Strange behaviour of the blog cms..

As I maneuvered into the blog 'dashboard', I found something quite strange: The usually 1.5-2 cm wide edit buttons were suddenly 5-7 cm wide. Is this some freak accident which happens every 1.000.000.000 time someone visits the page, or is it something that has to do with the coding?

Either way, that's not what I was thinking of when entering the site today :-)

Some design...
Well, I continued the design of the crossword site today, adding some nifty 'background-repeating-thingies' (borders that look good, using photoshop good old gradient...). Of course, I ran into some problems, the foremost being the psitioning of the different images... Since you can't put more than one background image in a div (or other element), I had to try working around this problem. I wanted a design using rounded corners and gradients between the menu background colour to the main background colour. This gave me the problems of having two corners and three sides being covered by two divs only. Certainly I could have skipped the gradient and only made soft corners, but since the client impled that they wanted a certain design, who am I to say no to a challenge? ;-)

Either way, since it's midsummers eve (swedish 'almost-holiday'), I decided to go the easy way - I got rid of one gradient, moved one corner to an almost unused div (...) and decided to put away the last corner until tomorrow, even though I believe know how to position it :-)

Finally started the design

I finally finished the planning for the design of the site I'm making. I started off with some simple three panel layout, using div's and CSS for positioning and colours. It actually took some experimenting before deciding on that.

Since they want images for links, it's going to take some tweaking to make it usable. However, I think it's an interesting challenge making a 'playful' site, at the same time trying to make it accessible for different browsers, platforms etc... From start I was considering using an existing solution I had since way back, just tweaking the css, changing some background images etc, but this proved difficult since the design was quite different from what I had in that project, meaning I would have to clean up a lot before tweaking.

After a lot of tweaking, and deleting of entries I had no use for in this design, I could finally relax for a while. I shut down the design-computer, writing this final line for the night, happy with a good starting design...

Finally some action

I finally got an email from the guy I'm working with, saying that we can start planning more on the crozzword site we're going to make. I'll start with a simple design, of course considering Usability and other issues.

I'll probably start off by creating a some simple div's with images, conitnuing with a simple image which is supposed to remind of a crossword - gebius isn't it? ;-)

Continuing I'll create three boxes on the right for news, updates etc, while a menu will be on the right, showing different kinds of puzzles and settings. On top, users will see - except for logo and crossword image - their earned points, login-name etc.

We'll see how that goes, and how it develops until end :-)

Now I'm just waiting for my two books to arrive from amazon: ASP.net Unleashed and ASP.net for Web Designers, so I can make a good impression on the coding for the client ;-)

Survived Usability exam

The Usability exam was about as hard as I had thought it would, but I believe my grade will be good enough from it :-)

The site we tested was a corporate website, full of popups on whatever you clicked. This seemed very unprofessional, and I had almost three pages of remarks about it - considering every remark is around 2 rows of text that's a lot. They had links which didn't work, the text wasn't resizable, almost every link opened a new window etcetera...

Then of course the next question in the exam was more about marketing than about Usability imho. The question was about how the company should communicate their tagline to visitors. Obviously, I put a Usability-perspective on it, saying that they have to be nice to their users to get them to come back...

The third and last question was about mobile usability, considering cellphones and PDA's. This is an area I find interesting, but sadly we only had about half an hour lecture on it, and that wasn't even a good lecture. Of course I wrote things about the smaller size, battery life time etc...

In the end, I was just glad to get out of there :-) Now there's two weeks until next exam. Then it will be about Location based mobile applications in a group exam.... we're starting preparations tonight...

Time for Usability studies

Nope, not actually checking the usability of anything 'real', just having another exam tomorrow, and studying for it today - at least after lunch.

As mentioned a few posts back, we're using the "Don't make me think" book from Steve Krug. This book is a good source for personal studies in the area of Usability, but I'm a bit sceptic to if it's enough for an academic course. The book gives an outstanding introduction to Usability and the most important parts in web site design. However, some more depth is needed for an academic course in my humble opinion - making me happy that we recieved a great number of articles in the area as well - giving us knowledge also about the facts surrounding Usability, including different methods, cooperative strategy, tactics and operations, budget proposals and even lectures on mobile usability and eye-tracking with tests of Tobii equipment. Considering all that was included in the course, perhaps I should have been happy about the course. However, I find that what we need for the exam is more to be able to make quotes from famous usability experts than to think and argue for our answers. Considering I'm a thinker, not one to always remember who says what, this was not a good course for me. At least I'm happy with the knowledge gained, which after all is the most important.

One area in this usability course I will consider studying more, is the area of mobile usability. This mostly looks at mobile phones and PDA's, but this is not an area I'll look into during at least the next six months. During this period I'll probably concentrate on Computer graphics, both using OpenGL and 3Ds Max and probably looking at the game mentioned in a previous post, while at the same time learning about the .net framework, esepcially for web applications. I am however considering a project management course as well, but I wouldn't know which other course to skip then :-) That's the curse of finding too many interesting choices...

Well weell - now back to studying :-)

Time for some testing

I decided to test w.bloggar for use with blogger, and it seems to be working perfectly. Nice being able to write while on the ferry or in a train without a connection, since that's when I actually have time. The ability to update both this and the blog I share with my girlfriend is pretty nice :-)

At the moment I'm trying to install Windows 2003 on another computer . and it's not going as easy as I had foreseen... I'm having some trouble coming online with it. I so far succesfully installed Firefox and ZoneAlarm Pro on the machine, without a need to go online, since I had those programs already. Together with MSOffice, it's the only installed programs at the moment.

For some reason nothing associated to getting online seems to be working - I'm starting to think I should make a clean install. So far I've tried ipconfig un der the cmd prompt, the Net connection wizard and of course I've also gone through all the settings I could think of in Zonealarm...

Everything else seem to be working fine, except for the Service Control Manager telling me that at least one service or driver failed during system startup, I wonder if that could be where I should look...

I'll just find a way to reinstall the drivers for the network card before trying anything else - luckily I can get online and download drivers with the WinXP installation on the same machine :-)

After a while logged in to XP, I found out which driver was used there. When trying to install the same on Win 2003 it took a while before I had any luck with it - the usual way going through the device manager wouldn't work with that driver, the same thing was the case for other ways I tried... I finally went back to WinXP, download another driver and went back into W2k3 and managed to install - after a few MS warnings about the Cnet driver hadn't passed this and that. I'm happy that neither XP or 2k3 takes time to startup or shut down at least.

Tomorrow I'll be studying Usability for my exam on wednesday - the book we've been using is Steve Krug's Don't make me think, which is one of the best I've seen in that area. Hopefully I will also find out how to create an Amazon recommendation box here, giving a chance to publish book reviews and recommendations here :-)

Today I started rebuilding one of my old computers so it should work as a HTPC (Home Theater PC)

Of course I had to start by putting the TV card in, and actually find the drivers for it. This wasn't easy, but after a couple of hours I had TV on the PC, using freeware drivers since I couldn't find any old driver section on the manufacturers website. The worst thing in the process, was that the computer had to be rebooted a few times because of freezing. After figuring out the problem here (some bad driver...), I had to search for ages before finding anything to use for the remote control.

After all this hassle, I found out/remembered that the sound had to be connected on the outside, and of course I didn't have a cable for it.... meaning that in the end I'll have to buy a new card to get it with sound and everything - just as well, since I want to try getting a digital tv tuner card anyway :-)