We’ll talk more about these guidelines in the future but I would like to talk about cross browsing testing and the challenges that it presents.

For a small team of developers like us cross browsing testing can be troublesome because not all the platforms/browsers are available to us. We use our own equipment for developing and testing, so not always there is an old Pentium II machine with IE4 installed for testing purposes.

Luckily our team is well balance and we have users for the three main operating systems Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux. Now with the arrival of Vista we have a new operating system to test and honestly after trying it up none of us is excited with the prospect of installing Vista in a (otherwise) productive machine. Microsoft is currently the biggest problem that web designers/developers face.

Their Internet Explorer policy is continuously changing in the last 5 years so they have gone from completely different from every other browser (and W3C standards) to just partially different them but half way supporting standards.

Internet Explorer 7 has brought a new set of inconveniences. Now if a user installs IE7 in his machine, inevitably IE6 will stop working. There are several methods that allow the users install both, but nevertheless it’s still a problem to ensure that new websites can be displayed properly in IE6.

Internet Explorer 6 is the most annoying thing in the web world, full of bugs, it would display the content of websites in its own very peculiar way, which forces the developers to create hacks and other alternatives if they want to achieve a decent grade of usability.

I am currently using a website to test how our websites look in other operating systems and different browsers. The website is called browsershots.org and it provides a very simple yet powerful functionality, it creates a screenshot of your website displayed in any(almost every) browser under any (almost every) operating system. The images take a little bit to be created so if you test your website under 44 different browsers it can take a while before all the images are uploaded, but it’s worth a try. A very useful tool for developers.

We will be talking more about this issues and about what can we do as community to improve our user’s experience.

Thanks.

[1st part] [2nd part]

One of our main concerns here at None Interaction is to make our websites accessible for as much people as possible. There are two important problems to be tackled in this subject, one is accessibility design and the other is cross browsing testing.

Designing websites for accessibility means using the solutions available to create websites that are accessible for people with disabilities. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the entity that regulate, produce and promote the guidelines that most web designer and developers follow to create their work. Among these guidelines the W3C has established what it’s called the “Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0“. It this guidelines is clearly explained how to make websites more accessible but also how to make them easier to find in the web:

Following these guidelines will also help people find information on the Web more quickly. These guidelines do not discourage content developers from using images, video, etc., but rather explain how to make multimedia content more accessible to a wide audience.

For those unfamiliar with accessibility issues pertaining to Web page design, consider that many users may be operating in contexts very different from your own:

They may not be able to see, hear, move, or may not be able to process some types of information easily or at all.

• They may have difficulty reading or comprehending text.
• They may not have or be able to use a keyboard or mouse.
• They may have a text-only screen, a small screen, or a slow Internet connection.
• They may not speak or understand fluently the language in which the document is written.
• They may be in a situation where their eyes, ears, or hands are busy or interfered with (e.g., driving to work, working in a loud environment, etc.).
• They may have an early version of a browser, a different browser entirely, a voice browser, or a different operating system.

[1st part] [2nd part] ]]> http://noneinteraction.com/accessibility-and-cross-browsing-testing-i-part/feed http://noneinteraction.com/web-design http://noneinteraction.com/web-design#comments Fri, 26 Sep 2008 17:43:23 +0000 nyx http://noneinteraction.com/?p=136 We are developing five projects simultaneously. Now this may not sound too much for a small sized studio/company, but our case is different because we are literally only three people working out this company.We are one designer, one developer and one person extra for everything else, that’s all.

Now if one of us, which always is me, has to spend some time optimising our website to make it SEO friendly that means less time working in the other projects. So we have decided to use just a few tips that we learned in the past projects. Add a few keywords here, create a post talking about this, and let’s hope that google fancy the semantic structure of our website.

SEO is such an important part of today’s website planning and strategy, luckily we have always used semantically correct and valid XHTML and CSS for all our projects which is the first step to achieve good results. Our customers have reduced SEO and marketing costs thanks to our clean and tidy approach to coding, and that’s rewarding.

We can’t wait to show the web design projects finished.

In one of the projects we have worked together with comedian Jason Manford redesigning his website. The new web should be up in the next few days and we’ll bring a review to this site.

We are also very proud of our collaboration with Maths-Doctor, to whom we have helped to develop a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) and a full web design for his new venture. We will show this soon but the website and VLE are already live, you can check the in here.

Our main project at the moment is to finish what it will be our first product as such, nonePMS. Our nonePMS is a Property Rental Management system based in a powerful open source framework and especially tuned for medium sized hotels and B&Bs. Our system is currently being implemented in two different projects, one in England and another one in Marrakesh, and it should be live in a few days.

So be it…

For Mac users it makes sense to dump MSO straight away, iWork is mature and yet new enough to accomplish almost all the tasks that you would do with Office.

Pages is easier to use, it is powerful and fun to use. I know people who has been using Word for 20 years and they don’t know more that a bold header and B&W documents that made my creativity ache. My girlfriend has been using Pages for two years and she can create beautiful documents. Anyone I’ve told about it has switched and never look back.

If you ever use Keynote, you’ll never gonna want to use Powerpoint again.

And Numbers is maybe too new and lacks some of the functionality required in a real office workflow, but be certain that they will get there. If you don’t require this extra functions maybe Numbers is easier to understand and use that MS Excel.

