So yesterday I began a short series on the Yahoo! User Interface or YUI for short.

I began with the tab view, and today I am going to talk about the connection manager.

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Fonts are always good…free ones are even better. You can never have too many fonts when designing logos, menus, etc.

Lifehacker has posted up where to get the top 500 free fonts on the web.

Check it.

So over the last several weeks I have been building a site for a client (it is an internally used app, otherwise I would give you a link). It is a relatively straight forward app for a real estate company so they can track their leads and contacts.

I could have done it the standard way, but I like to try out new stuff as much as I can. In this case I wanted to implement a little Ajax. I find this is a good way to get paid to experiment. It is a win/win for both me and the client. I get to learn a new technology and the client gets a much “fancier” site without having to pay for it (I never charge for the learning curve when I am the one who wants to try out something new).

The site was just a good old fashioned “data collection” site. Easy enough, so to make things interesting, I decided to use the Yahoo! User Interface or YUI. What is that? Well, it is basically Yahoo!’s way of doing the whole Ajax thing. But it is also really cool because they have some nice CSS templates that are built in and ready to use.

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When I was a kid hungry hungry hippos was one of my alltime favorite games. Looking back I have no idea why, but to a 10 year old that game was just “rad”.

So then there is this tshirt from bustedtees, which is just too funny.

I had seen this shirt before several weeks ago, but never bought it. Now they are out of my size…puh.

Just wanted to wish you all a very happy easter. Hope you have a good one!

So most of the time all you hear about nowadays is how awesome the web is, but truth be told, there are a whole lotta developers who never write any code for the web…sad but true.

When people think of business or desktop apps, they think of boring grey boxes that have boring grey buttons on them. If a designer gets really fancy, there might be an icon somewhere. Not the stuff of legend to be sure (but it pays the bills right?).

Enter WPF and Xaml and say goodbye to the boring old grey forms and buttons (rejoice!).
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Poynter Online is mainly a journalist site, however they sometimes have some good articles that apply online as well. Case in point, a few days ago they posted a new article about their new EyeTrack07 study.

What does this have to do with UI? Well basically it debunks the myth that online readers have ADD. That is a big difference from what we have been hearing the last few years about users with an attention span of a gnat. Also, these eye studies are great to check out because it really gives you a look at what is important on the screen so you can design accordingly.

Its an interesting read that is worth checking out, plus if you are really interested, they have some videos about the study as well.

The March 27th A List Apart article is entitled “Ruining the User Experience“. As usual, it is a great read, but it brings up some interesting questions.

First off, using the waiter analogy, I think, is brilliant. That could be because I was a waiter in a previous life, but it does seem to get the point of catering to your customers across quite nicely. I believe, overall Mr. Gustafson describes a standard that we all should aspire to, but the question I have is “how much time should be spent to reach it”?

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Hey, this is really exciting, I just got confirmation that I will be interviewing the guys over at Netvibes. Since they are over in France and all, the interview will be done Q&A style over email.

Not sure how long the whole process will take, but I am beginning to formulate the questions. If you want to be a part of that, send any and all questions to me, and I will forward the best ones on.

Get ‘em in soon, because I need to get them attached to the carrier pigeon soon (those birds have a long flight ahead of them).

So this post is the first of what I call “discussions”. Basically it is where I throw out a topic and y’all pick it up and run with it. Simple and sweet.

So here we go. For the first topic the question is simply:

When designing an app, what makes you decide to go simple and clean over flashy/fancy, and vice versa?

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