Webdesigninformer.com

Adactio Go to the source

Ever since I launched Huffduffer , one of the features that really caught people’s attention was the sign up form . I have to admit, I didn’t really think it was that revolutionary an idea. All I was trying to do was make the sign-up process a little friendlier and if web standards have taught us anything, it’s that there’s nothing inherent in the presentation of any element, much less forms. So I made the form more conversational and less blocky and rigid. Well, it turns out that people love it. I’ve received bucketloads of Twitter messages and emails from people telling me how much they enjoyed the sign-up process. … Read the rest here

Hicksdesign Go to the source

The last thing I needed was more choice in apps for keeping a ‘Design Scrapbook’, but that’s what’s happened with Zootool . At first glance, it looked like just another FFFF ound , Ember or Img Spark , but it turns out it’s much more than that. The developer, Bastian, told me to think of it as more of a visual Delicious. Once I got into that mindset it made more sense. Zootool ‘lassos’ not only images, but documents (like PDF s), videos, and pages (not complete pages yet) and stores them in your ‘zoo’… Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

One of the problems of working in the knowledge economy is the constant need to keep abreast of current trends and thinking. This would be fine if you worked in a mature industry or one with a limited number of books, papers and conferences appearing each year. However in the knowledge economy of the web, more information is being published every day than could be consumed in a year. What’s more, that pace is increasing. The problem is exacerbated by a number of things. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

Tony recently remarked on Twitter : Readwriteweb write the most thoughtful intelligent pieces around, and it’s worryingly indicative of our culture that they aren’t read more I have my own, somewhat selfish, reason to praise this particular tech site. ReadWriteWeb’s lead writer, Marshall Kirkpatrick , is a big fan of Huffduffer . What an astute young man! He even made a screencast for Read Write Web . Huffduffer Screencast Seriously, I’m pleased as punch with this. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

I rolled out a new addition to the Huffduffer home page earlier this week. If you aren’t logged in, everything looks the same as before: under the heading Create a podcast of found sounds, there’s a short list giving the low-down on what you can do: Find links to audio files on the Web. Huffduff the links—add them to your podcast. Subscribe to podcasts of other found sounds. But if you are logged in, then a different list appears, this one showing the activity since you last logged in: How much has been huffduffed. How much huffduffing your collective has done… Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

Take a look at the line-up and schedule for UX London next May. It’s going to be fan-bloody-tastic. I’m particularly excited about seeing Scott McCloud . When Kai found out that I had never read Understanding Comics , he very kindly sent me a copy. Now I understand what all the fuss is about. It’s a superb book and extremely relevant to interaction design …hence my excitement about Scott McCloud’s appearance at UX London. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

When I added collectives to Huffduffer , I wanted to keep the new feature fairly discrete. I knew I would have to add an add/remove device to profiles but I also wanted that device to be unobtrusive. That’s why I settled on using a small + / - button. The action of adding someone to, or removing someone from a collective was a clear candidate for Hijax . … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

Huffduffer was launched thirteen months ago. I almost missed the one year anniversary but for an astute huffduffer who pointed it out . It’s been quite a year. Just over 2000 people signed up and huffduffed over five and a half thousand audio files . I’ve been tweaking the site fairly regularly—and blogging about it here —fiddling with forms , machine tags and sparklines . Today I launched the biggest update to the site so far… Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

A few months ago, Jakob Nielsen wrote about password . Specifically, he wrote about the standard practice of the contents of password fields being masked by default. In his typical black/white, on/off, right/wrong Boolean worldview, Father Jakob called for this practice to be abolished completely. Meanwhile, back in the real world, Apple take a more empathetic approach, acknowledging that there often very good reasons for masking passwords. But that doesn’t mean you can’t offer the user the option to disable password masking if they choose … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

I’ve already described how machine tags on Huffduffer trigger a number of third-party API calls. Tagging something with music:artist=… , book:author=… , film:title=… or any number of similar machine tags will fire off calls to places like Amazon , The New York Times , or Last.fm . … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

It’s common practice for sign-up forms to include duplicate fields for either password or email, where the user has to type the same thing twice. I deliberately avoided this on the Huffduffer sign-up form . Not long after Huffduffer launched, I was asked about this ommision on Get Satisfaction and I defended my position there, citing the audience demographic. I still think I made the right decision although, in retrospect, I’ve changed my position completely from when I said, I can see more value in a ‘confirm your password’ field than a ‘confirm your email address’ field. Thinking about it, getting a correct email address is more important. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

