Notes on UX design and web development from some guy doing both
I love InDesign. It might be my absolute favorite Creative Suite tool. (Fireworks comes very, very close for interactive work though).
You may or may not be able to install it on your new MacBook Air, but when you can, MacWorld makes it sound like it’s very worth it.
The login form is a pretty basic and standard aspect of UI design.
At the very least, two form fields and a submit button are all you need: username, password and submit.
Sometime in the 1990′s, we gave Internet users the ability to save their session by storing a cookie on their computer when they click a little “remember me” checkbox near their password field.
This has been pretty standard practice for 20-ish years.
Leave it to Appcelerator (whom Tanner has scolded for other, unrelated reasons) to throw all precedent away by replacing standard “remember me” checkbox with a “reset password” checkbox.
Basically, replacing a standard aspect of login boxes with something that does the exact opposite.
Don’t do this. Stick to standards with your own twist.
PS: I consider “standard location” for a password reset function to be a link placed below the submit button.
We’re getting closer to finishing the Lookit iOS app using Appcelerator Titanium. The app calls a custom API on the Lookit server for both submitting pictures to the server and getting pictures, ratings, comments and other data about everyone else’s pics.
The user experience of our app is as important to me as getting the app to work correctly in the first place, and that includes making sure the app is responsive and usable on slow cell connections. Of our iOS beta testers, more than 80% of them have installed the app on an iPhone or iPad with 3G service.
Since most of our development happens in the iOS simulator on laptops with great wifi connections, we needed a way to slow down our internet connection to simulate a cellular connection.
You can limit the network traffic on your Mac to 3G-like speeds with three lines in the Terminal:
$ sudo ipfw pipe 1 config bw 30Kbit/s delay 350ms $ sudo ipfw add 1 pipe 1 src-port 80 $ sudo ipfw add 2 pipe 1 dst-port 80
This works great when testing your apps in the simulator on your laptop, but clicking with your mouse on the screen and touching with your fat fingers on an iPhone are completely different experiences. Tanner and I each use iPod Touches as our development devices, which don’t have 3G chips – only wifi.
Testing the entire 3G user experience is possible on a device by slowing down your laptop’s internet connection to 3G speeds, sharing your laptop’s (now slower) wifi connection and connecting your iPod Touch to it.
To fake a 3G connection on your iPod Touch:
Returning your network’s connection back to normal is just as easy:
$ sudo ipfw delete 1 $ sudo ipfw delete 2
Someone should turn this into an app. I’d spend a buck on it because I’m a lazy bastard.
