Usability Introduction – Baltics

Thank you to all those people who attended the session today in Tallinn, and I look forward to meeting people from Vilnius and Riga! Thanks also go to the guys at Best Marketing, who have made me very welcome. I promised lots of links to go with the presentation, so here they are…

Django – Local vs Live error

I came across a strange error using Django when putting something live that I couldn’t find via google, so hopefully this will help anyone in the same position.  When I put some new code live (to allow members to enter events), it errored with:

‘str’ object has no attribute ‘_default_manager’

Is accessibility actually usability?

An article of mine translated into Bulgarian.A couple of days ago I had the pleasure of speaking at the first seminiar on usability in Bulgaria. A great thanks to the people at .net and Lucrat in Bulgaria, it was a great event with great hosts. It was also great to see & meet Peter Merholz,…

Window click throughs and scrolling

Safari's buttons are clickable even when it's in the background, firefoxes are not.John Gruber recently expounded on the problems with click through, which put simply: is when you click a control on a window / application that’s in the background, it works. This is something that ‘got me’ when I started using Macs (that generally don’t allow click through), as it…

Local W3C validator on OSX

Local ValidatorYou may have noticed the W3C was asking for contributions for the running the validator. There is a way that you can support the W3c validation service – by not using it. The public version that is. If you use OSX, you can install it locally.

Home links verses logos

The facebook menu with logo, home, and other links. Facebook appears to be testing (with a far greater audience than I could), the current state of web conventions. A few years ago, few regular people knew that the logo on a website would link back to the homepage. Anecdotally, I have noticed more people using logos for that purpose in usability testing, but it’s very difficult to know what proportion of the general population that is.

Google Chrome market share

I’ve seen a few articles recently about Google’s Chrome browser market share, some sites seem to have had quite a lot of visits from people using Chrome, which then fell off again. However, these sort of stats are probably missing the point, what sites is it that people are most likely to use Chrome on?

.net standards champion

I was pleased (and rather surprised) to be nominated for “standards champion” in the .net awards. The thing is, the competition is, um, quite fierce! I’m up against the W3C, Mozilla, and some of the best known names in the business (like Zeldman). So I’m not picking out a…

iPods get speech, Apple gets accessible

The new iPod nanos (4th generation) now have speech-enabled menus, so you don’t have to be able to see the screen to operate it. This is obviously a boon for the visualy impaired, but with my old iPod I quite often used it from my pocket, or whilst driving. Could…

dConstruct 2008 notes

dConstruct banner.
My journey to d.construct was a long one, I hadn’t even checked which talks were when, so I was very thankful for the schedule built into your name tag! I took quite a few notes for general use, but please to refer to the originals where possible:

Keynote: