If you haven’t heard of SUBERNOVA, it’s an online project management application (designed and developed by us!) that makes you more productive by taking the stress out of remembering important details of your projects, lets you track time, send invoices and estimates, collaborate with team mates or clients and keeps your business smooth by keeping tabs on late payments, deadlines and more.

via @adechong

]]> http://hex.sg/blog/2010/02/24/human-interface-lovely/feed/ 0 http://hex.sg/blog/2010/02/20/html5-experiments/ http://hex.sg/blog/2010/02/20/html5-experiments/#comments Sat, 20 Feb 2010 04:29:09 +0000 Hex http://hex.sg/blog/?p=271 Will HTML5 replace Flash?

I was skeptical at first, until a few experiments with HTML5 pops up across the web that caught my attention.

These experiments looks like they were built with Flash, but they’re not. What’s more, the performance was incredibly better than Flash.

Here’s two awesome examples (note: you need to view them on a modern browser eg. Safari, Firefox, Google Chrome, NOT IE6!):

Sketchpad

View it here ->

A stunning “Photoshop” like application built in HTML5. You don’t have to register, just start painting. Years ago, this was only possible with Flash, but not anymore.

HTML Canvas Experiment

View it here ->

This looks like it was done in Flash AS3 + Papervision or other 3D framework. But no, it was coded in HTML5 combined with a javascript based particle engine.

The same high gloss magazines but with interactive elements. What a brand new experience!

Adobe announced that AIR would run on Android, and Adobe has already announced its Packager for iPhone tool that will allow Flash apps (including AIR) to run on Apple mobile platforms.

That is exciting! Can’t wait to leverage our existing AS3 skills to build native mobile apps for iPhone and iPad.

Awesome video found via Twitip.

I thought so too but if you really use Twitter like you would using Facebook, you’ll never make the most out of Twitter’s potential.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is about updating what matters to you, what is interesting to you, and how these might be valuable to your followers once you update and share it with them. It’s all about providing value to your followers and in turn receiving them from people you choose to follow. It’s about 1 on 1 conversations with people, even with people you don’t even know, and being very personal about it.

Using Twitter for Search

Most often than not, I use Twitter’s search in substitution to Google to find out more information about things that I’m interested in, as the results you get from Twitter are real time voices of people. Take the Mumbai attacks incident for example, during the event, doing a search on Twitter will get you real time information about the incident, even right from the mouth of people who are at the place of incident, something that Google cannot provide in that sense.

Twitter for Marketeers

Twitter is also one of the most effective social network tools for marketeers to reach out to people who are interested about their products. Take Dell for example, who recently adopted Twitter for it’s marketing effort to spread the news about their latest promotion in real time and as a result earned $1million in revenue just by using Twitter itself. At last count Dell have 39,429 followers in their Twitter network. 39,429 people have followed Dell voluntarily to receive real time deals. Which means Dell can always reach out to 39,429 people in seconds whenever they want to spread the news about a deal.

Twitter for Bloggers

Twitter is great for content providers like bloggers for example. Everyone who blogs knows that it is very difficult to keep pumping out great content/post on their blogs for their community more than once a day, but by using Twitter, you can give out valuable information via short burst of tweets to your community who follows you on Twitter. Other than that, if you have a large community of followers, you can let them know via a tweet that you’ve updated your blog with a new post. When users find your post valuable and useful, they might tweet it to their network of followers and you will get increased traffic as a result.

Twitter Misuse

But hold your horses if you are thinking about using it purely as a marketing tool, and using it to solely to sell your product and not providing value or interacting with others. Because you’ll lose followers in the long run. Remember, Twitter is as much about giving as it is about taking.

Cost of Twitter

*Update
Twitter will remain free for use for everyone including individuals, celebrities and companies.

Here’s the latest post from Twitter’s blog regarding this.
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Twitter has been free just like Facebook or any other social networks. It is still free, but recently there has been talks about Twitter getting down to business, charging commercial users soon, but how they define “commercial users” is still not clear at this point.

To find out more about using Twitter, checkout this great slideshow “How Twitter Changed my Life” (top of page), by business and entrepreneurship student MinXuan Lee.

You can get more tips and tricks about using Twitter at Twitip, a very useful blog about Twitter by Darren Rowse, a very successful blogger who started Problogger.net and Digital Photography School.

