02 - Design with Words
Well this week was all about designing with words and at the beginning of the lecture Chris and Nick showed us the “Defensive Design for the Web” book, and I am proud to say that I have read this book while I was on my placement year. I found relating to this lecture easier as I already knew how the book worked with working examples with a thumbs up and bad examples with a thumbs down – Simple. The book goes onto explain error messages, the language used, forms and other crisis moments that you may come across. I watched the short movie, “Copy goes here”, and I noticed the 37 Signals logo straight away in the frame and wonder did anybody else see this straight away too?
Another book Chris and Nick recommended for this week was Steve Krug’s “Don't Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability”, and I have also bought this book and currently reading it as we speak, so far really enjoying the book and would definately recommend it.
JavaScript Libraries
02 - Design with Words ↑
This week I went looking into JavaScript Libraries and found a lot of useful tutorials and the main JavaScript Libraries that I found were:
Nettuts tutorial
02 - Design with Words ↑
I found a really nice tutorial website, nettuts and I found a good tutorial on to use jQuery to load in and animtate content using Ajax. They tutorial even accounts for seo as it allows the "#id_name" to be attached at the end of the tutorial for easy indexing and referencing.
jQuery Touch
02 - Design with Words ↑jQuery has loads of documenation, tutorials and plugins on its website. After some research I came across a plugin called jQuery Touch – just for the iPhone. My eyes lite up as this would be perfect for me to use for my iPhone web app for my major project.
Registered iPhone Developer
02 - Design with Words ↑
I have signed up to apple to be an iphone developer and download the iphone SDK, which included the iphone simulator, dashcode, instruments and xcode. After playing with dashcode and the iphone simulator quite a bit, I noticed that most iphone apps are created with CSS3/web-kit as user-friendly experince of dynamic and animated content. This really surprised me as I was unaware of these capabilities of CSS3 and it looks like it could replace a lot of what JavaScript brings to a website.
David Walsh's Blog
02 - Design with Words ↑
When looking at some of my rss feeds I have, I felt that this week would be a good time to mention David Walsh’s blog. He has a great blog when it comes all to JavaScript, he covers both Mootools and jQuery in his tutorials but mainly is a mootools developer. From reading his blog he explains how jQuery and Mootools are great libraries but that Mootools is more for intermediate and advanced JavaScript libraries, but also highlights the ease of use of jQuery amongst beginners. I really like his tutorials when he is able translate a Mootools plugin into jQuery and jQuery plugin into Mootools.
Plans for Next Week
- Continue to improve the design of the blog, thinking of using sIFR3 or FLIR to improve the fonts used on my blog