Tesmond's Useful Design

Discovered a "bug" with Googles Annotated Time Line. I developed a lovely performance monitor which would monitor a large number of tests across our servers. The number of test was planned to be ever increasing. Started off with 6 tests and everything was working fine. I added checkboxes to turn on/off the different tests using showDataColumns/hideDataColumns. This worked brilliantly. The tests grew until there were 11 tests in total. At this point one of the checkboxes started failing. It was using hideDataColumns(id) where id = 10 to hide the tenth data column. Unfortunately this caused lines 0 and 1 to disappear from the Annotated Time Line. It appears that if the value parsed is a string then it will interpret this as an array and so it is necessary to parse the values as integers. Thought I would mention this incase anyone else came across this.

Some organisations are highly developed, they recognise the pervasive way that their brand is influenced by all the facets of their organisation. Just take a look at Apple, a highly popular and very successful brand that recognises that high quality software, combined with high quality hardware combined with high quality customer service. This is all wrapped up with a website which provides a relatively low level of support friction . Sony sadly is not an example of a well structured support mechanism. Below I will provide an example of a poor customer service interaction I received with Sony, which started with failure of information in the website, this continue through to the Sony Centre store and resulted in disatisfaction in the Sony Centre, the Sony Support website and by proxy the whole Sony brand. If you search for accessories under the NEX camera system they list numerous items which are not appropriate for an NEX camera, however, I did not realise this until I purchased o...

People don't read they scan -  Really? Every single web design book, and limitless online articles all advise you that people do not read they scan web pages. They cite tons of studies with scary statistics such as people will click the back button within 2 seconds, they will not read sentences and they will quickly browse your material. Because of these reasons all of the aforementioned articles recommend to re-write your body copy with this in mind, cut down the text as much as possible. Why do readers scan and not read? Is it the medium of web browsing that means you cannot read you have to scan? Many people point to studies showing that reading the same text on a computer takes longer than it does on paper. Well studies do suggest that this is true , but does this really mean that people only scan? One book on web design I have read recommended performing a ruthless cut of the details of an articles body copy. It is commonly stated that you should Start with the mos...

Well I was looking into adding a shift select on a checkbox table. After performing a quick search I found a jquery plugin . This was a great start, but I found it would not unselect successfully. I made some minor modifications and now it appears to work in IE9 and FF... (function($){   function toggleSelected(element, shouldSelect) {     $(element).attr("checked", shouldSelect);     if(shouldSelect){         $(element).parents("tr").addClass("selected");     } else {         $(element).parents("tr").removeClass("selected");     }   }     $.fn.shiftSelectTable = function(){     var $table = $(this);         $table.find(":checkbox").click(function(event){       var last = $table.data("jquery-shift-select-table.last");       $table.data("j...

So you have written an HTML5 site on your local intranet with some lovely CCS3 and run it up in Firefox and you feel smug, all your HTML and CSS are perfectly formed, but you run it up in IE9 and all the CSS3 goodness has gone away leaving your lack luster IE7 version of your site.   Why is IE9 running in IE7 compatibility mode? IE9 has a hidden setting that forces it to run in compatibility mode when it encounters any intranet websites. Microsoft have detailed this behaviour in a Blog about what they call Smart compatibility mode . You can easily switch off the compatibility mode for specific machines using the internet tools mentioned in the article above, but most of the time developers do not have the luxury of applying corporate wide settings of this nature. Avoiding Smart compatibility with X-UA-Compatible Luckily there is a single line of HTML you can that you can use to override this behaviour: <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge,c...

The company I am working for likes to support our product only on Windows platforms that are officially supported by Microsoft.  It certainly is easier to tell the client.  Well Microsoft has a nice website  for anyone contemplating IE6 support. Looks like if you are aiming at the Chinese market your website had better support IE6!

I heard a news story today which made me so angry I had to write about it here. Researchers of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME) have received death threats from a number of ME suffers. Why would they do such a thing?  Aren't these researchers just trying to help them? The reason for the threats is the suggestion by a number of researches that the condition is a mental health problem and not an unknown virus, and can be potentially treated through psychiatric care. For some strange reason people are offended if they are told they have a mental health problem, but being told that they have a weak and feeble body is apparently fine. It is not even just a simple case of blame diversion, because there are other instances where the cause of a problem can be "blamed" on the patient but they accept it.  For example if someone goes to the doctor with back pain they may well accept the statement that the cause is the way you sit at your desk, every day your posture is causin...