Yesterday, when using Gmail, I started to think about keyboard shortcuts. Specifically, I started to think about how keyboard shortcuts get routed within a modular JavaScript application architecture. If I have a module that can respond to the keyboard – but, that module is not supposed to “know” about the document at large – how does it listen for key-based events? I can think of two ways: 1) Either the application listens for keys and then directly invokes methods on encapsulated modules; or 2) the application listens for keys and then announces key events using an intermediary sandbox. While my gut tells me the former is more effective, I’ve never really used a sandbox bridge; as such, I thought I’d experiment with the latter.
Ben Nadel: Handling Keyboard Shortcuts Within Modular JavaScript Application Architecture
In this article, we’ll explore a scoring system for rating and comparing websites, we’ll visualize those ratings using infographics, and we’ll see what data and structure this method provides for reviewing websites.
Smashing Magazine: A Guide To Heuristic Website Reviews
It has been said that more of the world’s population has access to a cellphone than to a sanitary toilet. But of the planet’s estimated 5 billion cellphone users, a privileged minority have smartphones; a paltry few, iPhones. If you spend hours thumbing through pages of apps, scoffing at less-than-perfect software upgrades and grousing about screen resolution and pixel density, it’s easy to forget that the very concept of a mobile phone is a miracle. It’s a device that shrinks your day to day world into a single point, making you simultaneously accessible to and able to access nearly everyone you know, instantly and everywhere.
Gizmodo: The Most Popular Phone in the World
Great customer support is hard to come by and even harder to deliver. What you need is a customer support system made for the modern web that works with you to help deliver the best support possible to your customers.
Tender Support: Support your product: Knowledge Base, Helpdesk, Forums
When creating interfaces you often come to a point where you need to decide what your priorities are. The most obvious choice is to cater to the needs of the user. Unfortunately when doing online business sometimes this is not easy to achieve due to certain restrictions. It then becomes an economic choice.
To simplify the problem let’s say you’re designing an interface for a contact form. There are a lot of people involved in the problem and they all have their own issues they want resolved.
Outbreak: Messing up the interface
One of the most frequently asked questions in my Web usability course is “What screen resolution should we design for?” The full answer is a bit tricky, but the basic advice is clear.
Jakob Nielsen: Screen Resolution and Page Layout
In its current version, Google Accessible Search looks at a number of signals by examining the HTML markup found on a web page. It tends to favor pages that degrade gracefully–that is, pages with few visual distractions, and pages that are likely to render well with images turned off. Google Accessible Search is built on Google Co-op’s technology, which improves search results based on specialized interests.
Official Google Blog: Finding easy-to-read web content
An ajax loading gif generator, for creating those activity indicators
Ajaxload: Ajax loading gif generator