*Follow us on Twitter if you will (@hex_sg or @benhomie, @greenlaundry), we’re using Twitter for leisure if you’re wondering.

Flash, yesterday

Several years ago when Flash first made it’s debut, almost everyone who uses Flash are excited about creating the next flashy website, injecting the “wow factors” into every site they built by creating splash pages, lengthy flash intros, cheesy sounds, ambient or groovy background music with no “on/off” buttons, packing in lots of effects that either takes away too much of the users’ attention or having the user to wait too long for the website to load. Not mentioning weird interfaces and hard to use navigation systems which developers deemed “cool”. Though, I’m not denying the fact that I am guilty of some of the above mentioned in the early days.

Flash is Great But Prone to Being Abused

The great thing about Flash is that it is so versatile and flexible that you can build almost anything with it, websites, microsites, rich internet applications, games, mobile applications, desktop applications (AIR) etc, but the flip side of the coin is that Flash has been used irresponsibly by so many to make websites “as cool as possible” that it have earned some bad reputation over the years.

Loading Time

Take for example, when we speak to our clients about building their websites, they all share the same concern – loading time. Because that is the most apparent. Users don’t like to wait too long to interact with a site to start with as users have extremely short attention span today. Users these days have a queue of so many other sites to visit, news to read, blogs to follow, they have less reasons to wait another second. If you’re not convinced, ask yourself if you like to wait in a queue.

Among this common concern, bad utilization of Flash is more than meets the eye.

User Experience

In short, the user interface, the consistency of effects, the smoothness of transitions, navigation systems etc are some of the factors that contribute to the user experience. A layman can’t spell it out in details why they hate it, they just hate it. This makes user experience more of an “art” than a “science”. It’s the responsibility of the Flash developer to make sure they “don’t hate it”, by using Flash responsibly. Flash is resource hungry by nature, so don’t make it worse.

Keeping Flash Alive

Its the onus of Flash developers today to ensure the longevity of Flash. No more Flash intros without skip buttons. No more flashy and slow moving animations before the user can finally see the content. No more sounds without “on/off” buttons. No more launching a flash site in a pop up window from a splash page. No more launching the user’s browser into fullscreen mode without their consent. No more “experimental” or hard to use navigation systems that makes it hard for the user to learn, nobody likes to learn how to navigate a site anyways, when they use a door knob, turn on/off the lights, turn on/off the tap, they don’t have to learn in order to interact with it, so why do they have to on a website?

Splash pages

Think about it, do you really need a splash page? The whole purpose of splash pages was to inform users of the required screen size and it requires flash player to view the site, but you know what, who cares? Technology has been evolving faster than you can imagine, huge monitors are common these days, 1024×768 is the new 800×600 and 99% of internet users have Flash player installed. Lastly, please refrain from telling the user they need Flash Player 10 to view the site when it only takes Flash Player 8. And by the way, nobody likes to follow rules when using the internet, so please do your users a favor. Accommodate the user than have the user accommodate you.

Content Architecture

It is crucial to have a website planned out extensively in it’s skeleton form before anything else. Bad planning of a site leads to bad user experience, that is when users move their mouse to the top right corner of the screen and click the close button immediately.

As mentioned earlier, Flash is very flexible in terms of where you want to position elements of your site like buttons for example, but that doesn’t mean you can put them anywhere.

Flash Today

It has been several years since we have expressed our enthusiasm by releasing countless great or annoying flashy Flash sites, pleasing or pissing off countless others. It is time for us developers to grow up and to think more in the user’s point of view than our own.

Users these days are more content hungry than ever, leading to the rise of blogs that generates valuable content to meet user’s demands and at the same time monetizing their effort. This means more users are interacting with standards compliant websites more often than ever, giving them even lesser reason to learn how to navigate around a badly designed Flash site.

Being a good Flash designer or developer is more than just knowing how to script bells and whistles, it is how well the end user can interact with it that is the most important.

As web usage has been increasing throughout the years, even if you don’t own a personal website, you most probably own a blog. Having a website without being able to track the number of visits and where they’re coming from is almost like putting your site to waste.

Here’s a quick one explaining the basic terms of web statistics so you can better appreciate the use of it. Keep in mind that the terms used by various web statistic services might differ a little from each other. Some might refer to “Unique visitors” as “New visitors” or “Referrers” as “Traffic sources” etc. But they share similar meanings.

