Web Development Archives - Page 4 of 7

A Brief History of the Complete Redesign of Google at #SXSW2012

March 11, 2012 By Jonathan Jeter 2 Comments

Sunday, March 11 at South by Southwest Interactive Conference, Austin, TX
Google Panel Consisting of Evelyn Kim (Visual Designer for Maps), Jon Wiley (Lead Designer for Google Search), Michael Leggett (Design Lead, Google Apps & Gmail), Nicholas Jitkoff (User Experience Designer for Chrome), Chris Wiggins (Google Creative Lab)

The Evolution of Google Design

“So did Google just hire a bunch of designers recently, or were they all being kept in a cage all this time?” @tylerball

The process of this redesign is told in two stories. There is the story that you know about that happened in 2011, but most people don’t know the story of the redesign in 2007. 6 designers set out to express the Google brand that was consistent across all properties. It was called Kanna (Icelandic for “to explore, to examine”). Trying to find the balance between form and function, but mainly design and engineering. Looked at over 100 brand attributes that were narrowed down to 4 clusters.

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High On Line: Applying Psychology to Web Design at #SXSW2012

March 11, 2012 By Jonathan Jeter Leave a Comment

Sunday, March 11 2012 at South by Southwest, Austin, TX
by Jason Hreha, Behavior Designer+UX Advisor, Applied Psychologist, www.persuasive.ly, Co-founder of Dopamine, UX Advisor @ 500 Startups

Research from the Stansford Persuasive Tech Lab

D – dopamine

Why do we need a UX Design / Motivational framework?

Design with Intent Deck – 101 Patterns for Influencing Behaviour Through Design – decks
Mental Notes – ways to bring psychology to web design.
Influence: The Psycology of Persuation
Gamification – instead of thinking in a step by step way, it becomes a conglomeration of incentives, but what’s the point?

Why do these tactics work? What are we changing?

Model was created by BJ Fogg (leader of the Stanford Pers Lab) – Behavior Model

What causes behavior? (What needs to come together in order for behavior to occur?

3 things need to coincide for behavior to occur

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Client-Side Templating in jQuery at South by Southwest Interactive #SXSW2012

March 11, 2012 By Jonathan Jeter Leave a Comment

Sunday, March 11, 2012 – South by Southwest Interactive, Austin, Texas
by Fritz Onion – Editor in Chief of Pluralsight

A Quick History of Client-Side Templating

Demo Link

JavaScript Micro-templating

In July 2008, Jon Resig posted a little, JavaScript micro-templating function.

jQuery Templates

In 2010, Boris Moore worked on a fork of John Resig‘s protoype, but in April 2011, jQuery Templates were put on hold.

Create the template inside of script tags and then inject it via the DOM wherever you want on the page.

JsRender and JsViews

by Boris Moore, carried ideas of jQuery Templates forward with the goal of separating into two components.

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JsRender – small fast pure string-based rendering with no DOM dependency
JsViews – takes DOM content rendered by JsRender and activates it to provide equivalent DOM integration features to jQuery Templates and data linking

Killer App Design with Javascript and HTML 5

March 11, 2012 By Jonathan Jeter 1 Comment

HTML5 and Complex Web Apps

Web 2.0 vs HTML5 apps

Web 2.0

Dynamic content
Database driven
Social applications
Stupid name
“The Internet is more than lame dancing genies and hit counters!”

HTML5 Apps

Interactive content
Real-time
Task-oriented
Cool logo
“You can have a desktop experience in your browser”
Not trying to replicate a desktop software experience.

HTML5 – New Markup (separating functionality and presentation in the DOM with data-* attributes)

Amazing JavaScript APIs

Application Architecture

Lots of tools available that will allow for a more robust application development process.

Moving state to the client
Wep app Kool-Aid: MVC/MVVM, pub/sub and the module pattern
Your application as an API

Don’t do it alone

Toolkits, precompilers, boilerplates, and more

For the enterprise-y among you

Testing, IDEs and other developer tools

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Coming Soon – The New Google +1 Button

March 7, 2012 By Jonathan Jeter Leave a Comment

The Google+ Developers group announced today that the next update to the +1 button is strictly a UI change, with no functionality differences. I like the look of the clicked button, after you have activated it by using the plus one functionality.

