Surf*Mind*Musings

I’ve adapted the about:me experimental extension to report on search behavior. About-me is described as:
A statistical analysis of the user’s history, average tab load, etc. Like Google Zeitgeist, but based on their Places database.
I blogged about mining the Places db (sqlite) for search experience metrics some time ago, and posted polished sql [...]

Designing richly interactive UI controls for the iPhone and the web is an interesting challenge and much more feasible now that touch events are exposed in Safari for javascript hackery. Check out some examples.
On the iphone, you don’t have mousemove. Not much sooner than I had inked this draft, I discovered TLRobinson’s library that ports [...]

There’s been a lot of good research on tag clouds lately — from usage evaluation (>33% users surveyed) at IA Summit, layout at WWW’07 to visual processing at Hypertext ‘08.
I’m a bit fan of tag clouds, yet sense there’s much more to be done. Marti Hearst’s recent work on tag clouds challenges their usefulness [...]

The Atlanta launch & download record shindig will be at Park Tavern in midtown, at the east corner of Piedmont park. Thanks to my employer, StomperNet and local startup Appcelerator for sponsoring refreshments.
It’s been a long time since the Mozilla 1.0 party in Boston, but I’m happy to say that the Mozilla manifesto animations [...]

One of the less appreciated features of the awesome Firebug extension it’s ability to edit HTML and CSS live.
I use this to do rapid prototyping, generate screen shots for bug reports, etc. in addition to the development tweak it til it’s right use case.
I did a quick screencast of doing a two state UI prototype [...]

I’ve very happy to see innovation in web search in any fashion. The challenges of simply getting at scale search done creates a barrier to entry for innovators that might be one of the reasons search has remained so static over a decade on the web, while other interactions evolved. Progress has been varied [...]

Amazon’s design team has a real challenge in front of them with a huge catalog size. They’ve worked with tab based designs for years, but have recently switched from a top to side nav bar. They describe the changes to users here.
They say just hover, pick, and click… Interesting that hover is regarded to be [...]

One of the features that caught my eye in the lead up to Leopard was “web clipping”. A new toolbar button in Safari allows you to grab a portion of a webpage and create a Dashboard widget. I’ve created a 30 second video demo (1mb .mp4) (stream at Blip.tv), as the implementation details [...]

I’m here at Adobe’s Atlanta “AIR Bus Tour” event — great show. Nice space (the fox theatre), generous concessions, and a nice starter kit of tech. I’m up and running with the lastest beta and dev tools. Very happy to see some of the talks using Aptana, an open source IDE, over Adobe’s [...]

Google’s new feed API inspired me to create a little Windows Live & Google mashup.  While the Google API lets you get posts for a specific feed, it doesn’t help you find feeds.
With the isfeed: operator over at MSN, I was able to find the top 10 feeds on a topic, then use Google’s API [...]

I’ve been on an extended vacation back east and took some time to get my javascript skills up to web 2.0 status, putting the cross browser toolkit MochiKit to it’s paces.
Check out the E-Commerce Transaction Funnel Explorer. It’s a little DHTML app that mimics an excel spreadsheet for modeling multi-step processes with a [...]

A javascript focused IDE. Bonus feature is direct FTP editing.
I’m in love.
Based on Eclipse, but that’s pretty irrelevant. I am working with Visual Web Developer Express but finding the direct FTP slow and the JS support not nearly so robust as Aptana — though maybe I just haven’t found how to use it.
Update: [...]

From the dhtml spotting, another good link on a related topic, a scrolling checkbox list and a general rant against scrolling select boxes, here here!
And from my Fitt’s Law says Tag Clouds are Good post:
» Small Multiples, a blog by Dmitry Nekrasovski » Blog Archive » Tag cloud usability guidelines / tagging folksonomy facets
I’m [...]

It’s been a long while since I posted a DHTML spotting. There was a time when this was an adventurous and rare thing. Fortunately, this is not so any longer, and we have a landscape of elegant, pedestrian, efficiency boosting, and captivating in-page dynamics on the web today.
This musing is brought to you [...]

I haven’t seen this basic truth described about tag clouds, aka weighted lists, though we have a nice blogdom exploration of the cognitive implications of folksonomies and plenty of contrasts with hierarchies. 
Tag clouds are an extremely rational UI design, trading off efficiency of access (font size) against frequency.  This optimizes user effort, independent of [...]

Watching Bill Gate’s latest channel 9 appearance, alas it’s not the gonzo Scoble, but a video with a bit more polish.  BillG hits one on the head, re: AJAX: “What the heck too you so long?”.
My first efforts at loading data ascyhronously for a smoother screen paint experience in 1999 shortly after innerHTML was released [...]

I started web publishing with Frontier, capitalizing on the verdant ecosystem of userTalk/object db modules in 97. Back from holiday travels, I’ve just caught up with the latest OPML Editor foo and have installed the wordpress and river of news “roots”. Nice to see signs of life in the Frontier platform.
The news river interface [...]

Micah spots a slightly aging blog-distributed discussion on the current status quo for over-achiever DHTMLers at Joel on Software - Friday, June 18, 2004.

Maybe not for all tasks, but I’ve successfully laid out a few sites in Freehand. Here’s a walkthrough: Macromedia - Developer Center : Sketching a Site Navigation Scheme in FreeHand - complete with export to Flash.