3 Stations East

Webvisions: Day Two

nobody@vox.com(Paul) — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 12:27:54 -0500

On Friday I attended:

Building Better HTML Emails - Mark Wyner;
About Interface: Designing for Lifestyle - Kelly Goto;
Unleashing CSS: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love WinIE7 - Christopher Schmitt;
Keynote: The Naked Interface - Luke Williams;
Social Metadata and the Relevance Revolution - Gene Smith;
Keynote: The Dawning of the Age of Experience - Jared Spool

Building Better HTML Emails

Easily the most info-packed session I attended, the focus here wasn't what I thought it would be ("Everyone hates them, don't do it"). Instead Mark covered the topic from marketing and usability angles, ultimately making me feel good about HTML emails. He also outlined the CAN-SPAM Act, whose details I never knew.

Mark spent a solid half of his presentation going over the nuts and bolts for major mail clients, though. For instance, I learned that Yahoo! Mail actually changes your HTML tags - body becomes xbody - and in general, ensuring a consistent message is difficult. It's more difficult to test things. Also, Eudora on the Mac (hello, 7 people who use it) is apparently the worst.

He also stressed the idea of "styling" plain text emails - don't treat those folks like second class citizens.

Mark noted that designers should target the "CSS on, images off" state of mail clients. Make your stuff look good without images, in other words - good advice for emails and the web.

About Interface: Designing for Lifestyle

Definitely not what I expected. This was on the mobile track, though, so the focus was on mobile devices. The big takeway here was to consider the emotional experience in the interface. An interface must be usable, yes, but it should be emotional, useful, meet your needs, and integrate into your life. This was also the 284th speech that referenced how good iPod/iTunes are.

Unleashing CSS: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love WinIE7

The only disappointing session, I left this after 20 minutes. Christopher didn't have his A-game when it came to speaking and had some technical issues (mostly with Virtual PC on the Mac.) I expected a really nice, humor-filled (given the title) look at migrating from supporting IE5/6 to IE7. Instead I got the info I wanted and a lengthy howto on making transparent PNGs work in IE5/6. Sorry, I don't care.

Here's the good info from the speech, though:

IE7 is a security update, not really a standards one;
CSS3 selectors, pseudo-classes, and text are nowhere to be found;
text-shadow is not supported;
multiple backgrounds on the same element are not supported;
text columns are not supported (this sucks);
auto-content generation (:before, :after) are not supported;
PNG24 w/alpha transparency is supported (huzzah);
:hover on block elements is supported;
CSS2 selectors are largely implemented (about damn time).

That's really all you need to know.

The Naked Interface

Fascinating keynote from Luke Williams of frog design. Came in about 15 minutes or so late, but picked up some great conceptual notions here. Work with what your users/visitors/peeps know from growing up. For instance, if there's a wine bottle and somehow the entire bottle slices at a 45 degree angle with no liquid spilling, a clean break, etc. - that strikes the brain as weird and nonsensical and can't be trusted.

Social Metadata

Mildly interesting session. Takeaway: use the wisdom of crowds to solve IA problems. Work with tools such as moderation to suss out who is "good" and who is "bad" in your community.

Dawning of the Age of Experience

Great, great, great, great. Great. Jared Spool rocked with this keynote, mostly focusing on (duh) experience and what it encompasses. As "experience designers" one has to have a ton of talents from many disciplines, and that's hard.

Technical issues can affect one's experience. One example was his using an airline site to book a flight, and the site referenced totally incorrect airports. This made him stumble. In this case, it was a database issue that was fouling things up - so pay attention to the low-level stuff.

It would be great to mimic the buzz/evangelism around iPod (surprise!) and Netflix. Netflix basically bested Blockbuster and Wal-Mart at a new game, and the latter two never recovered. Netflix did it with a small team and no phone/in-person customer service and obviously no stores. Harnessing that kind of speed/agility and coupling it with great service worked well for them.

Ultimately we need to go beyond just designing interfaces and think about the entire experience, top to bottom. That touches so many departments... but if it's executed well, we'll have customers who are evangelists, too.

Epilogue

These have been brief synopses from my notes and lack of notes, from the conference. Expect some deeper posts on these topics starting next week or so.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Shot Down!

nobody@vox.com(Paul) — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 07:17:17 -0500

Yeah, remember that lone issue with Cyberduck? The renaming files thing? The one I submitted a ticket about?

Shot down!

...but... but I like it.

