Archive for June, 2008

We’ve been looking at what makes a good Web Application design good. We’ll continue that thought with Mint.com the financial account managing software.

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Web applications are the commodity to deal in on the internet these days but what makes them successful isn’t always their function, often times design plays a huge role. Today I’m taking a look at five apps that exemplify various aspects of great Web App design.

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One critical factor many new start-ups forget is that half of creating a successful web app is making sure that its well designed and easy to use. In this part of our series we’ll continue looking at well designed web applications….

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Web applications are all the rage these days as cloud computing becomes the standard way of doing things. Whether it’s Facebook apps, Web clients, Flash, Adobe Air Apps or anything else that’s becoming ubiquitous, a huge part of the development of these applications is design and what you an learn from the design of quality web applications is priceless. In this series of posts, I’ll spotlight five well known web applications and share the design aspects that I think make each unique.

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Snipplr.com is like del.icio.us for people who write a lot of code. Whether you develop for Ruby or Django, hack WordPress or MovableType, or if you just write XHTML, you probably keep a “Code Diary” full of useful tricks, hacks and hints that you’ve used in past projects. Snipplr exists to let you share that code with other developers just like yourself. It’s become indispensable to my work flow since I found it!

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Although I love design and web development, there are some days when I hit something akin to the writer’s wall. There really are days when I would rather bang my head against the wall than try to conjure up something new an exciting for a new client. I wrote about some places that I find inspirational a few weeks back at Smashing but that’s just me getting wanderlust. So where can you get inspiration when you’re fresh out of ideas and kind of sick of being creative?

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From time to time, Google hosts live chats with webmasters attended by some of their key developers. If anything, this is a great venue to ask that nagging question in your head. The first time this was held was in March 2008, and you can read the details of the successful launch at SEOroundtable.com. As a consequence, a follow up was held earlier this month and an MP3 of the discussions is available here, as well as a transcript of the chat session.
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Extensible Hypertext Markup (XML) has changed the web as we knew it and helped to make websites rich, well designed and fast loading. It’s become an integral part of Web 2.0 that won’t be going away any time soon. So what’s next for CSS? Mozilla and the Opera Software company give us some clues as to what features from the new CSS3 markup that may be incorporated into the next generation of web browsers. Here are some highlights…

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Some people look at graphs with blank faces. I happen to study them with a smile, like I did when I still had a cubicle job as a Quality Analyst. Ever since I discovered Google Analytics, I’ve used it religiously to increase traffic for a few niche blogs that I own with reasonable success. Google Analytics is a wonderful tool that gives you varied data to play with, and that you get all this sophistication free is just remarkable. However, data by itself won’t give you answers. Perhaps in a later evolution, GA will be able to generate action items in plain English, but that seems like a dream from a distant future.
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For client-side web developers, maintaining history – and working with the default “back” and “forward” browser buttons – can be a major challenge for building an effective AJAX web application. As HTTP is fundamentally stateless, the current URL has long been the standard for recording a user’s current “location”. With the Really Simply History library, developers can embrace this concept using a simple Javascript library to maintain history for their AJAX applications. (more…)

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