Jun 30th, 2010 by admin | 1 Comment »
If you’re a regular visitor to msnbc.com you may or may not have noticed the recent changes to their website. At first it appears as if there were only minor cosmetic changes to the header of the page but upon closer inspection you’ll notice something else – a ridiculous choice of content placement.
The first time you visit the page you see what appears to be a normal home page
Notice that the vertical scroll isn’t at the top of the page? It’s almost imperceptible and in fact, I didn’t notice it for a week. Why does this happen? Scroll up the page and you’ll see that msnbc.com now has a large chunk of content sitting up above what appears to be the normal top of the page. It wasn’t until I saw a link where some of the old navigation used to be that said “Where’s my navigation? We’ve moved it to the top” that I noticed this big change.
So I have to ask why would you redesign a page and place a large chunk of important content up above where the visitor will see when a page loads so that they have to scroll up to see it? This just seems completely counter intuitive to web navigation. Visit a news site and then scroll up to read the headlines? That’s like opening the New York Times and then finding that the top stores section was folded down behind the front page.
Msnbc.com explains this change by saying “We’ve moved the news menu to the top of story pages and made it easier to see what’s happening across the site. When you first get to a story, you’ll see sections and shows displayed across the top of the page. Below is the name of the section you’re in and a search box. Scroll up to see top headlines, slideshows, video and hot topics. Roll over a section name to see more from that section and click on a section name to go there.” Scroll. Roll. Click. Are they serious? Is it just me?
Posted in Rants, Usability | 1 Comment »
Jun 12th, 2010 by admin | 5 Comments »
Thanks to Sergio for finding a bug in the carousel where a certain sequence of clicks resulted in the play button being disabled, I’m happy to release version 2.0.2 which corrects the issue. Click here for the latest version or see our jQuery plugins page.
Posted in JavaScript, Usability | 5 Comments »
May 27th, 2010 by admin | 2 Comments »
Google released version 5 of Chrome this week which they claim is faster then ever. It also comes with a bunch of other updates like syncing bookmarks and preferences, incognito mode for extensions, and more HTML5 support to name a few. It’s lean, it’s mean and it works great. So why isn’t it my default browser? Glad you asked. In no particular order…
- No print preview. While this seems like a no-brainer, apparently Google decided it wasn’t needed. No public release of Chrome has had a print preview, although I hear version six is supposed to have it (fingers crossed).
- No Google toolbar. Really Google? You make the toolbar and you make a browser, yet you don’t make the toolbar for the browser you make? I love your toolbar and its the only one I use.
- No sidebar for favorites or history.
- No way to quickly see an image’s properties. OK, this is a small one but to see an images dimensions or file size you have to either download the image or view it through the element inspector. Too much hassle for such a simple feature.
There may be extensions that solve my issues but I don’t want to use extensions for things that should be a part of the browser. I’m sure I missed a few features that other would like to see built into Chrome, so what is Chrome missing for you?
Posted in Rants | 2 Comments »
May 21st, 2010 by admin | No Comments »
Why is it that my stupid “smart” phone doesn’t have the brains to dial my own area code when I ‘m outside Verizon’s coverage circle? I work in an office that somehow lies about 100 yards outside Verizon’s coverage, and whenever I try to call a number in my contacts list that I didn’t enter an area code for because it’s the same as the one I live in, my phone replies with a recorded message about dialing a one followed by blah blah blah? Shouldn’t phones now have the ability to know where they are, know that they’re not in a covered area, and then append the area code to any number that doesn’t have on in my contacts? I mean really, it’s only 2010, what should it take to get this right? I hate my phone and I hate cell phone companies. every time I run up against this obstacle first I curse, then I hang up, then I redial. This has gone on for longer than I can remember.
Moving on, today is the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man. Shit I feel old. I grew up on Pac-Man. Google acknowledged this by adding a sweet Pac-Man game to their generic home page so check out google.com (don’t use the personalized version) for an awesome JavaScript version of the game. Here’s a tip, hit “insert coin” twice to add ms. pac-man to the game and have two players clear the board.
Oh and in case you missed it, Google unveiled a sweet step forward in the web fonts arena with a simple way to use non-standard fonts in your site. Check out http://code.google.com/webfonts for the full run down and some examples. If you ask me, while this is cool and could be quite helpful, I still think that this whole web fonts thing is still too open ended. There are far too may way to try and get fonts to render properly in most browsers and all these solutions and workarounds just fee like they’re skirting the real issue which is being able to use any font on the web. The font foundries fear that they’ll lose money from designers and developers using fonts on sites and visitors being able to download them and then publish their own magazines with them without paying for them. The whole thing just feels kludgy and unnatural and that includes Google’s solution. There’s got to be a better way.
Posted in Rants, Uncategorized | No Comments »
May 20th, 2010 by admin | No Comments »
Sometime I’ll see an effect on a website and think nothing of it until I see it implemented on a few other sites in a similar way. Apparently my brain notices these things but it just doesn’t care the first time. It takes it a few viewings for it to wake up and actually take action. This was the case recently when I visited Slashdot. When you scroll down a comments page, a comments control bar will scroll up with the rest of the content until it hits the top of the page. When it does, instead of disappearing up off the top of the page with the rest of the content, it sticks to the top of the viewport while the rest of the page scrolls under it. I realized that I had also seen this effect on Google code and Stackoverflow, albeit in slightly different ways. There are potentially unlimited uses for this effect so I threw some jQuery code (not a plugin) together for this. Why not a plugin? Because it’s essentially two lines of code.
var stickerTop = parseInt($('#sticker').offset().top);
$(window).scroll(function()
{
$("#sticker").css((parseInt($(window).scrollTop())+parseInt($("#sticker").css('margin-top')) > stickerTop) ? {position:'fixed',top:'0px'} : {position:'relative'});
});
This snippet of code assumes that the block you want to make stick to the top of the browser window has the ID of “sticker”, but you can change it to whatever you like (and it doesn’t need to be a div). You could also expand the condition that checks the position of the window and the “stuck” element and apply a variety of other effects as well.
Here are a couple of basic demos. The first is just a bare bones example and the other uses a template from styleshout and applies the effect to the sidebar on the left. In my tests it works great in Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and IE.
Posted in JavaScript | No Comments »