Web Statistics & their terms

Unique Visits
Your web counter logs your users IP addresses. When a user visits your site, your web counter will log him/her as 1 unique visit. Even if the user returns to your homepage, or refreshes your site 10 times for example, your web counter still logs it as 1 unique visit. Unique visitor logs are much more accurate in recent times with broadband access, as your IP address won’t change too frequently unless you’re still sing 56k dial-ups where your IP address changes each time you connect to the internet.

Page Views
This is the number of times your website has been accessed at any page the web statistics code has been pasted into. This number does not take into account the user’s IP address. If the user accesses your website 10 times, the number of page views logged is 10. If the user accesses your your site’s homepage once, viewing 10 pages, the number of page views logged is 11.

Most advertisers are interested in this figure as this is a basic measure of the number of impressions their advertisements will get if they advertise on your site.

Returning Visits
This measures your “visitor’s loyalty”. The more popular your site is, the higher the number. One of the most important factor when measuring a blog, as this shows how interested your user is that makes them check your site again for new content.

Referrers
My favourite part of web statistics is referrers, or your traffic sources. Who is linking you? Who loves you? Where does your visitor come from? Referrers shows you the links so that you can check out the site and see what they’re saying about your site.

As a part of the crucial factors of SEO (search engine optimization), being linked up at as many other sites ranks your site higher in search engines. This is also a measure of the “link worthiness” of your website.

Search Keyword
This is an analysis of how users discover your site, which keyword they use and which search engine. Perfect for your SEO efforts, as you’ll know which keyword is the most popular. You’ll also get an idea of how successful your SEO efforts are, for example if you’re selling wine and when a user search for “wine” on google, your site appears at the number one position, this shows that your SEO efforts is applaudable. Congrats. You don’t have to pay for search engine advertising anymore. When this happens prepare to hire more employees to handle your surge in business leads.

Search keyword numbers also contributes to your unique visitors numbers.

Browsers / Operating System / Screen Resolutions / Flash Versions / Java Support
As you can tell these are very straightforward, the stats tells you which browsers, OS, resolutions, flash player versions, are the most popular these days, and also if their computers have java support.

If you look at screen resolutions for example you’ll realize that 800×600 resolutions does not appear at the first few most used screen resolutions anymore, who needs tiny screens when they can have large screens at a cheap price today (2008). The most popular screen resolution now is 1024×768, which is also a basis of the websites we create today.

Countries
Shows you which countries your website has been viewed from and which countries loves your site more. If you’re doing a global business, only having hits locally means you have to re-think about your marketing efforts.

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There are more kinds of other statistics that different web statistics services measure, some even measure which links on your website has been clicked, or if you own a blog, what search terms they use to search within your blog.

Free and Great Web Statistic Services

We recommend Statcounter, it’s free and gives you comprehensive statistics about your website, most importantly they don’t force you to append their logo on your site to have your site tracked, as compared to other free statistic services. Even sows you a Google Map of where your visitors comes from. The only catch is they make revenue through advertisements, so be prepared to see ads on your stats account.

One other service you can consider is Google Analytics, free, no ads and also is an invisible counter. Wide variety of information you can see about your side, even works with Google Adwords. If you use Adwords, Google Analytics is perfect as you’ll be able track your conversion rates (how your ad dollars converts to revenue). The only thing about Google Analytics is that it might be too overwhelming for first time users.

Both sites gives you the basics of web statistics including other bells and whistles. It’s up to your personal or business preference, try them to see which one works better for you, or you can even use both on one website.

Hope you have a better understanding about web statistics after this post.

Aside from mini notebooks, most notebooks are heavy and we all lived with that. Apple didn’t leave it at that, instead they came up with an innovative solution to solve that problem, by carving each new notebooks from a single piece of aluminum.

This not only reduces faults and breakdowns, but reduces the weight of the notebooks as they are not constructed from different pieces of metal.

The click button on the trackpad was also removed and trackpad widened leaving more room for multitouch gestures like swiping, pinching, rotating etc. The whole trackpad is a click button by the way (2 fingers for right click).

Here’s some pictures of the new slimmer Macbook Pro 15” to ogle at, enjoy.