Archive for the ‘Design’ Category
Friday, October 28th, 2005
Thank you, oh thank you! To be quite honest, this is something that has struck me for quite some time and I’m gladly not nuts and another (obviously, VERY smart) FileMaker developer named Mikhail Edoshin has blogged about it.
Nearly as long as FileMaker developers have been adamant on establishing and using naming conventions, I’ve been equally as adamant on NOT using them. That is, I absolutely hate naming a field something like “kz_calcMyTotalLinkSum”. I understand why developers would want to do such things, but I increasingly find that given the fact that developers can offer only limited protection from errors and can only respond to those errors within a set of constraints (read: bland error dialogs or field validation warnings), when the user becomes aware of some of the internal workings of a solution, that the developer intended to keep hidden, clarity and communication breakdown quickly.
Because of the possibility of unforeseen errors, I keep my field names simple and clear e.g. “Sum”, “Daily Total”, etc. This works most especially given that I can let users have greater control over sorting and exporting on certain layouts because the fields they see are clearly described and easily understood. (This is a more recent development because of FileMaker 8’s control of only displaying fields on a layout rather than ALL the fields in the table). Mikhail articulates my frustration far better and I encourage you to go read his post, perhaps you’ll see the light!
Posted in Design, FileMaker, General, Software | 1 Comment »
Thursday, October 20th, 2005
I don’t visit or necessarily endorse Think Geek, but the shirt that read:
SELECT * FROM users WHERE clue > 0
Zero rows were returned!
…put a smile on my face. And I don’t even really use SQL!
Posted in Design, General | No Comments »
Thursday, October 20th, 2005
I’ve always liked tooltips, the ingenious little popups that fade in and out of existence when users place their mouse cursor over certain hotspots on the screen. Generally, they give you more information about a link or describe the purpose of an obscure icon. And recently, in reading an interview with
Shaun Inman (of
Mint-fame) in the free
Treehouse PDF, I noted that the beta-testers for his product Mint noted that data should not be presented to the users in the form of tooltips. I can understand this point of view but then again, tooltips can be an invaluable resource in the GUI toolbox for saving space, so long as they are not used exclusively for delivering the information they highlight.
I’m developing the next version of my bread-and-butter FileMaker solution (tooltip image above) and I’ve implemented a tooltip feature that provides deeper insight into real-time statistics. I like it and it works well. I think my users will like it as much as I have so far and response has been positive thus far.
Along comes Apple with their new digital photo workflow app Aperture (which rocks btw, but more on that in a subsequent post) and there in Apple’s own nifty new app is the feature that customizable tooltips instantly display EXIF and meta data for the image currently being viewed - see http://www.apple.com/aperture/quicktours/ for more info.
Thus my question comes back to how to use tooltips well? One could simply put icons and have the tooltips offer the descriptive purpose of the button, but given that a lot of processing ability is available to FileMaker developers for tooltips, using the calculation engine, it’s possible we are missing a golden opportunity by not exploring the larger options possible with customizable tooltips. How’s that for run-on sentences! I’m also wondering if these tooltips translate when a database is web-published i.e. if FileMaker will automatically translate them into HTML TITLE attributes, ALT attributes, or some JavaScript blend of code?
What are some of your thoughts on the new tooltips feature available to FileMaker users?
Posted in Design, FileMaker, General, Software | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, October 18th, 2005
With all of the bubblegum for our minds that exist at every turn, the well articulated thought is always refreshing. With the cinematic monuments of Star Wars, The Matrix, Lord Of The Rings, and others behind us, I found myself struck by the below quote in a review of Serenity. It clearly explains why we loved the original Star Wars and why the newer ones didn’t have the proverbial oomph that everyone wanted and expected (The Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions delivered and failed in many respects as well).
From Orson Scott Card:
Because for me, a great film — sci-fi or otherwise — comes down to relationships and moral decisions. How people are with each other, how they build communities, what they sacrifice for the sake of others, what they mean when they think of a decision as right vs. wrong.
Yeah, even comedies. Even romantic comedies — it’s those moral decisions.
Wow, that sounds so heavy. But great film is heavy — out of sight, underneath everything, where you don’t have to be slapped in the face by it. On the surface, it can be exciting, funny, cool, scary, horrifying — all those things that mean “entertainment” to us.
Underneath it all, though, it has to mean something. And the meaning that matters is invariably about moral decisions people make. Motives. Relationships. Community. If those don’t work, then you can gloss up the surface all you want, we’ll know we’ve just been fed smoke. Might smell great but we’re still hungry.
Posted in Design, Entertainment, General | No Comments »
Sunday, October 9th, 2005
I hate using foul or derogatory language in this part of the site, or any part for that matter, but Palm Inc or Palm Source or Palmijiggy or whatever or whomever they are called right now, have for the longest time made me look with envy at the little Compaq iPaqs or Dell PDAs that seem so more inherently full featured relative to Palm PDAs. I never thought I would ever say the words, but I used to have Dell PDA envy.
