On November 20th I setup an advertising campaign on Facebook for my startup, CloudContacts. The ad setup program crashed a few times but eventually I was able to get the ad running. I selected men and women from 25 to 53 with a college degree as my initial test audience. Facebook told me that there were somewhere about 33 million users for the demographics I selected. Clearly this 33 million number is just profiles they have, not actual activity.
Link: Results of One Mans Facebook Ad Campaign, Ouch!
With a back-to-the-future technology called JavaFX to be launched Thursday, Sun Microsystems hopes to attract a new class of developer while building a much-needed new revenue source.
Link: With JavaFX, Sun seeks new coders, new revenue
Sass is a meta-language on top of CSS that‘s used to describe the style of a document cleanly and structurally, with more power than flat CSS allows. Sass both provides a simpler, more elegant syntax for CSS and implements various features that are useful for creating manageable stylesheets.
Link: Introducing Sass (Syntactically Awesome StyleSheets)
Photo-sharing site Flickr's mobile interface (m.flickr.com) got a facelift and a few upgrades today, notably the ability to play back video clips. Right now the Flickr folks say video playback is limited to the iPhone and iPod touch, but despite several tries on my iPhone, I never did see any video movement. (Update: Video playback's rolling out to iPhone/iPod touch users over the next few weeks.) Once it's available to all, mobile Flickrinos will love this upgrade.
Link: Flickr: Flickr Updates its Mobile Interface
If you’re looking for a time killer, most of you tend to play casual games online. It is the fast-growing segment that accounts for about 10% of the $30 billion global video game industry.
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Meet this week’s start-ups, Jim, founder of Kongregate, a company that deems themselves as the YouTube of casual games and Jameson, founder of Mochi Media, a company that provides the essential tools for casual game developers to track and embed advertising. “With games… the repeat interaction is what’s driving the advertisers interest.” says Jameson.
(November, 2007)
Link: Jim Greer, Kongregate and Jameson Hsu, Mochi Media, monetizing casual games?
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 3: Disable flash plugin
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?
Internet Explorer 7: Toggle Flash
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
