone, designers aren’t going to be able to rely on mouseover states. Mouseovers are used both to provide feedback that an item is clickable and to reduce complexity on a screen by hiding controls until the cursor is moved over an area. But that ability goes away with the iPad. I’m running into this issue with a current project, and it takes a new way of thinking about the problem.
Andy sums up:
I know that I’ll certainly be considering ‘tap to toggle’ as a user interface choice ahead of hover in the future. The iPhone-ification of interaction online continues.
(via Daring Fireball)
I realized I haven’t made note of any site launches in quite a while. So if you’ll indulge me, here are some recent (and not-so-recent) updates…
The following sites/microsites/blogs were all designed and developed by Kieran Chapman Design:
O’Connor Constructors
Arborjet Blog
Super Soil Raised Bed Garden
Organic Tick Control
Lincoln Street Cooking School
Sara Richard
I’ve also been doing some front-end development to bring to life the work of other talented designers:
KSN Partners
Ooh-la-la Salon
Newborn Possibilities
Navia Systems
KBK Wealth Connection
I’m also planning a redesign of my personal site, but that’ll only happen when I have some free time (or a burst of inspiration).
Posted in KCD, Releases |
PNGs are pretty standard images on the web these days, but Photoshop tends to generate unnecessarily large files. And even though most people have high-speed access, any savings in image size is a good thing and will help speed page load times.
Enter PNG Thing for Mac. Running your Photoshop-generated PNGs through PNG Thing reduces their size: just drag your images onto PNG Thing and strips out unnecessary junk, making your PNGs smaller. (It does a better job on large files and doesn’t make much of a dent with smaller PNGs.)
Dave Shea says Fireworks does an even better job of reducing PNGs. But if you don’t have Fireworks handy, PNG Thing is a nice (free) way to go.
