I'm Jason Long, an independent web developer and designer living in Columbus, Ohio. I'm married, have two kids, and I recently ran my first marathon. I have a site called House of Buttons for collecting great UI buttons.
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Icons created by (or inspired by) komodomedia.com
Styled Maps Using Google Maps API Version 3 - You probably know a lot of these tips if you’ve done some Google Maps integration work, but you may not know that you can change the colors of land, water, and road elements, simplify or remove roads, remove text labels, and display pseudo-3D buildings.
Google TV - This space is about to explode. With so many high-caliber players competing, they’re going to have to bring their A game to survive. End result = consumers win.
Ricardo Cabello (aka. Mr. Doob) has a great writeup discussing the making of The Wilderness Downtown, the Arcade Fire HTML 5 experiment. It’s an absolute web polymath’s treasure chest with jewels including Javascript sequencers, 3D rendering, geocoding, issues with WebGL and CoreGraphics, boid simulations (for the bird flocks), tweening, and color correction (for which the code above was a part of).
As part of their recent design refresh, Google removed almost all underlines from links on the search results page. They kept the primary link titles underlined while cleaning up secondary and supportive UI links for reduced visual clutter.
Methinks the Google News team could benefit from some of this text-decoration:none goodness.
Peter Kasting, UI engineer for Google Chrome, gives a rundown on just how much work they’ve put into making the user interface exceptionally fast and responsive.
Two things that I found particularly interesting:
Back when the project was just starting and the browser did almost nothing, they benchmarked the startup time performance (again, for an app that was basically a skeleton) and then set a policy that no future change could ever slow the startup time below that threshold. I can’t imagine how challenging that must have been.
It was really exiting to hear that Google, with their reputation for objective and scientifically measurable test results, embraced the ideas of perceived performance (how responsive something is, regardless of actual performance) and cognitive friction. Cognitive Friction is a term that Alan Cooper came up with in The Inmates Are Running the Asylum to describe the mental energy required to decipher an interface in order to determine how to proceed. In other words, a UI can be blazingly fast from a technical standpoint, but it doesn’t matter if it takes a user 17 seconds to find the control they need.
Google Earth adds even more awesome with amazingly detailed 3D buildings of New York City.
Google’s master plan of modeling the entire planet takes a step closer using crowdsourcing with their Model Your Town Competition - the finalists seen here.
A Chrome extension that provides keyboard-based navigation with in the spirit of the Vim editor.
I’m no longer a Vim power user, but its keybindings are still deeply ingrained in my muscle memory. Some of my most frequently used sites use the J/K keys for up/down navigation (Gmail, Google Reader, Tumblr, etc.), but this extension will allow you to do so on any site (and allows you to disable the extension on sites that already make use of keyboard navigtion).
The developer went way beyond the bare minimum:
h scroll left j scroll down k scroll up l scroll right gg scroll to top of the page G scroll to bottom of the page, scroll down a page , scroll up a page scroll down a full page scroll up a full page f activate link hints mode to open in current tab F activate link hints mode to open in new tab r reload gf view source zi zoom in zo zoom out / enter find mode -- type your search query and hit enter to search or esc to cancel n cycle forward to the next find match N cycle backward to the previous find match i enter insert mode -- all commands will be ignored until you hit esc to exit y copy the current url to the clipboard ba, H go back in history fw, fo, L go forward in history J, gT go one tab left K, gt go one tab right t create tab d close current tab u restore closed tab (i.e. unwind the 'd' command)
Update: I found a promising Rails plugin for this.
I’ve got a couple of projects that I’d be interested in trying out the recently released Closure Tools on. Have any workflow best practices started to surface yet in regards to compiling your app’s Javascript with these tools? The compiler UI is slick in that you can see the results of the compiled code, but I’m thinking you’d want to automate things with the command line tool somehow (rake task, Git pre-commit hook? Maybe with the compiler API on the server?).
Duncan Grazier may be on to something with his comjiler project. I’d be interested in hearing about how people are using the Closure compiler in the wild - Rails apps or otherwise.
Love it or hate it, here’s another look into Google’s data-driven design processes.
