June 26th, 2009
The mobile devices are getting increasingly sophisticated. With the combination of GPS, compass, camera, Internet Connection and a big screen it’s now possible to create amazing, context aware, first Person UI’s. Imaging for a moment that you’re in a foreign city, standing in front of a statue that you never seen before. Point your mobile phone at it and it will tell you what it is, who built it etc, imposing the information as a layer over the reality.
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June 24th, 2009
This article is part 2 of 2 in the series Google Maps API 3
In the first article in this series we discussed how to create a simple Map with Google Maps API 3. In this article we will explore the available properties when creating a map and see how we can change the look and [...]
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June 11th, 2009
I just found this really great talk on YouTube from a Google Tech Talk called, Speed Up Your JavaScript. It’s a guy from Yahoo named Nicholas Zakas that talks about various things you can do to get better performance in you Javascripts.
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June 8th, 2009
Some people on the forum NUI-group have written a book called Multi-Touch Technologies. The book is about Multi-Touch seen from several perspectives like hardware, software and gestures. It’s more about hardware and software than Interaction Design but contains some interesting bits on the latter subject.
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June 5th, 2009
This article is part 1 of 2 in the series Google Maps API 3
The Google Maps API has evolved to version 3. This version is a complete rewrite and focuses primarily on speed. The new API also features new ways of using it. This article is the first in a series exploring version 3 of [...]
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June 2nd, 2009
This article explains how to dynamically toggle the visibility of markers in Google Maps as well as how to deal with an annoying bug that occurs when trying to do this while using an utility library, like the MarkerManager.
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May 28th, 2009
Yesterday a new version of the ever so popular Google Maps API was released. In the new version the focus has been on improving speed, especially on mobile devices. I’ve been fortunate enough to be part of the beta testing and has been able to provide feeback directly to the developers. So far I think [...]
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May 27th, 2009
Designing Web Interfaces is a book about how to design rich interactions within web pages. In todays web with richer user interfaces, far from the static, full page load web applications we were once used to. We need patterns, guidelines and best practices on how to design those Interfaces to work well. This book is [...]
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May 4th, 2009
In development project teams there are often several specialized roles, like programmers, database designers, interaction designers, user researchers, business analysts and so on. Studies has shown that the more these different roles collaborate and are aware of the different aspects of the project as a whole as well as what the other project members are [...]
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April 21st, 2009
Forms that Work is a book on how to design web forms properly. Some time ago I reviewed a similar book, Web Form Design by Luke Wroblewski, which deals with the same subject. I then thought that this was a very narrow scope for a book, but perhaps it was not, since this book was [...]
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Published in Book reviews | 2 comments »
April 7th, 2009
ListDJ is an add on to Spotify that displays the lyrics of the song you’re currently listen to. I’m the kind of guy who thinks that the lyrics of a song is important, so this i perfect for me.
The add on docks itself to the side of the main Spotify application window. From when I’ve [...]
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March 31st, 2009
One of the shortcomings in the Google Maps API is that there’s no easy way to add tooltips to polylines and polygons. That’s why I felt inclined to build an extension to Google Maps that adds that functionality. MapTooltip makes it possible to add tooltips to any kind of overlay. It’s even possible to [...]
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March 17th, 2009
This is a quicktip on how to update images on a webpage that retain the same filename but is periodically updated, without having to perform a full page load.
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March 11th, 2009
If you’re into ASP.NET MVC then you should definitely check out this free chapter from the upcoming Wrox book Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0. The chapter is a 185 page long tutorial on how to build a complete web application with the Framework.
The ASP.NET MVC Framework is still in beta (RC2) but is going [...]
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March 8th, 2009
In circumstances where you want to notify the user of something, like for example that some information have been saved, a non-modal alert is an excellent solution. It gets your message across without being intrusive and without the need for uneccesary user interaction.
In this article I will describe how to create it with the [...]
