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8 September, 2008 11:54 am

10 Laws of Simplicity Developers should know

Posted by Richard Wong under Development | 3 Comments

Recently I revisited “” by John Maeda. He is a graphic designer, visual artist, and computer scientist at the MIT Media Lab. In the book, John proposes 10 laws for simplifying complex systems in business and life.

Although the book are mostly focused on product design, it could be applied to anything especially software development. It doesn’t matter whether you are coding or designing simplicity will always work and sale. Simpler code means less bug and less maintenance cost. Simpler interface means easier to learn and use.

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28 August, 2008 12:16 am

Evaluate the Quality of Your Website

Posted by Richard Wong under Development, Others | 2 Comments

Since I just updated the design of the site, I start thinking whether this new design is better. But realising there so many different aspect of site that we need to look at in order to measure the quality.

Then I found 50 Questions to Evaluate the Quality of Your Website by Carsten Cumbrowski from my starred item in google reader. It covers a wide range of areas including accessibility, design, navigation and more.

A sample of questions includes:

• Is content structurally separate from navigational elements?

• Are links labeled with anchor text that provides a clear indication of where they lead?
• Do clickable items stylistically indicate that they are clickable?
• How intuitive is it to navigate? Are signs obvious or obscured? Buttons/Links Like Text, that are not clickable and vice versa, links/buttons that cannot be identified as such
• Clear statement of PURPOSE of the site? Purpose must become clear within a few seconds without reading much or no text copy at all.

• Are the colors used harmonious and logically related?
• The fonts should be easily readable, and degrade gracefully.- Should look OK on various screen resolutions.

• Does the copywriting style suit the website’s purpose and ’speak’ to its target audience?

Although the list isn’t particularly targeting developers / designer, I think it is still a very useful list to reference if you are running your own site. If you can answer YES on most of the questions, you have done a great job. For me there are still a lot of work to do here…

20 August, 2008 9:09 pm

8 Golden Rules of Interface Design

Posted by Richard Wong under Design, Development | 29 Comments

Considering the only way users can communicate with your application is through the interface, interface design then should be one of the most important part of any application. A good interface will enhance the experience, usability, effectiveness or even success of your system.

From the book by Ben Shneiderman, he pointed out 8 rules to guide us to good interaction design.

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28 June, 2008 1:06 am

4 Plugins to turbocharge your Firebug

Posted by Richard Wong under Development, Javascript, Tools | 2 Comments

Anyone developing for the web will have at least used or heard of Firebug. It is very powerful tool for debugging and testing any web pages on Firefox. You can live edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.

Although Firebug is already packed with features, there are always rooms for extras. Since the creation of Firebug, plugins are being developed to extend the power of Firebug even further. Here is a list of useful plugins for Firebug.

Jiffy

Jiffy provides a very detail and visual view of the Javascript time measurements captured by . It allows you to get information of AJAX requests and other Javascript functions.

YSlow developed by Yahoo! is probably one of most famous Firebug extension out there. It analyzes web page performance and tells you why performance is slow. It gives you information on all the requests, load time, sizes and even give you tips to improve your site speed.

FireCookie

Instead of using other Firefox extensions to view cookies. This Firebug plugin allows developers like you to keep using the firebug interface to debug with cookies. FireCookie gives you the ability to view and manage cookies. It also has a console where you can see when cookies are created, changed or deleted.

FirePHP

For those PHP developers out there, FirePHP is enable you to print to the Firebug Console using simple PHP function call. The main benifit is that all the debugging data are hidden from normal user and you can review in a nicely format within Firebug console.

Updates:

So still want more plugins? You can always build your own. Jan Odvarko of Software is hard has a series of tutorial on creating a Firebug plugin.

5 June, 2008 11:01 pm

Beautiful Subversion Client for Mac

Posted by Richard Wong under Development, Tools | 0 Comment

As a developer, version control is an integral part of my development process. As one of many source version control system, Subversion can manage files and directories over time with a central repository hosted on a Subversion server. So team collaboration become a lot more manageable and effective, since all changes are logged and could be easily rollback.

Now Versions is providing us a brand new subversion client for the Mac. It has a very clean and intuitive interface that makes you really want to use it. So if you are not using subversion and want to give it a try, you can use a hosted Subservsion services like beanstalk. Then you can start versioning you code in no time!!!

You can check out the beta software here

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