As I mentioned, I want to give the new WordPress Image Gallery a try. I gathered up some photos from the 2011 SXSW Interactive Conference to use as an experiment.
The results? Easy to set up, easy to edit, easy to add titles and alt text. I don’t like that the thumbnails open in a separate window and that the Back button has to be used to return to the gallery. Putting only two thumbnails in each row would make the images large enough that users wouldn’t be so prone to click for a larger view, but still, that’s a drawback.
Designing for Emotion, written by Aarron Walter, is another of the brief but valuable books from A Book Apart. If you’ve read other books from A Book Apart you know they are high quality work from knowledgeable writers. This one is no exception.
With only 7 chapters and less than 100 pages to tell his tale, writer Aarron Walter gets right to it in a hurry. He explains what emotional design is and how it uses personality, humor, and positive experiences to meet human needs on web sites. Walter infuses the book with personality, humor and positive experiences, too, making it a delight to read. For example,
There’s a very practical reason that emotion and memory are so closely coupled—it keeps us alive. We would be doomed to repeat negative experiences and wouldn’t be able to consciously repeat positive experiences if we had no memory of them. Imagine eating a delicious four-pound log of bacon and not having the sense to eat another the following day. That’s a life not worth living, my friend.
That wasn’t the only remark in the book that made me smile. Walter does practice what he preaches.
He gives examples for each point he makes, giving the reader some real world examples to examine. In the chapter explaining what emotion design is, he points to Wufoo and Betabrand.
In the chapter on designing for humans, he talks about psychological principles that guide the emotional language and imagery web designers might employ. For example, “baby-face-bias”. Baby-face-bias triggers positive emotions with characters with large eyes, small nose and a pronounced forehead. It’s behind the successful imagery used by Brizzly, Twitter, StickyBits, and Walter’s own work at MailChimp. This chapter also talks about the use of contrast and aesthetics.
There’s a chapter on personality. Creating a website with personality gives users a sense of human-to-human interaction. He talks about personas and provides a detailed downloadable worksheet to help you create a design persona for your website. Online examples include Carbonmade and Housing Works.
In the chapter on emotional engagement, Walter talks about surprise, delight, anticipation, and priming. Examples in this chapter include Photojojo and the New Twitter. He discusses the idea of variable rewards from sites like Groupon, but I think the uncertainty of what will come next from the new app Siri on the iPhone 4S—which came out after this book was written—is a terrific example of baked in emotional engagement, surprise, delight and anticipation.
The next chapter is overcoming obstacles. This chapter deals with convincing users to click, sign up, complete the process and keep coming back. He discusses game theory, bribery and a sense of achievement. Mint and Dropbox are the examples described.
In the chapter called Forgiveness, Walter talks about what to do when you screw up, and how to help people overlook your shortcomings. Flickr is the example he uses in this chapter.
The final chapter is about risks and rewards. It talks about the risks of getting started with emotional design, and the rewards. CoffeeCup Software is cited as an example of how to start small with a limited time idea to see if it works. He describes the risk of starting a new site with emotional design in mind from the beginning. Designers can alienate users instead of making them feel good about a site with emotional design. Walter discusses some of those risks. He borrows the phrase progressive enhancement for those who want to work some personality into existing websites. The online example cites Blue Sky Resumes.
Finally, there is a list of resources for those who want to dig into the concepts from this book in more detail. The resources are genrally books about design principles, science, psychology, behavior, the human brain and user experience, but there are some online resources, too.
Summary: Brief but packed with useful concepts and concrete examples.
A review by Virginia DeBolt of Designing for Emotion (rating: 5 stars)
Themeefy looks great for instructors (and students who have to do a presentation). Read more about it at Digital Inspiration, where you can look at Amit’s sample about Steve Jobs.
Here’s an example from the Themeefy site. It’s free. Sign up with a Twitter or Facebook login.
Are you aware of Digitwirl? A weekly program that provides tips on interesting technology and includes some how to help for getting started with each topic. There’s an email sign up for the weekly release.
HTML5 & CSS3 For The Real World, written by Alexis Goldstein, Louis Lazaris and Estelle Weyl, is from Sitepoint (2011). This book takes on several topics that could fill an entire book individually, yet manages to serve each topic well. As you can tell from the title, the book talks about HTML5 and CSS3, but it also goes into complementary JavaScript/API topics like geolocation, offline web apps, web storage, Canvas, SVG, drag and drop.
The authors specifically point to the growing mobile market, and that focus is reflected in the chapters included in the book. They say,
Mobile Safari on iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad, Opera Mini and Opera Mobile, as well as the Android operating system’s web browser all provide strong levels of HTML5 and CSS3 support. New features and technologies supported by some of those browser include CSS3 colors and opacity, the Canvas API, Web Storage, SVG, CSS3 rounded corners, Offline Web Apps, and more.
The authors made a strong effort to be as up to date as one can possibly be in a hardcopy format. They mentioned very recent changes in HTML5. They knew what future versions of browsers were likely to support, and therefore, what vendor specific prefixes were no longer needed, or soon would not be needed.
The downloadable site adds valuable practical and hands-on experience with the examples in the book that many learners will appreciate. It gives you something concrete to grapple with in addition to the theoretical information behind what’s going on in a browser or other device. Since I tend to look at everything from an educator’s point of view, I think the downloadable files would be a real asset if this book was used to teach either HTML5 or CSS3 or both.
It’s a lot for one book, but it’s all handled well. Which makes this book a decent choice for someone who wants a single resource to guide them through the new technologies and tools that are available in and around HTML5 and CSS3. I wouldn’t recommend it for someone who didn’t already understand HTML and CSS, but it is certainly a valuable book for learning the latest information in those fields.
