capcloud | Martin Polley

Rockstars?

I think this whole design rockstars argument is a bit daft. I think we need both—people who will blaze trails (rockstars) and others who will follow them (most everybody else).

Transitions and States

Wow! Buxton was right. The transitions are just as important as the states (if not more so).

As I play around with jQuery (+HTML + CSS, obviously) as a prototyping tool, I’m finding that I really need to play around with the details of the transitions to make it obvious what is happening (something that it is hard to do in my head, for me at least).

For example, in my prototype I have a thing where you can add new rows (like adding attachments in Gmail). But I’m constrained for vertical space—there’s only space for four rows. So I have set it up so that when there are more than four rows, this part of the screen gets a scroll bar.

Having a newly-added row simply appear works fine when you have unlimited space, but with scrolling it gets awkward. What happens if the new row is out of view? Well, we should automatically scroll so that this new item is visible. But this kind of sudden transition is a bit jarring and disorienting.

I found that animating the addition of the row and the automatic scrolling makes it much more clear what just happened, and where things have been moved to. (I must just stress that this is animation done sparingly and not for its own sake.)

What did I learn? That when you’re at the prototyping stage, you really need to roll your sleeves up and get your hands dirty to find out exactly how to best handle subtle transitions like this.

Software companies should hire more user experience designers and less technical writers.

That way, they would need less tech writers, because the products would explain themselves. And the products would be better to boot.

Shouldn’t it be the other way round?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to have floor 0 (ground floor) at the bottom instead of the top?

Flash Video vs HTML5 Video—An Experiment

I played the same YouTube video in Safari (on Mac OS X), first using YouTube’s HTML5 video player, then using their Flash player. This is what the CPU monitor looked like:

Feel free to draw your own conclusions :)

Sugru—Looking Good So Far

My Sugru arrived yesterday. So this morning I set about fashioning some new feet for my aging PowerBook.



I used the smallest sachet, 5 grams, but the feet only needed about 1 gram. What to do with the rest?

I had a little scout around and found something that has been annoying me for ages—on my bike, my daughter’s bike seat is not attached at the back (and there’s no obvious way to attach it). It’s not dangerous, just annoying. So…

iPhone and Nexus One

I’ve finally figured out why I like the iPhone better than the Nexus One. It’s because the iPhone is truly innovative, while the Nexus One is a me-too product.

Google is playing catch-up. They should be playing leapfrog.