With the prevalence of AJAX and background operations on the web these days it pays to have an unobtrusive method for notifying the user when certain things happen. Typically thise is done with an animated graphic, or a popup but these usually mean you have to make a choice between relaying information and being intrusive, or being minimal with information and being very passive.
Growl is an application that has become quite popular on the Mac, it allows applications to popup a notification sticky in the corner of the screen for a while. They’re very handy and unobtrusive and now someone has gone ahead and implemented a similar notification style using jQuery. He calls it jGrowl which makes sense.
I think I’ll be using it quite a bit in a few projects I’ve been working on recently. It seems like the best of both worlds and very easy to implement now that someone else has done the heavy lifting for me.
Lately there has been a fair amount of chatter within the office concerning how to more efficiently spend our time on projects. Given that most of the time the best place to start when solving a problem is learning more about what is causing the problem, we’ve unearthed a couple of tools that aim to help us better manage our time and to-do lists.
The first application is Things. The basic idea here is that you have things to do and you generally schedule them into stuff that has to be done today or very soon, and other things that can be done some time in the future but aren’t that urgent. This idea isn’t anything particularly new but the way that it integrates with mail and mobile devices is great. It’s free for the time being so give it a try.
The second application that I found just today is called Slife. It records what you do in a stack of different applications and then gives you a report as to how much time you spent in an application and what you were doing. For instance it can tell you that you spent 2 hours today in Firefox, however it can also tell you at what times you were in Firefox, for how long you were in there and even the name of the tab you had open. You can group applications into ‘activities’ and then set goals for these activities such as “read email for less than 10 minutes per day” or “do work for more than 5 hours a day” and so on. Again, this application is free.
So if you own a Mac and are looking to spot any innefficiencies in your working habits or to improve the way you handle your to-dos then check these applications out!
NETTUTS have posted a handy guide on improving your HTML emails. Some of these pointers are addressed automatically by our email marketing product Raven Communicator but it is still worth a read.
The post covers testing, inline CSS styling, degrading gracefully, and structuring with tables.
While the term AJAX may possibly be a little overhyped and overused these days, when AJAX is used appropriately it can really enhance the usability of an application and make many tasks far quicker to complete than they otherwise would have been. One of the first examples of this would be auto-completing search fields but for anyone using Facebook, Flickr or any number of Web 2.0 applications they probably forget how tedious some of the things they do now used to be.
This list of 20 great AJAX effects has many of the effects you’ll see on the larger sites that are truly embracing AJAX such as better form validation, auto-completing text box lists and file uploading. If you’re looking to create a truly awesome experience for your user on your websites you really need to be implementing these UI patterns in your websites now!