Now, knowing it might not be incorporated is honestly making me reconsider my use of Cyberduck. Yes, after I wrote a long entry about its praises.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Dogs to Ducks

nobody@vox.com(Paul) — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 20:55:34 -0500

Fetch, Cyberduck

Update: Be sure to read this entry too, which is making me reconsider my use of Cyberduck.

When you work on web sites, there are a few tools you get to become buddy-buddy with. Your text editor. Your photo editor. Your browsers. Your FTP program.

Of course, your FTP program. Where would you be without it? You'd be up a creek without a paddle, that's where you'd be!

When I switched to the Mac six years ago, I first used InterArchy. It worked, but not too pleasantly for my tastes. I then switched to Fetch, whose website looks the same as it did in 2000. Fetch did everything I needed it to do, and did it without complaint. In time I became a beta tester for the 5.0 release and thought it was a solid improvement.

But no relationship is without its idiosyncracies, and the little Fetch dog occasionally made me growl. Like, for instance, when I was editing a file on the server with TextWrangler. Let's say I edit a file, and in the Fetch window navigate to another folder. I then go do something (gee, upload a file?) and head back to TextWrangler. I hit save. But wait! I navigated to another folder, right? Fetch took care of that. It helpfully navigated to where the open file was saved, and saved it.

Then when I needed to upload another file to that folder I navigated to earlier, I'd just drag it onto Fetch's window. But... you guessed it... the window had been pointing to where the TextWrangler file lived. Meaning I just uploaded it to the wrong folder, because Fetch "forgot" where I was. Oops.

I am a creature of habit, as are you, but I still toyed with the idea of switching FTP clients - particularly, Transmit. Transmit is, in a word, fantastic. It's beautiful (much prettier than Fetch if you ask me), it's useful, it is tightly integrated with TextWrangler or whatever text editor you'd like to use, and it costs money. $30, to be specific.

$30 is not a lot of money for an FTP program. But you know, I'd rather buy a pair of shoes for that $30.

I recall trying out an open-source FTP program called Cyberduck a year or so ago and thinking it really sucked. It did. It was awful. The interface sucked, the everything sucked. The icon? Well, I'm not a fan of too much cutesy-ness in my Dock. But a duck? Okay. Whatever. Say hi to Adium.

(I don't really use Adium; I don't really IM on the Mac.)

I totally forgot about InterArchy until Gruber mentioned it, and I will admit the interface looks absolutely fantastic. Its ability to look just like Finder has been a strength - or weakness - since its early days. But InterArchy, too, costs the money.

Something got in my noggin about 3 weeks ago, however, and Cyberduck was referenced in some forum or blog I was reading. I thought, "Why not give it a shot?" So for the past three weeks, the dog and the duck have been sitting side by side in my dock. (Fetch is to the left, so he can't see the Cyberduck; he's just fetching the floppy disk to the giant TextWrangler logo in front of him.)

I plunged into Cyberduck the same way I did RSS: wholeheartedly. I set up shortcuts for the FTP sites I used the most and saved them so I could use QuickSilver to access them. But a thought: "Gee, that display is fugly." I really thought that: "fugly". Vertical lines. No alternating row lines. No horizontal lines. Egads, it's 1987.

But wait! A preference? Yes! A preference for it. So I can make Cyberduck have pretty alternating row columns and no stupid horizontal or vertical lines, the way I like it. Great!

And I can make a double-click equal "Edit in TextWrangler" instead of "Put the file on the desktop" like Fetch - one of the most annoying things ever? Yes!

And it has a Transfers window! And a drawer for Bookmarks! Swell! Lovely!

And somehow, I got sold on this once ugly duckling. The little Fetch dog has been without his companion, Running Triangle, underneath him. He's been kind of nonresponsive, just sitting there mid-jump with his floppy.

There is one flaw with the Duck, though: I can't rename files like I do in Finder, by clicking the filename once. The first time I encountered this, I actually said, "Ooooooh," in a bad way. Instead I have to open an info window and edit it there. No preference for that, at least none I've found. (Note: after R'ingTFM I learned that I could click a filename and then press Return and then edit it. Lame.) The plus side is that I was able to submit a ticket for this, which is great.

Is it a deal-breaker? Time will tell. But my instinct says no. I'll trade the awkward renaming mechanism for the multiple little problems I had with Fetch, which all added up to a dull headache.

I will admit I'm pleased there are more than a couple of great FTP clients out there for the Mac. All I've mentioned in this post are great in their own ways but, for me, the Cyberduck wins.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend