behind the design » Neat Ideas

Making Web Searches More Fun

Kenric — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 17:22:33 +0000

The Google Wonder Wheel is an expansion to the Google search that I heard of recently that allows searches to have a different user interface that automatically suggests multiple related searches and displays them in a kind of chart form. You really have to try it out to understand. All you have to do is run a Google search. Then, on the page that gives the search results, under the search bar, choose “Show Options”. In the options, select “Wonder Wheel”, and presto, you have the Google Wonder Wheel at your command. The results of each search are displayed to the right of the wheel.

You can see it in action here with a search of the people at the U.P. Web Maestro.

You can also use the same feature with Google Image Swirl. Check it out here.

Backing Up Your Google Data May Soon Be Easier

Kenric — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:58:21 +0000

Hopefully this story will become more common in the near future with online services besides Google. From webmonkey.com comes a story about letting users have free reign over their own data, an approach that would make sense to most people, but not always companies. The article “Pack Up Your Data and Leave Whenever You Want, It’s the New Rule of the Cloud” mentions that Google has put together a team of engineers called The Data Liberation Front which is “an initiative within the company to ensure every one of its products has a clear, easy option for users to export their data in bulk and take their business elsewhere.” This initiative wishes to enable users to, for example, take all of their Gmail data – all the chats, emails, contacts, photos, attachments, everything – and download it in one nice archive file. This would be useful for if they wanted to move to another email service or if they just like to backup your files to their own computer.

Some of the thinking behind this is that the less a company gets in the way of the consumer as far as what they need, the more they will appreciate the company and give it business. Besides, it’s the consumer’s data, why not let them have it? As Brian Fitzpatrick, lead of this project said “…if you’re using a Google product now and you decide to go somewhere else, the easier we make it to leave and take your data with you, the more likely you are to come back and use something we come out with in the future.” A major problem they have remaining, though, is how to make it easy to download large amounts of data over networks whose speeds don’t match the ever increasing storage sizes for online services, an ever increasing problem as people are obtaining more and more software products online.

It’s Curtains! (Disguise long image load times with some javascript and CSS that pretends to be Flash.)

Nathan Lyle — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 03:34:58 +0000

If there’s no way around a few large images in your design, but you don’t want the page to load piecemeal, here’s a way to cover them up while they’re loading, with a familiar looking “flash” style curtain. Basically, what this does is use Javascript to cover the page with a styled DIV (the curtain) that covers the loading page elements. Once the page is loaded, Javascript then fades the covering layer to reveal the fully loaded page.

The curtain contains two things: a solid background color and an animated non-repeating gif which gives it the preloader look. Because Javascript is used to both close and open the curtain, without Javascript enabled or available it’s bypassed entirely letting it degrade gracefully.

To try this out, first include the following onload code in your page’s BODY element:

Then, immediately after the BODY element in your HTML paste the following code. You can change the background color and the image if you like.

If you’d like, you can see a working example at upwebmaestro.com/curtain.

Of course, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still try to keep image sizes down. No matter how cool your animated “loading” image is, people won’t wait forever. If you need some help creating an animated image, check out www.ajaxload.info.

Internet Explorer 6: The Superior Browser.

Kenric — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 05:54:15 +0000

Well, according to this site anyway.

SaveIE6.com was put together by the uptime monitoring service, Pingdom, as an April Fools prank. SaveIE6.com has these goals: 1. Get everyone to use Internet Explorer 6, 2. Get IE6 ported to more platforms, 3. Get the W3C standard changed to fit IE6. That’s hilarious. There’s even a petition to sign on the site with quotes from people mentioning how IE6 has changed their life.

To those who don’t get the joke, IE6 is a web browser that is a web designer’s constant nightmare. It doesn’t display code correctly, it doesn’t adhere to web standards, and there are security issues. Web designers will make pages that work fine in all the other browsers, but when tested with IE6, they don’t work. There is all kinds of hate out there for IE6, some of it very funny, like the treehouse illustration above. You may be asking, why are people just whining about this problem and doing nothing about it. Well, it’s a difficult problem to solve. The current global market share for IE6 is around 15 to 25 percent. That is a large number of people using an outdated browser, so web designers can’t ignore them. Many people bought a computer with IE6 and aren’t computer savy enough to update the browser. Some use computers in institutions that restrict computer updates. Others probably don’t see any need to update. Why fix what isn’t broken, anyway? If pages don’t display correctly, it’s not the browser’s fault to these users, it’s that website’s fault.

IE6 Update

There are a few ways to get people to upgrade. One is a little too sneaky in my opinion. IE6 Update disguises as the yellow drop down Internet Explorer information bar when it detects people are using IE6. It offers users a link to upgrade to the latest version of Internet Explorer. All you have to do is download the code from the website and put it in whatever page you want the bar to display on.

I don’t like the idea of tricking users into upgrading, so I prefer Pushup which urges users to upgrade to the latest version of whatever major browser they are using (Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox or Opera) a little more nicely. It accomplishes this by displaying a yellow update button that sits in the upper right corner of the browser window for a certain amount of time and then fades away. Once again, you just download the code and put it in your pages. Very classy because it is subtle, and doesn’t annoy too easily, in my opinion.

It’s a video! It’s a website?

Kenric — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 14:37:54 +0000

It’s both! It’s a website in a video…..in a website. And it isn’t accomplished using frames.