Category Archives: Interface Design

A Race Against Time Pickers

The Date Picker component is one of the most popular user interface components on the web today. Its operation is very simple: focus into a field (sometimes a click on a dedicated calendar button is required) intended to contain a specific date and an on-screen calendar will be shown next to the form field, allowing [...]
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If the Menu Fitts, We Must Acquit

One of the first things you’ll learn when diving into a self-taught course on usability is the hugely popular Fitts’s Law. In a nutshell, Fitts’s Law tries to predict the time needed to move to a “target area” (usually a link, menu, button, or form element) as a function of the distance to the element [...]
Also posted in Usability | Tagged , , , , , | 9 Comments

Trash that “Back to Top” Link

It would seem that perfection is attained not when no more can be added, but when no more can be removed. - Antoine de Saint Exupéry While most would argue that the principles espoused in the above quote might also be applied to the quote itself, it would serve us better to consider how we [...]
Also posted in JavaScript | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Double Whammy: OpenID and Microformats

Own your Identity had a great post today detailing a great feature on the signup form of the Get Satisfaction site. They rely on the fact that sites like Twitter and Flickr publish an hCard microformat for all of their users publicly on their website.
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Don’t Let the Door Hit You Onunload and Onbeforeunload

Many people attempt a last ditch effort to save page state in the browser by using the onunload or onbeforeunload events. This has been studied at great length by Patrick Hunlock, who uses the perhaps now common knowledge of using a Synchronous Ajax call to perform the page state save. Another use for the onbeforeunload [...]
Also posted in JavaScript, Web Browsers | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments

Rethinking JavaScript Grids and DataTables

In the world of front end engineering, one must consider the end-user of the interface first, and above all other things. The priorities should not start with development ease, nor external library preference. The priorities should start with the needs of the consumer of your end product. Evolution of your engineering skill is also a [...]
Also posted in JavaScript | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

ALARMd 2 Beta, with Google Calendar Integration

Take a look: ALARMd 2 Beta Update: added Metric and Unit Circle time formats. I know, some of you are reading this and thinking to yourself — genital herpes is more appealing than yet another online alarm clock. But to that I say, congratulations, that’s one of the new features in ALARMd 2! Why did [...]
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Wake up to YouTube on my Internet Alarm Clock

Update: Try the new ALARMd 2 Beta, with Google Calendar integration and offline Youtube caching. Did you take your contacts out last night and you can’t see the time on your alarm clock from all the way across the room? I’m here to calm your fears. Enter ALARMD, the Internet Alarm Clock. Wake up to [...]
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