Blog - Dayspring Web Design and Development

Where Am I? Breadcrumbs In Web Design

Young-Ki K. — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 18:49:15 +0000

A basic primer on breadcrumb navigation. Covers topics such as when and when not to use them, the three main types, design considerations, design mistakes, and using them together with drop down sub-menus.

Also includes a gallery of examples.

Breadcrumbs In Web Design: Examples And Best Practices – Smashing Magazine

Progress Indicators in Web Design

Young-Ki K. — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 18:45:09 +0000

A good primer to implementing ‘progress indicators’ in interface design. Includes discussion on different uses of progress indicators (not just for store checkouts), best practices, and when not to use them.

Progress Trackers in Web Design: Examples and Best Practices – Smashing Magazine

Amazon EC2 Oversubscribed?

Matthew D. — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 18:43:22 +0000

Here is a post that reports that all is not happy for some with their heads in the clouds.

Is Amazon EC2 Oversubscribed and Suffering from Internal Network Latency?

I am not directly involved with this, but figured I’d raise it in the blog.

There have been various reports from the community of Amazon EC2 users, that [...]

45 Powerful CSS/JavaScript Techniques

Young-Ki K. — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 23:17:54 +0000

A list of tutorials to do some very clever things with CSS and JS. Some notables:

Advanced Event Timeline With PHP, CSS & jQuery Sproing! – Make An Elastic Thumbnail Menu Sticky SideNav Layout with CSS Simply-Buttons v2 A Colorful Clock With CSS & jQuery

45 Powerful CSS/JavaScript-Techniques – Smashing Magazine

Google will factor page load speed into search result rankings

Young-Ki K. — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 18:21:14 +0000

Want to get on the first page of Google’s results? Concatenate and minify those CSS and JS files. Matt Cutts of Google indicates that sometime in 2010 Google may formally incorporate page load speed into its organic search results rankings. It has already been doing this for some time in its quality score index for [...]

More evidence of Android’s takeover?

Jeff W. — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 17:35:35 +0000

ChangeWave’s December survey shows Android is used by 4% of smart-phone users (up 3% from September).

Android is the choice for 21% of people planning to buy a smart-phone in the next 90 days (up 15% from September). Compare this to iPhone’s figure of 28%, down 4 points. Satisfaction of Android users is at 72%, almost [...]

Automated UI Tests: Holy Grail or Snake Oil?

Matthew D. — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 18:07:23 +0000

I think the title of this article says it all.

UI Test Automation Tools are Snake Oil

Michael Feathers, the author, is very solid.

It’s a very familiar ‘rabbit hole’ in the industry. … Personally, I think that in this day and age selling them [UI testing tools] is irresponsible. Developing them open-source? Well, let your [...]

SproutCore: HTML 5 Framework

Bruce Y. — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 18:40:24 +0000

I was looking to see if there were any frameworks for HTML 5 and came across SproutCore. It’s an MVC framework and has some similarity to GWT in that it compiles all the code into HTML/JS/CSS that should work across browsers without plug-ins. Also like GWT, it has a bunch of panels, buttons, and controls [...]

Keep Content Above the Fold? Breaking the Myth

Young-Ki K. — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 22:44:43 +0000

An article that questions the theory of making sure all content shows up above the fold.

Over the last 6 years we’ve watched over 800 user testing sessions between us and on only 3 occasions have we seen the page fold as a barrier to users getting to the content they want.

The myth of the page fold: [...]

Java 7: New Language Features

Bruce Y. — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 17:15:49 +0000

Java 7 has some smaller syntactic changes that look like they'll be helpful for your everyday dev