Danny-T.co.uk

Flash On The Beach – Day 1

Despite a hugely successful shindig at Aral’s there was a good turn-out for the morning key-note by Mike Downey and the Adobe crew. Good job too as it was a very interesting and informative keynote with some looks over the past year and a couple of sneak peaks at Flash 9 and the upcoming Apollo runtime.

The first session I went to was Craig Swan’s of Crash media, previously I had caught the last 10 minutes of his talk at OFFF in Barcelona so this was a good chance to fill in the blanks. He demonstrated some very inspirational projects and experiments pushing the boundaries of user interaction with devices plumbed into Flash through various inputs. I took away alot of ideas and thoughts about alternative uses and implemenations of Flash with non-keyboard input devices.

Next was Mike Chambers presenting on Apollo, a desktop runtime designed for leveraging rich internet applications development with desktop integration. This is hugely interesting to me, I’ll write another post on the details. Needless to say a hugely intriguing presentation.

After Mike I went to catch Aral’s “Memo to the CEO” where he explains some very good rationale behind the shocking project success rate (50-70% failure!) in the IT industry. He went on to promote ideas of a more Agile, user centric approach to project development that does away with large functional specifications, drawn out project timelines, big-bang impelmentations. Enthusiastically presented and some excellent ideals on approach.

The final session of the day was Adobe’s Mark Anders who presented the ins and outs of component design in Flex2. I had been thinking there hadn’t been much activity on the component front in the Flex community so thought this would be a useful and interesting presentation and it was. I think a lot of people left with plans of attack and ideas for their next Flex2 component.

Overall a quality first day, unfortunately I’m currently missing the morning session because of a client meeting but will be back for the afternoon.

Stand against “Fair Usage”

Niqui has posted something many people are getting more and more frustrated by lately, “Fair Usage”. This term is being overly abused and is a blatent form of misleading the public.

Whenever you read the term “Unlimited” be sure to check the small print, in this day and age Unlimited actually translates to Limited in advertising speak. Also feel free to kick up a stink with the customer service representative you discuss it with, it makes them feel awkward when questioned “then surely thats limited?” so they might feedback to their superiors and something MIGHT get done about it.

“Visual Studio .NET has detected that the specified Web Server is not running ASP.NET version 1.1. You will be unable to run ASP.NET Web applications or services.”

Every time I’ve tried to install VS.net 2003 I’ve had to deal with this error, the solution is out there on many other sites but thought I’d put it here for my own reference.

Often when trying to create a web project in VS.net you’ll get the error:

“Visual Studio .NET has detected that the specified Web Server is not running ASP.NET version 1.1. You will be unable to run ASP.NET Web applications or services.”

To resolve this all you need to do is open a command prompt (Start, Run, Type “cmd” enter) and enter the following:

%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\aspnet_regiis.exe -i

That should do it!

Intuition Vs Conditioning in Interface Design

Last month myself and Colin travelled up to London to attend the LFPUG and saw two excellent presentations from Rob Bateman and Tink.

During Rob’s presentation on Optimising visual interfaces for the human brain something was brought up that I hadn’t considered previously; the difference between “Intuition” and “Conditioning”. This wasn’t a major part of the presentation but something that got me thinking nonetheless.

Intuition, for the sake of this discussion, is similar to instinct, they are a form of common sense that perhaps cannot be associated to any specific learning experience.
Conditioning, is a more manufactured type of action that we may perform, we’ve been told to do it this way, we’ve been doing it like this for some time, so when we want to do something, we’ll try to do it this way.

The above are two very crude explanations, I have no psychological knowledge and so have drawn these explanations from the presentation last month and some brief further reading. Please feel free to offer any comments below, agreeing or otherwise.

Anyway, what has this got to do with interface design? Actually quite a lot I have realised. Usability is obviously a very important factor of interface design, the user has got to instantly feel comfortable with their environment and almost know where to look and what to click in order to achieve a desired action. Even if they have never before performed this action. When designing an interface, we have to make a concious decision on whether we feel it is appropriate to target a user’s intuition, conditioning or both or even if there is a distinction between the two.

This is perhaps best explained by example, of which there were several in Rob’s presentation which I am unashamedly going to borrow.

Here are two “OK” / “Cancel” dialogue prompts, one is for Mac one is for Windows. Despite aesthetics, the fundemental difference between the two is that for Mac the Cancel option is to the left, for Windows this is to the right. Aparently, the rationale for Mac putting their cancel button on the left and the OK button on the right is because it is synonomous with the Escape and Return keys on a keyboard. I would assume the Windows approach is based on the typical left to right reading and expected order of events, confirm or reject.

