Posted by
in Findings, Reviews, Software, Usability on February 9th, 2010
Last night I attended a presentation for web professionals in the Chicago area. It was organized through meetup.com. The presenter was Matt Moog, Founder & CEO at Viewpoints. You can see his slide deck here.
Among his many relevant points was the notion he referred to as ‘the dominance of search.’ Matt’s focus for the evening was specifically on sites that serve up social commerce, but I think the search issue is something any site needs to consider seriously. What Matt was referring to was his claim was that 50-80% of traffic across the web comes from search. This was a…
Read More
Posted by
charles
in Business, News, Software, browsers on June 3rd, 2009
What started as an idea in our humble office on the north side of Chicago is now available to web designers worldwide!
BrowserLab, formerly named Meer Meer, was made available for free trial download on June 2. Read the press release here.
Our principals, Charles Stevenson and Ted Billups, formed a collaboration with Joshua Hatwich and Dean Vukas in 2006 to develop a web-based experience testing tool that would streamline web designers’ cross-browser testing processes and save them thousands of dollars on hardware required to do the tasks.
Together our team worked on all facets of this nascent SaaS idea: application development, remote…
Read More
Posted by
steve
in Reviews, Software on April 14th, 2009
A couple weeks ago Macrabbit released the much anticipated Espresso 1.0 application. Its meant to rival the feature set of Panic’s Coda by being more or less a one stop shop for editing, uploading, and previewing Web files. Espresso doesn’t take on quite as much as Coda but what features they did do, they did with style.
It’s clear from the moment you open Espresso that the application is meant for web designers that code their own front ends. The sort of people that take good aesthetic design into their purchasing decisions. The welcome screen is a beautiful, albeit unnecessary, illustration…
Read More
Posted by
steve
in Software, Usability, browsers on April 6th, 2009
In the world of web development there has been a recent push from all around the world to finally drop support for IE6. It’s understandable since IE8 is now released and IE6 is about 8 years old, an antique in computer years. However, there are still a measurable amount of users still launching IE6 as their primary browser, 17.4% of all users according to w3schools. So should we abandon the traditional model of graceful degradation and cross browser compatibility and stop supporting IE6? Some very substantial web developers have said yes.
37signals.
37signals started phasing out support for ie6 starting in October 1, 2008.…
Read More
Posted by
ted
in Findings, Reviews, Software, Uncategorized on March 19th, 2009
Everyone has their favorite little utilities, especially when it comes to taking long gangly links and shortening them for Twitter and other social apps. I like SnipURL.com best because it has a great cross-browser bookmarks bar button that converts links on-click (gotta love javascript). Here’s what else it does:
- it seems faster than TinyURL (although as of today I noticed 500,000+ snips, and their total is 28 million so they are getting lots of traffic suddenly too with the popularity of Twitter)
- it has tracking and management of snips
- the browser button is great
Read More
Posted by
ted
in Findings, Reviews, Software, Uncategorized on January 14th, 2009
I’ve been using Songbird (instead of iTunes) lately, and I have to say it’s quite a nice media browser/player. It is an open-source project with a focus on the api and web integration throughout – very similar to Firefox. In fact, it uses Firefox’s XML-based XUL user interface description language, so it even supports many of Firefox’s add-ons like DOM Inspector. One popular add-on is a panel that displays lyrics.
On launch it can import your iTunes library and settings, and instead of “The Genius” it has mashTape, with artist info, reviews, news (Digg, Google News, MTV Music News, etc.), photos and…
Read More
Posted by
ted
in Reviews, Software on October 15th, 2008
Our good software engineer friends at Adobe have launched InContext Editing (ICE), which (long last) allows any user to edit directly into pages using Dreamweaver. It’s what people have been asking for since I started making web pages in 1994. Other companies like Yahoo (and their YUI tools) allow for some in-page editing, but Adobe has done it with elegance and complete breadth. I’ll be curious to see how much of the content management software market they will have in 1 year. Sign up, view a tutorial and register a site to get started. The support site is here.
In the next month or…
Read More
