Posts Tagged conventions

Posted on Programming

An image splits; time lacks distinctinction

A man named Shaun E. Kiernan asks if I know of any programs purposed toward splitting PNG files. Barring image editors, I do not.

Saying no to people is not something I do well. I offer to make him one. Development time should be brief.

I do so. It is so.

I rebel against the common over-use of text fields. I do not worry about certain conditions. If an image cannot be evenly divided, it will try for pixel fractions. This is an obvious mistake, but the fault is theirs.

I implement tarring, for increased ease-of-use. I commandeer and massage code from Bradicon. It is done in under an hour.

He laments its interface, though it seems functional. He claims it suits his need.

I spend some more time on the user interface. This is as far as I see it going.

It is a program that splits an image, and split images is what it does.

 

Posted on Business

When Google is not available, I ask Karl

I don’t know if you’ve ever used a web browser before, but a common UI convention is to display a box at the top of the window, into which you type an address (or, URL). It lets the browser know what you want to retrieve, and soon you are browsing away like a professional.

With certain websites, Chrome asks if I’d like to preform a website-specific search using a query typed directly into his very own address bar — something I find very cool and also reasonably useful.

Firefox, too, but who cares about him?
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Posted on Uncategorised

Sometimes people do interesting things!

Facebook. The other day, Jeff and I noticed their footer bar – let’s call it the presence bar, since that is how they’ve identified the div – behaves differently with different browsers!

In Safari, Opera, and Chrome it works normally. You click a link, the page reloads, and the presence bar opens to where you’d left it.

In IE (6 and 7), as well as in Firefox, not so much. The links only alter the part of the URL succeeding the hash mark. The page never reloads.
New content is loaded via an invisible iframe. On completion, the data is extracted from the iframe and inserted into the main section of the page – which doesn’t include the presence bar.

Facebook can use JS to read the section of the URL after the # and load the appropriate page, which allows pasted URLs and bookmarks to work, as well as the back and forward buttons.
If you inspect their HTML, you will notice that the links’ destinations are identical for either set. They probably use Javascript to hijack clicks via eventlisteners.

I have no idea why they’ve decided facebook should behave differently based on browser. Maybe they ran into some sort of problem? Ideas?

I prefer the first approach, but they could have done much worse with the second. They’ve made sure it preserves usage assumptions common to web applications, and degrades gracefully.

 

Posted on Business

consistency in branding

As you probably know, I designed the logo for Aquaflora Nurseries. In many ways, it has changed a lot from my original submission. Aquaflora very much wanted to use Arial Rounded MT Bold in their logo, which was not at all the fontograph I’d chosen. I switched it to VAG Rounded Std, and no one ever has to know.

Turns out they liked the change anyway, so that was a bonus.
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Posted on Programming

Magically managing menus

Hey, so, I’m going to detail my method for making menus. I’ll try as well to explain the reasons behind the choices I make. If you have any questions, let me know and I’ll try to fabricate a plausible answer.

Two popular menu types are drop down menus, and your basic expanding lists. But good news, the HTML we use for both is the same! Why? Because they’re both menus! They may look different, but in essence they’re nothing but a nested list of links. And in my opinion, we should do our best to use HTML to describe the data we’re presenting.

One big bonus is that if we take out the CSS, the website still usable. We can also easily provide alternate stylesheets for things like mobile phones, and pages are easy to navigate from text-based browsers. Most importantly, the HTML is short, clear, and easily readable.

Which is why I’m going to use nested lists. The styling will be done with CSS, and some event handling with Javascript (I’ll use JQuery because it’s nice, but don’t feel tied to it).

I’ve prepared a page complete with code quotes and comments:

I was too lazy to style it. Also, the magic was a trick. There was no magic. I’m sorry.

Your friend,
Brad