The Google Calendar team is proud to announce the public release of our support for the CalDAV protocol. You can now use Apple iCal with your Google Calendar, so you can work even when you're offline, sync almost instantly, respond to invitations from others and see the free/busy data of your friends and coworkers.
Link: Official Google Mac Blog: Google Calendar now supports Apple iCal
It's probably the least glamourous part of web design, but information design is by no means the least important. Locating and consuming information is the quintessential web task, far surpassing buying, playing and communicating, all of which include a good portion of information design themselves. How users find and then avail themselves of all that information is affected by how it is structured and presented. Thus every web designer should be equipped to make qualified and informed decisions on just how to do this.
Link: 9 Information Design Tips to Make You a Better Web Designer – PSDTUTS
I get asked quite often about how to temporarily disable flash in Firefox and IE. Although there are Firefox Add-ons like Adblock and Flashblock, these don’t actually deactivate the plugin. They simply replace flash elements with static elements. For testing purposes its important to understand exactly what users without flash will see. With that in mind, here are two techniques I use to quickly disable the flash plugin in Firefox 3 and IE 7.
Firefox makes it very easy to disable any browser plugin. Simply go to Tools->Add-ons->Plugins. Select “Shockwave Flash” from the list of plugins and click the disable button. Thats it. No need to restart. When your ready to activate flash again simply follow the same steps. Screenshot not good enough for you?
Toggle Flash is a toolbar button that executes a script to temporarily disable flash in the browser. Again, no need to restart. Click the button and flash is disabled. When your ready to re-enable flash just click the button again. There is one quirk in that it dosent have any sort of visual feedback on whether flash is enabled or disabled. You sort of have to just remember. Regardless its a simple and very useful tool.
Encountering 404 errors is not new. Often, developers provide custom 404 pages to make the experience a little less frustrating. However, for a custom 404 page to be truly useful, it should not only provide relevant information to the user, but should also provide immediate feedback to the developer so that, when possible, the problem can be fixed.
Link: A List Apart: Articles: A More Useful 404
How to conduct 'guerilla testing' to perfect usability
Link: The ultimate guide to testing your website