Another example is one I thought of whilst getting my mind in knots trying to get my head around this. If I were to launch a completely new program, with a save option, it would be perfectly reasonable for me to offer access to the save feature by way of a floppy disk icon. Why is this? Is a floppy disk icon the most intuitive approach? No it’s probably not, I’m sure many new and younger computer users wouldn’t even know what a floppy disk was (maybe most would at present but give it another few years), when was the last time you saved to a floppy disk? This is what I would consider conditioning, we’re used to doing it this way so we’ll continue to do so even if it might not be the most appropriate approach for new and future users.

I’m not sure there is a distinct line between intuition and conditioning. It almost seems as if they are both results of a way we get used to doing things only intuition is more towards being hard-wired as part of who we are as opposed to conditioning being something we are more recently used to doing. Thats not to say i think intuition is not affected by our development within our individual surroundings. For example, would someone who reads arabic, or other right to left language, expect to see the first option on the right, second on the left? Do operating systems even take this into consideration in translated versions? It’s all food for thought but definitely worth bearing in mind when thinking about your application audience. If you get a chance do check out the online video of Rob’s presentation as there is a lot more interesting and useful information about much more than just intuition.

Security Issue in Firefox AND IE6/7

A security vulnerability has been identified in major web browsers Internet Explorer and FireFox. This vulnerability exists through websites that allow user generated HTML content and exploiting the browsers’ remember password functionality. More info about the browser vulnerability.

Flash Speed Test

Cool site for testing connection speed with a flash UI:
www.speedtest.net

My Results (home)

New Project: The Mini

I’ve not been posting much lately as I’ve set myself a new project for my spare time that for once doesn’t involve me being sat in front of a computer screen. Last Saturday I picked up my old 1992 Mini Cooper from a friend’s place where I had been storing it for two years.

It’s certainly not going to pass any MOT any time soon but I intend to get her started and running again and eventually get her road legal again.

Here’s some pics:
The car:

The Back:

The Engine (needs a bit of a clean up!):

The Interior

The Rust (ahem…)

The first plan is to get the engine started which hasn’t ran for well over two years. Once that milestone’s been achieved I’ll be cleaning her up alot and then getting to work on the bodywork.

A little off topic from my usual posts but as it’s been taking up alot of my time lately thought I’d post something.

Shout about GOOD service

I recently involved myself in the sharing of frustrations about shocking customer service from banks and telecoms providers in the UK with Aral.

Today I had some troubles with one of our customer’s emails apparently not being received, we use MDaemon mail server. I hit a brick wall and called the guys at ZenSoftware who we purchased the software through… in fact I called them three times and emailed them once. Every time they told me exactly what I needed to know. The one time I called and couldn’t get through they returned my call within 10 minutes and my email was also responded to almost immediately.

I figure people don’t tend to shout about good customer service so have decided to start mentioning positive experiences as well as bad.

Flash Player 9 Beta updated

Guy Watson has some details on an update just made to the beta version of the coming Flash Player 9.

Read about the Flash Player 9 Beta Update

Cross Browser Testing with BrowserCam.com

Any decent web designer nowadays understands the value of cross browser and cross platform compatability. You can put a serious dent in your site traffic by only making it available to say, just Internet Explorer. Unfortunately the luxury of having every browser on every platform isn’t something alot of agencies have the time or money to setup.

www.browsercam.com is a manged service providing access to every type of platform/browser combination and any combination they don’t have they can setup for you. They offer two main services, screen capture and remote access.

The screen capture lets you select the OS (type and version), browser, screen res and whether flash is installed or not, you then enter a url of your site you wish to test and it will fire off and take a screen grab from each of the chosen setups and save it as an image file for you to browse. A very quick way of checking a page in alot of different setups quickly. You can also set it to crawl hyperlinks and grab child pages.

Remote access does exactly what it says on the tin. Using the excellent VNC viewer you can have remote access to an actual machine to use to check how your site works on various platforms.

The pricing is reasonable and you can sign up for 24 hour, monthly, three monthly or annual access to either or both services. I have tried both (screen grab offers a free 24 hour trial and unlimited remote access for 24 hours is just $19.99) and the service works well. There was one minor usability issue I discovered (which I emailed about and had a quick response) but overall this is an excellent service I will be using again. I have access to a number of platforms in our office, but nothing compared to this. The convenience of this service which I can use from one machine is too good not to use.