It’s common practice for sign-up forms to include duplicate fields for either password or email, where the user has to type the same thing twice. I deliberately avoided this on the Huffduffer sign-up form . Not long after Huffduffer launched, I was asked about this ommision on Get Satisfaction and I defended my position there, citing the audience demographic. I still think I made the right decision although, in retrospect, I’ve changed my position completely from when I said, I can see more value in a ‘confirm your password’ field than a ‘confirm your email address’ field. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

So, remember when I posted all those episodes of Simon Singh’s Five Numbers radio series on Pownce so that they’d have permanent URLs? Yeah, well, so much for that . Fortunately Brian had saved all the MP3s. I’ve posted them on S3 and huffduffed them all. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

So, remember when I posted all those episodes of Simon Singh’s Five Numbers radio series on Pownce so that they’d have permanent URLs? Yeah, well, so much for that . Fortunately Brian had saved all the MP3s. I’ve posted them on S3 and huffduffed them all. I can be fairly confident that Huffduffer won’t be going the way of Pownce, Magnolia, Geocities, and so many more . Anyway, if you want to listen to the fifteen episodes of the three radio series’ on mathematics, you can subscribe to the podcast at http://huffduffer.com/adactio/tags/five+numbers/rss . … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

Beer o’clock in Brighton begins shortly after work ends on a Friday evening. That’s when the geeks of Brighton unshackle themselves from their keyboards and monitors to congregate in a pub. If the weather is good, it’ll be a sunny pub . Last friday the Clearlefties descended on The Eagle where we were joined by Ribotians and others. Glenn showed up and we proceeded to geek out on our usual favourite topics; microformats and data portability. He had spent the day hacking on a Firefox plug-in. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

The newest episode of Radiolab has the highlights from one of their occasional live events. This one revolves around the deliberately contentious premise of television vs. radio. AV Smackdown … The Podcast on Huffduffer Seeing as Huffduffer is all about audio rather than video, you can probably guess that I’ve got a soft spot for radio. Not that I have anything against the moving image; it’s just that television, film and video demand more from your senses. Lend me your ears! and your eyes… Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

After I started rewarding machine tagging on Huffduffer with API calls to Amazon and Last.fm, people started using them quite a bit. But when it came to displaying tag clouds, I wasn’t treating machine tags any differently to other tags. Everything was being displayed in one big cloud . I decided it would be good to separate out machine tags and display them after displaying “regular” tags. That started me thinking about how best to display machine tags. One of the best machine tag visualisations I’ve seen so far is Paul Mison ’s Flickr machine tag browser , somewhat like the list view in OS X’s Finder… Read the rest here

Clagnut Go to the source

Back in January I was part of a double bill with Jon Tan , entitled Skillswap goes typographic . It went down really well so I thought I’d better tie it all together here. My talk was on “Facing up to Fonts” the blurb for which went as follows: Browser support for the typographical aspects of CSS is gradually increasing. Things are on the up. Richard will be trouncing the myth of web-safe fonts, demonstrating how to go beyond bold, detailing the technicalities of font embedding and exploring the commercial and ethical minefield therein. The introduction of font embedding in particular is a long-awaited step in the right direction… Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

I just got back from a geek event down the street: £5 App . I had fun talking about Huffduffer . You can download the slides or see them on Slideshare . I was all set to record the presentation using Audio Hijack but, while I remembered to click “hijack”, I stupidly forgot to press “record.” Sorry. The evening finished with a call for more entries to the 5K App competition. To spur us on, we were shown some pretty amazing lightweight demos. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

While I was in Nashville for the Voices That Matter conference , I sat down for an enjoyable little chat with Nikki McDonald. It began with a discussion of my uncanny resemblance to Severus Snape before moving on to more webby matters. I also had a great three-way chat with Christopher Schmitt and Steve Krug . Christopher has posted up a transcript of the conversation If you’re not completely sick of hearing me natter on and you are in Brighton on Tuesday evening , come along to £5 App where I’ll be babbling about Huffduffer . I know it clashes with the Flash Brighton screening of Sita Sings the Blues but you can watch that online anytime, right? Tagged with video speaking interview huffduffer £5app sussexdigital … Read the rest here