Palm, after restructuring, and selling their limbs to science, and rebranding and everything else you can think seems to be in panic mode. They’re losing market share to Microsoft and Intel-based PDAs, and it’s only an uphill battle from their position. After too long, the Tungsten TX seems to be making its way to the front of Palm’s line and showing off some long-anticipated features such as Wi-Fi compatability, Bluetooth 1.1, a schweet color screen, 128MB of memory, a 312MHz processor, and an SDIO expansion card slot. I’m impressed but I’m not WOWed, and I think I have to be WOWed in order to continue considering Palm a viable contender before they just fall to pieces and die and we’re all left with our Newton wannabes + 10 years or so. They should update the cheesy Palm Desktop software to be more full featured as well and less OS 8-ish. Nuff said.
Read more here…
Posted in Design, General | No Comments »
Thursday, October 6th, 2005
Check out ParticleTree, which is boasting a new PDF web development magazine entitled “treehouse”
An interview with Jason Santa Maria had him speak the following:
Some of the best design goes unnoticed, because good design just gets out of the way. It shouldn’t obstruct the communication taking place.
That’s what it’s all about. If you’re interested, check out the magazine and the site.
Posted in Blogging, Design, General, WWW | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 28th, 2005
The future is coming, the question is really what will it be and where will we end up? I’m absolutely fascinated by the progress on Wordpress, the community that has sprouted up around it, its proliferation of web standards, and the future of web apps. Wordpress isn’t the root of things like AJAX, CSS, and more but it is certainly a great application of love, ingenuity, and idealism to sprout out of the open-source web.
I recently acquired an invite to host a blog at Wordpress.com and I’m still wondering what power this email/”golden ticket” holds.
This is all basically just web philosophizing which doesn’t do much of anyone any good sometimes. I’m equally as curious to see the direction K2 is heading and where it inevitably takes the Wordpress community. Certainly, the time and effort that Michael & Chris are putting in shall prove helpful in stretching the Wordpress design muscles at The Labs. And thus, I explain why the capricious fluttering of default themes for the SWL blog, between the home-brewed Elvgren and the evolving K2.
Posted in Blogging, Design, General, Software, WWW, Wordpress | 2 Comments »
Monday, September 26th, 2005
FileMaker Inc announced the release of version 8 of FileMaker Server, inline with the recent upgrade of the FileMaker product line. What I’m most interested to learn of is how this performs on multi-processor systems relative to single processor systems and if we can theoretically setup a RAID of Mac Minis to be multi-processor data-processing workhorses.
You can read more about it here
Posted in Design, FileMaker, General | 3 Comments »
Saturday, September 24th, 2005
This technique isn’t a lifesaver, but it could be. People have been asking and I will be showing have already shown it to the NY FileMaker Pro User Group, so here it comes in a nutshell for all the other users and developers:
It’s a global field in the header part of a layout, and it performs a scripted search when the user presses Enter or exits the field.
Wow!
Huh?
(more…)
Posted in Design, FileMaker, General, Noteworthy | 28 Comments »
Thursday, September 22nd, 2005
Echoing the rebirth of thought in web design, I read (along with much of the rest of the design blogosphere apparently) an interesting if somewhat controversial postulate in web design: “Embrace the scroll”
A Brief History
For those not privy to the discussion, after the initial revolution in web design when pages/sites went from LOOOOOOONG pages of default font/Times text on a gray background to intricate and fairly short delicate table-based layouts with complicated grids of sliced images, the web-design gold standard had changed significantly. This was helped in no small part by companies like Studio Archetype, founded and lead by Clement Mok (which was then gobbled up by Sapient) who specialized and revolutionized the web with terse, tight,and intricate designs (read more about him here
or see examples 1, 2, 3). Preaching the same discourse was Roger Black, now at Danilo Black despite the fact his designs step beyond minimalist to seemingly near nonfunctionality (see DaniloBlack.com to see just what I’m talking about.) His book Web Sites that Work
is an interesting and provacative read, and he singularly points at an example of a long homepage of CNN.com as readable only by “mad dogs and Englishman”. Obviously the advancement of the web, coupled with browser enhacements, CSS, the stylistic tendency of blogs, and the general large quantity of information have lead to a resurgence/Renaissance in the “It’s Okay If We Scroll” style of web design.
In My Humble Opinion
… both philosophies are correct. After all, scrolling has become one of, if not the premier, and most commonplace accepted design standards. A grandma who just figured out how to look at pics of her spoiled grand kids in the bathtub knows how to scroll more than she knows what her AOL software/browser is actually connecting to. Scrolling is in and it isn’t going anywhere for the time being. But dammit, leave it some overkill-tendancied and tasteless designers to over exploit it and have us downloading 12,980,675 pixel-tall web pages. There’s a happy medium, even though it’s a gray area, that designers should respect. People don’t mind scrolling, but keep it within reason.
Having said that, read through some of the buzz on the web. I was drawn into the discussion at Dan Cederholm’s site and his own home is a perfect example of tastefully limiting just how much a user needs to scroll - his post on scolling can be found here
Some more worth reading:
http://designforcommunity.com/essay6.html
http://www.powazek.com/2005/09/000537.html
http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/footers_are_the_new_sidebars.php
Posted in Design, Elvgren, General, Taft, WWW, Wordpress | 8 Comments »