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February 26th, 2009
For a project I’m currently working on I wanted to create a submenu that included the parent page as well as the supbages. I just wanted to display the submenu only if the parent page had subpages. Searching the Wordpress Codex and googling for a solution I couldn’t quite find an example that took all [...]
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February 19th, 2009
The first time I ever read anything about Zooming User Interfaces was when I was reading The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin, where he introduced the concept of Zoom World, a whole OS based on a Zooming User Interface (ZUI). Of course this wasn’t my first encounter with this type of user interface since I’ve, [...]
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February 12th, 2009
Global variables are evil. Although possibly nifty for very small programs it quickly clutters the global namespace and increase the risk for name collisions as are program grows larger. The risk for collisions are even greater when using different libraries and widgets.
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February 9th, 2009
Is it just me or is Twitter exploding right now? Apart from noticing that I got more followers the last days, I’ve also noticed that several Twitter services such as Tweetburner and Mr. Tweet has been down for maintenance. That might be a sign of overload!
At a seminar I attended last week on Social [...]
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Published in Articles | 2 comments »
February 5th, 2009
Having Info Windows in a Google Maps is a powerful way of displaying information about a specific point or object. Did you know that there are several kinds of them?
In this article I will show you how to add different kinds of Info Windows that appear when you click on a marker.
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Published in Tutorials | 19 comments »
January 30th, 2009
A while I go I wrote an article called Spotify is right on the spot where I described a service called Spotify that let’s you listen to music over the Internet. I was impressed of how well it worked and of how good the music player was.
I’ve been using Spotify for about four months now [...]
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January 29th, 2009
Peter Morville at Semantic Studios has compiled an extensive list of ways to create deliverables to communicate uX designs. He writes about this in User Experience Deliverables.
The article contains a list of 20 techniques with links to further reading on each. To make it easier to find suitable techniques he also made a [...]
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January 24th, 2009
I’ve read a few books by Don Norman before and they have all been a great source of inspiration and full of “Aha” moments. This book doesn’t quite reach that same level, but I still find it an interesting read.
The book is basically about how to design intelligent things. Some call it ambient computing others [...]
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January 13th, 2009
To use markers in Google Maps is fairly trivial, at least when you have a reasonable amount of them. But once you have more than a few hundred of them, performance quickly starts to degrade. In this article I will show you a few approaches to speed up performance. I’ve also put together a test [...]
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Published in Tutorials | 29 comments »
January 7th, 2009
2008 was the first year of this blog. It has been really interesting and it’s encouraging to see that the number of readers is steadily increasing. Thanks to all of you who has read and commented on my articles. A big reason for me running this blog is to learn more about the stuff I [...]
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Published in Articles | 3 comments »
December 19th, 2008
Tomorrow I’m going on vacation to Duved, a ski resort in Sweden right next to Åre that has killer slopes. We’re going to ski every day, celebrate Christmas and just have a really good time. It’s going to be so nice to get away for a while.
That also means that I’m not going to [...]
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Published in Life | 2 comments »
December 18th, 2008
I recently read Andy B. King’s book Website Optimization and was surprised by some of the statistics in it. It shows that there’s a very clear connection between page load times and conversion rates. Statistics from Google and Amazon show that an increase in load time has a direct and profound impact on user engagement.
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Published in Articles | 3 comments »
December 16th, 2008
Markers is one of the core features in Google Maps and an effective way of displaying places on a map. In this article I will show you how to add a basic marker to a map and also how to add some interactivity to it.
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Published in Tutorials | 1 Comment »
December 15th, 2008
Back in 2003 Andy King published his first book: Speed Up Your Site. It was my first encounter with optimization of HTML and CSS, something that in recent years have been recognized as an important field by, among others, the YUI team. Now in 2008 Andy is back with a new book, but this time [...]
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Published in Book reviews | 3 comments »
December 12th, 2008
When developing web applications we can never be sure what the environment for the user is. He could for example use our application from a mobile device with a browser with limited Javascript support. Like Roger Johansson pointed out in Making Google Maps more accessible, we must prevent our applications from breaking under these circumstances [...]
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