I used to have MS Office installed in my Mac. For the last two years I have been attending my Computing course at University and I have to say that they enforce the use of MS products at any cost. The lecturers didn’t like the fact that I completely renounced to be taught in MS terms, I think that I didn’t win anyone’s sympathy by being different, but my documents were the best presented documentation of all the students. All thanks to use iWork instead of Office.

If you like to wait ages for your applications and, above else all, to keep the general feeling of achievement that you get after making a MS application do something (NOT EASY), I sincerely hope you enjoy your life in the darkness…

peace

First is a video from the mother of all design companies, Apple Computers Inc, right when they presented the most revolutionary computer seen by then.

And of course the next video represents what Microsoft was doing by then, leaded in this video by the legendary Steve Ballmer:

I hope you have fun with these,

Thanks

It is oficial, you can now access your blog from your iPhone by installing this new plugin call WPHone. This will allow you to manage and admiistrate all the WordPress features from your iPhone and iTouch.

The best about this, is the improvements you will notice from the browser´s interface to the iPhone. It does get rid of the unnecessary HTML, compressing the code so that you can access them quickly and easily from theese phones with lack of 3G.

Thankfully I have been using Safari (3.1.2) more than anything else during this research period.

I normally have to put up with the slowness of Firefox 2 when I am testing websites, even the obligatory round of tests in Internet Explorer that make me literally sick ( I think I am Windowsphobic, save the term). With Safari browsing the internet safely and keeping track of what you doing can be a ultimate experience from a usability point of view.

Reason 1:

Export your bookmarks to an html file

Safari can export all your bookmarks as an html file so you can share what you have been researching with others in a clear standard format

Just fire up Safari and in the File menu select –Export Bookmarks…-, you will be presented with a menu in which you can select where to save the file and some options. By default Safari saves the file on standard html format so what you have is a list of links with all you bookmarks. You can copy the html code and paste it onto almost every type of document.

In some cases the option –Export Bookmarks…– will not appear in the menu, there is a terminal command (below) that you can use to activate this functionality.

At a terminal menu (when safari isn’t running) type:
% defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1

Reason 2:

Send the website pages you’re visiting to an email address

I love the way Safari and Mail integrate on Mac OS X. Whenever I am visiting a website that I want to record apart from the bookmarks there is other option that I normally use, I send the website to one of my email accounts.

Sending a website page as email message is pretty easy, just press CMD+i and the website page will appear as email message ready to be send.

I have created several email addresses for this purpose, so I have one for research, another for current projects, and another for my personal stuff. I have also created a group on my Address Book with my friends that own a mac, so I can send them sometimes interesting articles and tutorials. Lamentably PC users will not be able to take advantage of the legendary easy of use of both products, Mail and Safari.

Reason 3

Tabs

Tabs are now a standard way of managing windows in internet browsers, even IE7 uses tabs, but tabs in Safari have been implemented in a remarkable way. You can do many things with tabs in Safari, drag and drop, open a tab in a new window, open all bookmarks in a folder in tabs, bookmark all open tabs with a simple command (CMD+CONTROL+N), and many more options.

Working with tabs is so simple that anyone could figure it out with a little practice yet you always discover something else that it is so cool, after all this is characteristic of Apple products, they always have aces on the sleeve.

Reason 4

PDF support and Preview integration

Another brilliant feature of Safari is its PDF viewer and the integration with Mac OS X Preview. Whenever I want to save a document I use –Save as PDF– on the print menu (CMD+P) in Safari. Saving a website page as PDF document also allows light editing such as highlighting or adding text and shapes to the documents in Preview.

Reason 5

Speed

I have a relatively fast computer set, Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB of RAM, even if at the end of the day it is just a laptop, my MacBook Pro is pretty quick. However launching Firefox 2 takes ages and it just never responds fast enough, I am always waiting for it to be ready and let me type something in the URL bar. I know there is Firefox 3, and I know Opera is pretty good too, but Safari always feels responsive and ready to shoot.

Of course all these reasons can be extended to many more, for instance you can create your own keyboard shortcuts and have all these actions/commands ready just a keystroke away.

Thanks

One of the most exciting projects we have at the moment involves the creation of a vertical menu for a very busy and complex local website. This website is one of the most successful in the business, not only here in the UK but also in Europe. We can’t give more details but it’s very exciting to work in something as big as this. We will do a 3D carousel for the same website. The website will go live soon and then we will reveal our work.

The other big project is the remake of the website for a comedian. He is quite popular already but we will ensure that his website stands to his fame in the short term. Again a bit of mistery with the project as we can’t release any more details until completion.

Finally we are looking to recruit skilled people in the Brighton area, as we will need more designers and developers for our upcoming projects.

We are using dotproject as starting point but we are looking forward to bring any improvements over it in order to suit better to our needs.

So if you are a member go to the login page and start using right away:

login page

But above all this projects, there has been a huge impact in what we want to do. Something has really given us in a sense of direction. We have just discovered some technologies (?) that have impressed us gladly, some sparks in the web, or as one of our members said “a breeze of fresh air”.

Have you ever heard of Jonathan Harris? If you haven’t I am sure you will soon. Let me show you something in advance:

Jonathan Harris, an storyteller. (tedTalks)

We feel fine about this, we absolutely love it. You can actually visit the www.wefeelfine.org and www.universe.daylife.com and discover the applications by yourselves. This technology has been running for sometime but it really relies in a good connection to the Internet and decent computer power, the experience is extraordinary worthy and enriching.

We will talk more about these projects and other in future posts, but remember:

Feel fine…