sugarenia.com

I’m ashamed to admit, I haven’t discovered Konigi till recently. It’s a great repository of design bits, methods, tools and techniques related to user experience, a recent favourite of mine.

First of all, I digg the design. I digg it so much it hurts. I guess when we teach “content must define the design, never the opposite”, that’s what we have in mind:

Simple, works.

Feel free to browse the archives, but what I liked best was these graph paper templates, because hey, you can never stop using pencil and paper in UI design.

konigi, UX, design

A call to web designers out there: noticed any differences in your sites between Firefox 2 and Firefox 3?

Personally, I’ve only seen the infamous outline bug. For those that haven’t experienced it, check Google pagination when clicking a link:

You can fix it though, piece of cake. Just add an a { outline: none; } rule. You’ll find yourself defining outlines more often than ever with Firefox 3.

The other bug is trickier: the new version of Firefox doesn’t seem to like background images. I admit I haven’t researched it much, but it’s a really annoying bug, as it blurs background images for no reason. Others have noticed as well.

To fully understand what I mean, check out the display of the background image live:

…and compare it with the actual image (seen here by right click > view background image):

Really, really annoying bug that one. It seems that Firefox has a problem rendering background images with background rules that also specify positioning. So it does not render well backgrounds defined with something like body { background: url("img/img.jpg") no-repeat top center; }.

It’s minor but irritating. Surely though I can’t go around breaking up my rules in two just because of this hiccup. I guess I’ll have to wait for 3.0.1.

firefox 3, css, link, outline, dot, bug, background, blur

Zennaware’s Cornerstone is a (or yet another a) sexy Subversion client app for Mac OS. I haven’t tried it yet, but I’m sure it’ll be pretty enough. But the site, oh, the site:

Awesome use of colours and grids in a page so informative it (kinda) hurts. I love it.

What I’d like to see differently: Screenshots should be moved to the top of the content, right after the introductory text. Screenshots is the first thing a user wants to see while checking out an app, especially a Mac user.

Moreover, I’m a sucker for big headers, but well, this one kinda hurts my 13.3” Macbook. Only thing I can see when full screen is the humongous logo, the download badge and some text.

zennaware, cornerstone, subversion

Blizzard has confirmed its existence to cause us orgasms again. They’ve gone and announced Diablo 3, complete with single player goodness and Battle.net love.

All vibed up, sexied up and ready to burn away our precious free time. Seriously, it’s the first time I’ve actually watched a gameplay video and I must say, I’m ready for this!

So.

Who’s gonna team up with my sorc on Battle.net?

blizzard, diablo, diablo3

EDIT: Mr. Rosenfeld was kind enough to offer a discount code for all Sugarenia.com readers: with the code SUGARENIA you get -10% while purchasing any of their books. Now is the time to get them, guys!

At first, I was kinda hesitant to go on and buy such a niche book - after all, what’s so exciting about coding and designing web forms?

Wrong.

Mr. Wroblewski’s book taught me that web forms are all kinds of designer fun, and this is not a euphemism. It’s just what the author says:

Forms make or break the most crucial online interactions: checkout, registration, and any task requiring information entry.

Imagine how many times you decided not to join a service just because of its scary registration form - or how many times you’ve mistakenly filled in your credit card number to a checkout form that didn’t support multiple formats of input.

Get the point?

Web Form Design is a simple, well-written book: it seems to have borrowed the blogging way of stating facts, and this is a good thing: simple, coherent writing, to-the-point explanations and the ubiquitous “Best Practices” list of points in the end of each chapter strike a chord: it’s a specialized blog turned book! That’s not too bad, is it?

Web Form Design by Luke Wroblewski is a book highly recommended for interface designers, both on web and more traditional media. It can help everyone that wants to improve her skills in laying out inputs and textareas, and make you feel good too in the meanwhile.

You surprised me, mr. Wroblewski. Pleasantly, I might say. I think I’ll get Site Seeing too.

luke wroblewski, web form design, site seeing