Mark McAulay

I think i understand UX a bit better now. Here a point in case: I click on a link posted to twitter only to be redirected to some not apparently clear Facebook page, I then have to find the link I was expecting to visit in the first place, click that one, then be met with a warning page telling me to "be careful" and this time having to press a button to confirm i'm happy to leave Facebook? erm...i never wanted to be there in the first place! Only now am I at the end of the journey I started all those clicks and distractions ago...

This whole "No one will be using Flash, the world is moving to HTML5" may be true on mobile browsers and certain mac products due to vendor lock out but lets not believe this hype, the dominant platform today and for the foreseeable future is still windows by a country mile...and I haven't heard that they as a whole, or of any of the primary browsers running on windows are dropping flash support in any way, have you?

For quite some time now, the phrase "User Experience" has been bandied about in web design and development discussions and to be honest, I've not personally understood exactly what was meant or indeed, seen it be challenged. To start with, what is it? what does user experience or "UX" actually mean to designer, developer or client? This is actually an integral part of any design and development process. It deals with the way in which a user interacts with your design, be that a product, a printed piece or a website. Of course my eyes, interest and focus of this post are on the latter of these.

drawing little boxes and arrows on little notepads is all well and good but...

After a particularly heavy going 2009, I've taken stock of my professional and personal life and have made some aims and ambitions for the year ahead. 2009 held some  big challenges and some fairly heavy duty decisions had to be made, the fruits of those decisions will start to come this year I hope. Like every year for the past 4, I've made a decision to learn a new programing language but unlike other years, this time around I'll be sticking with my choice beyond the year in question. I've learned a hell of a lot over the past few years and now is the time to consolidate that learning and push on. I've also made a fairly big decision about returning some focus to design which may surprise some people but I hope to expand on this a bit in this post. I set out to become a generalist and that's what I now call myself. Personally, there are a few new things I'll be doing to improve my health.

I struggled a bit with writing this post, maybe it's because I think I'm not really qualified to do so. One thing's for sure, I grow tired of seeing CFML being bashed about with the same old tired and increasingly silly points so I thought I'd throw in my experience with the language and what I found to be a huge benefit and something that people, particularly "front end" guys looking to get into a bit of development may find interesting.

Having thought that I'd sent all my available googlewave invites out, I was surprised to find I still have one left so instead of handing it out in the same manner as the rest of them (first come first served), I've decided to be a little more creative with this one and use it for bribery.

Firstly, this of course only works on Firefox with the greasemonkey addon installed. If you have no idea what this means, you probably don't need to read any further and you're free to go on your way ;)

** UPDATE ** - This now also works natively under chrome 4. just click the link below to install it as an extension. buh bye hootsuite framery on chrome too ;)

For those of us who like finer grain control of our web browsing, I have created a userscript for a new pet hate of mine. I have noticed an increase of twitter users posting from hootsuite, and there's nothing wrong with that, my issue comes from any links contained within a hootsuite tweet. These do not open as I'd personaly like...in the browser window as intended, but are instead loaded into an iframe with a little toolbar etc so you can interact more with hootsuite. Now that may be fine for many people. Not for me though, I prefer my web pages served straight up thank you very much. I personaly dont want to interact with hootsuite...thats not why i clicked a link now is it?

This userscript breaks out of the hootsuite iframe and renders the page correctly in the browser...it's probably about now that someone will pipe up and tell me there's tons of these already as I know i'm not alone in my dislike for this kind of thing...whatever, I'm just glad that I got to experiment with greasemonkey and that hootsuite frames are a thing of the past.

Grab it here if you want it.

If you find something wrong with it, remember that this is a first attempt and try to be kind/helpfull with any feedback please.

Timesheets, now there's something I never thought I'd write favourably about! Those who have worked with me in a timesheet culture previously will have gathered that i'm not too keen on them. My opinions ranged from "waste of time", "they're all made up anyway" to "exist only to point a finger of blame" in truth, I absolutely hated timesheets. Turns out that me and timesheets got off to a bad start, I'd been forced to use the wrong sort of timesheet by those I previously worked with.

Earlier in the year while looking at how we could be more efficient and accurate in both managing/scheduling our time and costing jobs at work, the idea of using project management software was agreed on. As part of this, time tracking was built in on a project by project basis and we all decided to give it a go as a helpful indicator on how long tasks take to complete. My appreciation of timesheets started here.

It is still my opinion that general timesheets are not very useful and yes, i'd still resist using them. Project timesheets on the other hand, have proven to be very useful indeed. For clarity, I should probably explain what I mean.

What I'd class a general timesheet includes a block of time for your whole day, say 8 hours, broken down into hours or half hours or even 15 minute blocks where you log everything you do from the moment you take your coat off in the morning to the moment you put your coat back on again at the end of the day whereas a project timesheet only focusses on the tasks required to complete the job from start to finish and their duration runs for the entire length of the project. So for exaple when figuring out how long a job takes, or even how long a select part of a job takes, the information is right there rather than having to wade through days of irrelevent time entries for things like washing your hands or going to the shop and then collating the useful data into something sensible.

It's been an interesting and often eye opening experience over the relatively short period of time so far that I've been using these. The imediate benefit is being more aware of how long smaller, individual tasks really take. Longer term benefits include giving an overview of how many hours a whole job actualy takes and on a much longer timescale it is possible to average out how long certain types of jobs take, allowing you to quote accurately and honestly while also letting you see where you can be most profitable...which is nice for anyone in business to know really.

If you're not currently using project timesheets I'd encourage you to give it a shot, even if you do it by yourself on the work you do for your own record. It'll give you a valuable insight into how you work and how you should be charging jobs.

been concocting a little app recently and think I may have gone a bit minimal with my wireframe....whaddya think?