22 April, 2008
in Technical and JavaScript.
Here’s some jQuery love for you front-end types. I have certainly been enjoying using jQuery a lot lately. So damn efficient and easy to use. An active community means there are lots of handy plug-in libraries out there to take care of your tabs, carousels and fadey bits… (If you’re a HTML/CSS person and you don’t know what all this jQuery stuff is about, have a look at these easy jQuery Tutorials for Designers.)
Once you start getting a few such libraries going on a site, you can end up with a whole pile of script includes in your header for minor user interface enhancements here and there. This can be a hassle to deploy over various page templates/master pages/etc, particularly if you work with large sites. More importantly, you want to minimise requests to the server if they’re not necessary - it’s been shown that reducing HTTP requests can reduce response times and improve server performance.
There are various ways you can reduce HTTP requests from the front-end (like using CSS sprites to reduce image requests, aggregating CSS and JS files), but the tip I want to share is to not include multiple javascript libraries (eg. jQuery plug-ins) on your pages but having your main JavaScript file load the relevant libraries on demand, as the need arises.
Continue reading ‘Load only the jQuery plugins you need, when you need them’
16 April, 2008
in Featured and Design.
We were recently discussing some quotes from Apple man Steve Jobs around the office, where he talked about his philosophy when it comes to design:
It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.
BusinessWeek, May 25 1998
So you can’t go out and ask people, you know, what the next big [thing.] There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, ‘If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me “A faster horse.”‘
Fortune, CNNMoney.com
These are really insightful quotes, especially if you work in creating anything for a consumer mass market. The big point here is that you can and should design for users but you can’t expect users to tell you how to innovate. What you find when you read more about Apple’s ethos is that the big innovations in design come from when you design for yourself. Make something *you* would want to use.
Continue reading ‘Designing for yourself’
29 March, 2008
in Flash and Design.
Well, looks like Adobe has pulled another one out of the bag with Photoshop Express, a web-based Flash application that lets you colour adjust, retouch and add effects to your photographs without installing anything.
The interface is really easy to use and it looks as though this is aimed at your average non-designer web user, with easily navigated albums and photo editing interface.
This is really setting a new benchmark in rich web apps. The beta is available for a test drive now.
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