An aircraft carrier is incredibly secure; it’s safe, it’s backed by the government, it’s got infrastructure and it’s built to last.
But everyone still wants to ride the luxury yacht.
Archive for 2009
On Boating
Sep 23
- Image via Wikipedia
If you’ve downloaded Blend 3- or if you’ve heard a bit about it- you may have heard of the prototyping tool Sketchflow. It’s an extension of the Microsoft Expression Blend tool, and allows you to quickly design a site’s flow, page by page, and then define the components within it.
I started playing around with Sketchflow when I was tasked with coming up with a “grand master plan” for a project that I wanted to take on. Creating the page flow seemed easy enough; it wasn’t long before I had a nice little tree drawn that covered everything from the first page to the last, with neat little arrows directing the user’s flow. When you hit F5 (or build), you’re taken to a compiled version of the site, from which you can navigate to each of your pages. Pretty neat.
The real power came out when I started dropping in labels, textboxes, and buttons, and then attaching events from each of those buttons to navigate to other pages. Suddenly, I was able to take my prototype to the next level- instead of bits of scrap paper, I was creating an interactable demo that I could show off, that saved notes and annotations for later reviewal. As soon as I had it figured out (mostly), I showed the other person that I was working with how to set up, and within a matter of minutes, we were designing away.
There’s a big difference when you can show off a “working” prototype instead of a few concept drawings; you could get a feel for the flow of the application, and because it felt more real, you could do a bit more of a gut-check. It felt closer to production, even though it really wasn’t any further than that scrap paper; and it took about as much time (in fact, probably less, edits are easier in digital format). And if you do feel inclined to shuffle around dead plants, you can always export the whole project as a Word doc.
P.S., one small hint- the “sketch” style is not on by default. It’s hidden under the controls chevron, if you click the triangle next to “Styles” and then “Sketchflow”. It is a HUGE PAIN to change styles… which kind of baffles me.
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- Image via CrunchBase
More Google loving! This time, it’s a plugin for Firebug (the best tool in the world for developers- get it now) that Google created, called Page Speed. Here’s the breakdown, and here’s why it rocks.
Page Speed analyzes your code, running the same checks that Google uses for their own sites- checking for things like unoptimized images, un-gzipped code, slow CSS, uncompressed Javascript, and more; and then it delivers you a neat little report, which you can then use as a checklist of things to fix. Page Speed allowed me to cut over half a meg from the page requests from one of the projects I was working on; kind of a big deal. Even if you think your application is amazing, there’s a small chance that a quick 20-second test can tell you something that’ll save you bandwidth, and by extension, money. Saving money is good, and saving your visitors time and bandwidth is great.
Check it out, and revel in the awesomeness.
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- Image by carveconsulting via Flickr
(skip down a little further if you don’t need an introduction to Google Analytics.)
I love Google Analytics. In fact, I’m a big fan of Google as a whole, and I do the majority of my work using Google Docs, Calendar, and Gmail (online collaboration! oh, and free) and Google Analytics is a beautiful tool for businesses, whether their website’s primary focus is online sales or just a small info-about-my-business site. If you don’t have some kind of tracking, you’re missing out on very important information; GA is a good place to start. Anybody can put GA into their website, and everybody should put something in.
The way GA works is by dropping a snippet of Javascript into your page; this javascript runs a series of tests against the visitor’s browser, checking screen resolution, flash capabilities, seeing if the user is unique, watching the user’s path through the website, checking the user’s location, and much, much more (all collected anonymously). This is all put into an interface where you can see the data collected and organized. However, AJAX applications don’t function as normal websites- you don’t get a new page hit every time you fire off an UpdatePanel, because it’s not a full page refresh. So, we need to do a little trickery to get things to work the way we want them to.
(you can start reading again if you skipped earlier.)
If you have the Google Analytics in the host page (whether the aspx page, or more likely, the master page), then you have to register a client script block that calls the trackpageview method. If you use jQuery, it’ll look something like:
ScriptManager.RegisterClientScriptBlock(UpdatePanelID, typeof(UpdatePanel), "uniqueIdentifierString", "$(document).ready(function(){ pageTracker._trackPageview('/pagename'); });", true);
If you’re not using jQuery, you’ll have to do a little more work to attach to the window’s onload event, but it’s pretty similar.
What you’re doing is registering a script block to execute when the UpdatePanel updates (because it won’t execute JS returned in the text), and using the pageTracker object (that the GA code you copied when you first set up GA on your site created) to force a pageview for a page you define. For my applications, I generally use something like “/dataentry/guestbook/edit” or “/dataentry/guestbook/delete” so that I can easily track guestbook views, as well as edits / deletes. It’s both a way to track controls you load via AJAX, and a cheap shot at logging (not perfect data, though, so you’re still best off doing all of your own logging on events, of course.)
The official Google help doc on the subject is also here: http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55519
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- Image by Matrixizationized via Flickr
I’ve almost totally exclusively switched to Chrome, kind of.
It’s so much better than FireFox. Don’t get me wrong- FireFox is great- but it’s just not Chrome. I recently caught myself in the act of groaning when I had to open up FireFox just so that I could run (the absolutely FANTASTIC) FireBug, the same way that a year ago I groaned when I had to open up IE for testing. It just takes so long to boot, and in those eight seconds, I could have opened Chrome a dozen times. I’m writing this post in FireFox because it has Zemanta, not because I want to.
It’s strange when a browser that I fought against, and then fought for, fell so quickly when Google threw it’s weight into the arena. I was crazy about FireFox; every day I extolled its merits to coworkers, to family, to strangers who happened to glance my way. I do the same thing now, but haltingly, with a line like “but if you really want to see something fast check this out,” as I load up Chrome.
Oh, come quickly, Chrome extensions, and may I banish FireFox to the realm of “browsers to load when testing”. FireFox, it was great while it lasted. Maybe someday.
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