Web Info & Tutorials

Jesse Kuhnert, the Dojo and Tapestry commiter, must have had one too many UIs with split-panes on his desktop.

It drove him to write about why splitpane views suck..:

I’ve recently been involved in some discussions surrounding ixd issues and attempted to use Yahoo Mail and Google Mail as examples of bad/good interface design techniques. There was a lot of push back because there were no follow up details outlining why one was good and the other bad. A complete analysis of the two applications would take much longer and require more effort than a random blog posting so I decided to focus on one core annoyance I have with Yahoo Mail - its use of ye old “Split Pane” re-sizable control.

Jesse’s core peeves are:

• Sizing - The size of the view I care about is never right! When I’m browsing a list of emails I want as much real estate as possible to view them all, I don’t care about seeing any one particular email at that point. When I do select an email and the content within it doesn’t fit into my split view it’s annoying. I don’t care about the emails anymore at that point, I just want to read the email I’ve selected. In fact, I might go so far as to say it’s almost impossible for the view to ever be what I want in this scenario. By nature of the control the size of the view remains static until adjusted by the user, but when reading emails you really need it to change based on what step of reading them you are in. Arghh!
• Scrolling - I know I know. It sounds like a real whiny thing to complain about, but it is annoying. After selecting an email message I must now consciously think about the interface and move my mouse over to the appropriate area before I can actually scroll through the content - otherwise scrolling right there and then would move me up and down through all of my other email messages.
• Claustrophobia - I don’t know about you, but these split views tend to make me feel pretty constrained. All of the scrollbars appearing on the page really start to make me feel like nothing is the right size. Like maybe my monitor sucks and I should get a bigger one? I don’t know. The screen looks pretty large, how hard is it to fit everything on there without an all out assault on the senses from a million different UI controls all telling me the same thing - nothing fits!

Do you agree?

Mike Chambers and Christian Cantrell of Adobe had some fun with a video camera, and Mike interviewed Christian as he demoed a couple of applications that has has written using the Apollo platform.

The demo’s show a lot of integration between the world of Flash and HTML. First, Christian shows a little app that keeps track of your address-book and integrates with Google Maps. You can drag vCards directly onto the Google Map web interface, etc.

Then they show an Amazon item viewer. One version shows them browsing Amazon, and one click in that interface talks to an Apollo app.

We are having recreation watching Firebug’s meshwork fashion as we meet different sites, and sight where the application spends instance waiting.

Yesterday we talked most cheating the grouping by using CNAMES to intend around the sort of connections per patron limitation.

Today, Niels Leenheer blogged most making your pages alluviation faster by combine and pressure javascript and css files.

The key points from his investigating are:

• Combining the ordered of JavaScript files into one
• Compressing that resulting file
• Caching the shut enter to round (instead of pressure on the control for apiece request)

Niels free his combine.php playscript that does the impact for him.

There seems to be a uncolored enmity between:

“One bounteous shut enter to derogate connections and size”

and:

“Multiple files are beatific as they crapper be cached severally (a modify to enter A affects the whole compounded enter in the prototypal case), so ingest the CNAME gimmick to earmark binary downloads at once”

My sister-in-law was just asking me about editing ringtones, and then an hour later I get told about this free Ajax ringtone maker.

You can send it some audio, make quick edits (Flash/Ajax integration), and then create the new ringtone.

There are social features too. When you create the new tone, you choose how public you want it to be.