Archive for July 2008
Get the user so excited about the site that they hardly notice the signup process
While researching OAuth, I came across this gold about OpenID (not to be confused with OAuth): Read the rest of this entry »
Yahoo-epic-usability-fail
This is a good example of why I moved from Flickr to Smugmug. Read the rest of this entry »
Screen Resolutions Again
I hate to drill a topic into the ground, but one more little thing on screen resolutions.
I’d forgotten that I’d installed the Woopra for stats on Jetfar.
It has a desktop interface that provides a very impressive real time view of who’s on your web site at any moment in time, including a very bondesque world domination full screen view.
Using the lo-fi web based interface you still get detailed real time statistics, including this chart of screen resolutions for unique visitors:
Note in 11th position, we have 320×396. Which, at ~1%, is almost on par with 800×600.
Given that the iPhone 3G only came out in the last week its going to be interesting to watch how this trends over time.
BigTable and Why it Changes Everything
Background
For the last couple of weeks I’ve been playing with Google App Engine.
In case you’ve been living in a cave for the last month; App Engine is a mostly complete, sandboxed, Python 2.5 environment with a WSGI web server and a very interesting Datastore API. Read the rest of this entry »
What browser window size should we develop for?
Today I learned something about browser window size.
Remember the days when we developed for 640×480 and optimised for 800×600. Well those days are gone… or are they?
Screen resolutions have exploded in recent years with 1680×1050 now not uncommon. My Dell laptop three years ago had a 1900×1280 resolution. The twin displays in my cubicle are each 1280×1024. But I’m a geek who makes web sites, so I’m not typical, right?
A similarly skewed view of the world can be obtained from W3 Schools who publish browser statistics and trends derived from their own log files. Whilst the percentages they provide are perhaps skewed towards web professionals, the trends are useful, although unremarkable.
Behold, Liquid Fold. Liquid Fold is a cool little app-engine project built by Simon Willison (of Django) and Natalie Downe.
It provides a JavaScript bug that you can include in your web pages to record the actual viewport size of your unique visitors as opposed to the less useful screen resolution.
Most interestingly, they are sharing their global stats which offer some useful insights… 780 pixels wide anybody?