28 October 2002

Usability from DesDev MACROMEDIA -- Good thoughts about Web site usability on DesDev. Get to know your audience and design for them—not for yourself or your colleagues Test your site with inexperienced web users Make the content on your first page rich and explanatory Archive content after redesigning or changing a site Include useful search terms in meta tags and titles Provide contact and copyright information on every page Provide search options Maintain consistency of design Think about noise, movement, or anything that spins twice ... no, wait ... three times Proofread the text on your sites Provide printer-friendly pages Enhance your pages—don't replace them

Flash MX Success Stories Flash MX -- Check out how washingtonpost.com coverage of the local area sniper shootings uses Flash MX for its maps and descriptive details. The Montgomery Country information includes video. Here's another one : ShelterNet provides Canadian women fleeing abuse with a ColdFusion MX and Flash MX interactive map to find a shelter near them. [Matt Brown's Radio Weblog]

Adam Curry on Webtalk Guys Adam Curry -- You can hear Adam Curry's audio-blog post on the webtalk guys radio show where Mitch Ratcliffe guest hosted. It also arrives as an enclosure in this RSS feed, so if you aggregate with Radio UserLand, you will automatically receive the mp3 file for immediate playback.

Sighting: Sony Electronics Offerings SONY -- Sony wants to tie its computers into all things entertainment. I've seen interesting things in European Sony Centres. Vaio Media is an alternative to Windows Media Center with its own interface for audio, video, and data management. Different PCs on a home network can use it to easily share content. Click to DVD makes it elementary to transfer video from a camcorder to a DVD. RoomLink is a little wireless device that attaches to your TV, allowing you to use your PC's media on the TV. All these things reflect Sony's business model. Sony aims to boost sales of digital camera, MP3 players, camcorders and TVs with its PC business, and vice versa. Once you get over the fact that Sony's memory stick is proprietary, the experience is rather seamless.

My Sony Vaio Experience BALLYBLOG -- I've liked Sony's laptops since the early days of the Vaio. It took me a while to understand that the name stood for Video Audio Integrated Operation but shortly after I figured that out, I bought a Vaio laptop. That was in December 2000. I dropped the Vaio several times during the course of an academic term, ultimately cracking an internal hinge attach point for the screen. Within a dozen times of opening the screen, I shorted out the motherboard. That meant I got 14 months of use out of the Vaio. I had the laptop on a 24-month payment plan and my finance plan says I have two more months of payments remaining. Will I get another Vaio, eke out wireless connectivity issues with my TransNote, or move up to a Powerbook?