I’ve previously written that I was using Wordpress PDA Plugin in order to give mobile users a nice user experience. Today during lunch time I’ve upgraded the plugin which now has a iPhone/iPod version. (I must give a word of appreciation to the new “one click upgrade” feature in Wordpress)
It has animations in page transitions and all. Pretty cool. It still have some bugs (at least when testing it in Firefox with a fake User Agent), but it is usable. Maybe one of my readers will give me feedback from his iPhone experience navigating in this website. 
Finally available for us to use it! What can we do? No only explore but also create!
So how does Photosynth work? Photosynth analyzes your photos for similarities to your other photos in the set and then uses the information to estimate where the photos were was taken from. Photosynth then re-creates the place the photos were taken and uses that as a canvas to display your photos. Pretty neat huh? The work done in analyzing your photos is done via the above mentioned Photosynth plug-in.
Windows Vista Team Blog
While testing a project on which I’m working I accidentally went to TMN’s website (a Portuguese cellphone company) with Javascript disabled.
First of all I think that is great that they use a <noscript> tag to warn the user that the user experience quality will be decreased because Javascript is disabled. Because of this message I switched it on right away. Without this message I would probably get some strange behavior while using the website, complaint about it and then maybe I would remember that I had Javascript disabled (or just leave the website without realizing it).
Something that you can’t see in the image above is that the website look & feel doesn’t get too damaged by the absence of Javascript support which is nice too.
One thing that I didn’t like that much was the fact of this website language is Portuguese but the warning message is written in English… TMN’s clients don’t have to understand English, and I believe that many don’t. This issue seems like a “copy-paste” without message customization.
Today I was testing a website using a HTML W3C validation tool (XHTML 1.0 Transitional) and I found a problem in my links. Some URLs had the & symbol, since they linked to dynamic webpages which need parameters. The trivial solution is to replace the “&” occurrences on all links by the equivalent “&” expression. But while changing some dynamically generated URLs I found out an interesting fact about ASP.NET controls vs HTML controls that I was not aware of.
In the example bellow you can see 2 pairs of Links and Images. The first set are ASP.NET controls, the second one are HTML controls (markup) with runat attribute set to server in order to allow their manipulation by ASP.NET code.
When you look at the source code in the client side bellow you can spot a slight difference that can make your HTML validation fail. href and src attributes that originally contained the “&” and which are the result of ASP.NET controls rendering have “&” instead, but the HTML controls still have the invalid &-based URL’s.
Since I had both type of elements mixed in the website, and I was threating them in the same way I was getting different behaviors. Now I know why…
In my daily work It is quite usual facing applications and websites which have what I consider some usability issues (including projects in which I have worked, its true). It is so common that I’ve decided to start posting some thoughts about usability using examples that cross my path.
I am not and usability expert and what I will post may not be accepted by usability experts or by any person at all. I’ll just write about things that annoy me and which I think that should be different. So, if you think that I am not right about something, just comment the correspondent post. This way I can get different points of view and learn about usability from you.
Today while using Live Mesh Remote Desktop I noticed something. While the ActiveX is connecting to your remote computer you get a loading screen. You have a “Cancel” button in order to cancel (how obvious is that caption 
). In the button’s normal state you can see a “Cancel” message below the loading animation, but you don’t really notice it is a button until you put your mouse over it.
If it is a button, I think it should look like a button before I try to click it (this is the moment when I need to know that it is a button). Or at least it could resemble like a link, which would have the same effect. Since Live Mesh is still a Tech Preview, maybe this usability issue will not be present on the final release.