Summary: An all-inclusive resource for learning HTML5 and CSS3.
A review by Virginia DeBolt of HTML5 & CSS3 for the Real World (rating: 5 stars)
Google, Yahoo and Bing announced schema.org yesterday.
Many sites are generated from structured data, which is often stored in databases. When this data is formatted into HTML, it becomes very difficult to recover the original structured data. Many applications, especially search engines, can benefit greatly from direct access to this structured data. On-page markup enables search engines to understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results in order to make it easier for users to find relevant information on the web. Markup can also enable new tools and applications that make use of the structure.
A shared markup vocabulary makes easier for webmasters to decide on a markup schema and get the maximum benefit for their efforts. So, in the spirit of sitemaps.org, Bing, Google and Yahoo! have come together to provide a shared collection of schemas that webmasters can use.
I immediately began to think about how this would apply to my frequently used hReview microformat. I looked at the schema for books, and tried to see how I could incorporate that into a book review if I continue to use the hReview microformat to do book reviews.
Here’s what I came up with. I’d love comments. The additions to the hReview from the book schema are in red.
<div class="hreview"
itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Book">
<span style="display:none">product</span>
<p><img class="photo" src="image.jpg" alt="alt here"></p>
<div class="description" itemprop="reviews">
<p><a class="fn url"itemprop="name url" href="link here"
title="affiliate link to Amazon"><cite>book title
here</cite></a>
by <span itemprop="author">author's name</span> is from
<span itemprop="publisher">publisher's
name</span>, <span itemprop="datePublished">date
here</span>.
Text of the review here.</p>
<p>Text of the review here.</p>
<p>Text of the review here.</p>
<p class="summary">Summary: text of the summary</p>
<p><span class="reviewer vcard">A review by
<a href="http://www.webteacher.ws/" rel="me">Virginia
DeBolt</a></span> of <cite itemprop="name">
book title here</cite>
<span class="rating" itemprop="rating">
(rating: n stars)</span></span></p>
</div>
</div>
What I’m wondering.
Is the hReview microformat even needed since there is so much overlap between the book schema and the hReview microformat. It’s redundant. Should reviewers switch to the schema and abandon the microformat?
I’m wondering about putting an itemprop in the cite element, since most of the schema HTML is added with span tags. It seems more semantic to me.
What do you think? Are schemas going to replace microformats completely?
There’s a new free app called Clear Captions. It captions phone calls. It works with a phone and an Internet-connected computer, but it can also be downloaded as an app on iPad, iPod Touch or iPhone. When I heard about it and checked out clearcaptions.com, I thought it was worth a look. If it’s as accessible as the PR leads you to believe, it should be a great app.
I downloaded the iPhone app from iTunes and took a look. Here’s the sign up screen. I decided against Facebook, and created a new account. They wanted my full name and address and a password.
You enter the number you’re calling and your own number, and the call goes through a computer system. That part seems pretty obvious.
I got voice mail for the person I called, you can see the captioned version of that. Later I received a voice mail on my own phone that sounded like a recording of my call to the other number. When I talked to her a bit later, she said she also got a voicemail of her own voicemail message.
It wasn’t at all clear how to press 5 to leave a message, or even how to hang up. Plus, there was no way to put the call on speaker so I could hear and read at the same time. In fact, even with my ear to the phone, I didn’t hear a thing.
Since I considered the first call a fail – not because I got voice mail, but because I couldn’t operate my phone like I was on a call with hearing, talking, and using the number pad – I went to Clear Captions and looked at the Help information. Here’s their video on how to make a call.
That was what I did, but my results weren’t the same. Then I saw a Help video on making a call from a cell phone. Here it is.
Okay, so I need a bluetooth earpiece or earbuds. I got some ear buds ready. Plus, the call apparently should be made from the Phone app rather than from the Clear Captions app. I tried that – made a normal call. The person I was calling answered this time. The results were normal, no captions. I clicked the home screen during the call and opened the Clear Captions app while we were talking to see if there were captions, but there were not.
By then, I’d run out of Help videos from the site and still hadn’t made a satisfactory call that got captioned.
I didn’t try making a call from my computer using the Clear Captions web site.
I did go back to the Clear Captions app, thinking I’d try again with the app while wearing the earbuds. I couldn’t get rid of the screen showing the captions from the voice mail connection I’d made. I couldn’t enter new numbers to make a new call. I completely shut down my iPhone and restarted it after 5 minutes or so. After the reboot, the Clear Captions opening screen was the one where I could make a call. Rebooting the phone after every call is clearly not a satisfactory option.
After the reboot, I tried again from the Clear Captions app. The pesky screen was gone and we were back to the call screen. This time, when I hit call, it sent me to my Phone app and MY phone rang. When I answered it, it was my call going through to my friend. When she answered, a popup asked me if I wanted to view the call with captions. I said yes. There were captions, but if I were depending on them to make sense of the conversation, they would not have been satisfactory. You can see that it’s garbled. Parts of that are her statements, parts are mine. You can’t tell them apart. She said, “Is it working,” and “Paused” came out as Caused and many many words were left out completely.
After that I called my long suffering friend one more time. From my Phone app as the Help video says to do. This time, there was no pop up offering me the option to see captions and it went through as a normal voice call.
You can’t use it on an incoming call yet.
I don’t want to give up on this app, because I think it is important to the deaf and hard-of-hearing community. Nevertheless, I can’t report a good experience with it. It either doesn’t work as advertised, or the instructions on how to make it work are terribly inadequate. I support what they are doing at Clear Captions, and hope they will continue to make improvements.
My advice, if you really need it and want to start using it right now, is to ask the person you call to speak slowly and to reboot your phone after you install the app. Make the call from the Clear Captions app, not from the Phone app.
