Tuesday, 4th September 2007
Ideas rot if you don't do something with them. I used to try to hoard them, but they rotted. Now I just blog them or tell people about them. Sometimes they still rot, but sometimes someone finds them useful in one way or another.
CouchDb: Some Context. CouchDb developer Jan Lehnardt wrote up detailed notes on slides from a presentation he gave back in June, explaining most of what’s interesting about CouchDb (although without the new JavaScript function query language).
Primary & Secondary Actions in Web Forms. Fascinating results from an eye tracking study on the placement of “Submit” and “Cancel” buttons—one layout was a whole six seconds slower than the others. Luke Wroblewski’s “Web Form Design Best Practices” book looks like it will be excellent.
Django on Jython: What I’ve done until now. It’s not quite there yet (the new Jython is Python 2.2 with a few 2.3 features; Django requires 2.3 at least) but it’s looking pretty promising.
Opera 9.5 (Kestrel). The latest Opera alpha includes a bunch of CSS3 features (including an almost full implementation of CSS3 Selectors) as well as the ability to use SVG for scalable background images.
I've actually been using the latest version of JAWS recently, as part of my work on HTML5. From a usability point of view it is possibly the worst software I have ever used. I'm still horrified at how bad the accessibility situation is. All this time I've been hearing people worried about whether or not Web pages have longdesc attributes specified or whatnot, when in fact the biggest problems facing blind users are so much more fundamental as to make image-related issues seem almost trivial in comparison.