However, the +1 button itself, not clicked, seems a little too camouflaged to me. It blends in with the surrounding area and doesn’t yell “click me!” like a good “call to action” button should. We talk a lot about the difference between what good design looks like and good design that actually gets user interaction, so I’m sure the good folks developing the Google+ button have tested the new design and found that the new design outperforms the old. They wouldn’t just change things to keep changing things, would they?

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Be Real and Be Nice in Social Media

March 7, 2012 By Jonathan Jeter 1 Comment

It’s amazing how some days just have a theme. Today in my daily ritual of browsing my social spaces, the theme of being real, being helpful and being polite when participating in Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc. kept coming up over and over again.

First, I read a great article by Jonathan Morrow on Copyblogger, (which creates the Genesis Framework that I use on my blog) called “21 Warning Signs You’re Becoming a Social Media Snob” that gives great insight and a cool self-evaluation tool to see if you have become a “Social Media Snob”. I won’t divulge my score, but I think I’m doing okay, but it’s a good reminder that I can be doing better. My favorite part of the article is the solution, which is to show empathy and caring in your social interactions online.

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What’s the Point of Creating a Feed-Generated Online Newspaper?

March 5, 2012 By Jonathan Jeter Leave a Comment

Paper.li is an information aggregation site that let’s people create their own online newspapers from sources that they create or choose. Back in September I created my own online newspaper via the paper.li system and watched it for a few days, but then left it alone and forgot about it.

I revisited it today and really like the updates they’ve made to the system. I like the ability to embed the paper into your own site, which I’ve done with My Daily Web Thoughts on this blog. They have also created a Facebook tab app that allows you to create a tab on your fan page that also displays your “online newspaper”. I also like the bookmark feature that allows you to add items to your daily newspaper as you see them while browsing the Web. The main thing that I thought was missing before was an easy way to manually add content to each edition. The + Paper.li button fixes that issue.

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Google+ Updates Launched

February 27, 2012 By Jonathan Jeter Leave a Comment

As I mentioned in my post the other day, the Google+ Badge has gotten some tweaks. I think they’re great improvements that will help you increase your reach on Google+, as well as some good usability updates that just make sense.

I really like the new follow button in the Google+ site badge. It just makes sense to be able to put a site in your follow circle if you don’t want to decide which circle you want to add the person or site.

The new plus 1 button functionality sounded a lot better than it has actually proved out to be after the launch. The click on the +1 button is supposed to automatically trigger the share widget to appear. In practice, it seems like their is a brief hesitation before the share widget is triggered. In my experience, I personally navigate away from the button as soon as I’ve clicked it, so I would like to see the share widget open more quickly. It may be programmed to do that, but maybe server or bandwidth limitations make it a little less responsive.

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Google Plus Badge Gets Some Tweaks

February 22, 2012 By Jonathan Jeter Leave a Comment

In the Google+ Developers preview group, it was announced today that the Google+ badge is getting a couple of really good tweaks.

First, the “Add to Circles” button is going to become a follow button and when clicked, it will automatically add the account to your “following” circle. At that point, you can change circles or select a different circle, but it’s an easy one-click way to add a Google+ page to your circles.

Secondly, the sharing functionality is going to get a little easier. Currently, when you +1 something, you have to click twice to get the sharing dialogue to appear. This will now be the default functionality, which will make it much easier to share content on Google Plus. If you are a member of the Google developers preview group, you can already see this functionality in action.

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Pinterest IS Making Money… …Off of YOU!

February 13, 2012 By Jonathan Jeter Leave a Comment

I’ve been watching Pinterest with fascination because of the massive appeal it has for certain demographics. It’s really clever because it is a graphical bookmarking site billed a social online pinboard that allows you to “organize and share the things you love.” Everyone expects that a popular site like Pinterest should be making money, but noticeably absent from the interface are any advertising blocks or any other promotional spaces.

It makes sense, though considering the findings posted on Digital Trends that Pinterest is converting shared links on the site to affiliate links. This is not surprising, as it seems one of the most logical ways to convert the user-generated content on the site into monetizable traffic. However, the interesting thing is that they don’t disclose anywhere on their site or their blog that they are modifying the links that members are “pinning” to their “boards”. Looking through their terms, copyright notice and privacy policy, the standard items are in place, but nothing about modifying the content uploaded to the site to generate income via affiliate relationships. What I’m curious about is how this fits into the FTC guidelines for disclosing affiliate relationships. Maybe it only applies to bloggers and only applies to those who blog about items provided via affiliate relationships.

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