A separate mobile website: no forking way

 interface, Internet News, Web Design  422 Responses »
May 092012
 

Karen McGrane warns about the dangers of content forking and tells us that the problem responsive design is trying to solve is really a problem with the CMS

The experience of using a mobile website should naturally be different from a desktop experience – not just visual presentation, content should be prioritised and structured differently. The risk, though, is that you’ll wind up maintaining different versions. News flash: this will be a disaster. Duplicate content. Out-of-sync updates. Wasted effort.

When usability pioneer Jakob Nielsen argued that you should “Build a separate mobile-optimised site (or mobile site) if you can afford it” where you cut features and content “that are not core to the mobile use case”, many within the mobile design and development community got out their torches and pitchforks. Seems like people who spend a lot of time thinking about mobile agree that a separate mobile website is “180-degrees backward”.

But what does a “separate mobile website” even mean?

Whether you’re talking about content or code, what you want to guard against is creating multiple versions of your website. It’s called forking, and it’s a forking nightmare from a maintenance perspective. If you fork your website into separate mobile and desktop versions, then you’re stuck updating both of them every time there’s a change. Avoiding this problem is tricky, even with sophisticated content management systems. But before we get there, let’s start with a simple scenario.

via A separate mobile website: no forking way | Opinion | .net magazine.

 

5 blunders your brand is making on Facebook Timeline

 interface, Marketing, Your Brand  240 Responses »
May 092012
 

Companies that neglect Timelines brand-friendly attributes will fall victim to the ever-distracted nature of the online consumer. At Socialbakers, we continuously analyze social media data to determine how brands can maximize their social media investments by posting engaging content to the most influential online users. Based on millions of points of global data, we have found the following mistakes cause the greatest hindrance to a companys success in using Timeline.

SOURCE: 5 blunders your brand is making on Facebook Timeline single page view – iMediaConnection.com.

 

Google Docs boasts 450 new fonts and 60 new templates

 interface, Internet News  401 Responses »
May 042012
 

The 60 new templates are designed for work, home, school, fun, holiday, and more. Examples of some of the types of templates include resumes, newsletters, recipes, photo sharing, and legal invoices.

Google has worked on vast improvements to its word processing program since it launched in 2007, including the addition of more than 200 updates to the core apps suite in the past year. These changes are apparently causing some users to make the switch from Microsoft Word.

Other Google Docs announcements from today include more options for inserting images into documents, charts in spreadsheets now have support for minor gridlines and customization, and users can set the default page size for new documents.

SOURCE: Google Docs boasts 450 new fonts and 60 new templates | Internet & Media – CNET News.

 

Does “Mastered for iTunes” matter to music? Ars puts it to the test

 interface, Internet News, Tech News  519 Responses »
May 012012
 

Some musicians and record executives have recently bemoaned the fact that what ends up on a fans iPod or iPhone is of arguably much lower quality than what is laid down on tape or hard drives in the studio. While some players in the industry have pushed for higher resolution downloads, Apples current solution involves adhering to long-recognized—if not always followed—industry best practices, along with an improved compression toolchain that squeezes the most out of high-quality master recordings while still producing a standard 256kbps AAC iTunes Plus file.

Shepard applauded Apples technical guidelines, which encourage mastering engineers to use less dynamic range compression, to refrain from pushing audio levels to the absolute limit, and to submit 24/96 files for direct conversion to 16/44.1 compressed iTunes Plus tracks. However, he doubted that submitting such high quality files would result in much difference in final sound quality. Shepards conclusions led CE Pro to claim that Mastered for iTunes is nothing more than “marketing hype.”

So, we set out to delve deeper into the technical aspects of Mastered for iTunes. We also attempted to do some of our own testing to see if there was any difference—good or bad—to be had from following the example of Masterdisk.

SOURCE: Does “Mastered for iTunes” matter to music? Ars puts it to the test.

 

Replace those frustrating Captchas with a simple visual game

 interface  748 Responses »
Apr 252012
 

If you hate those annoying Captcha words you need to figure out before posting on many websites including Dvice, then a company called Are You A Human feels your pain. Their system called PlayThru dumps the unreadable words, asking you instead to play a simple little visual game that requires some human knowledge.

SOURCE: Replace those frustrating Captchas with a simple visual game | DVICE.

Facebook Timeline Alienating 50% of its Users

 interface, Internet News  542 Responses »
Apr 242012
 

More than half of Facebook users are worried about timeline, according to a poll of 4,110 people by Sophos.

More specifically, of the 4,110 respondents to the Sophos poll:

  • 51.29 percent said timeline worried them;
  • 32.36 percent said they didn’t know why they were still on Facebook;
  • 8.39 percent guessed they’d get used to timeline; and
  • 7.96 percent liked timeline.

According to  Sophos, the type of Facebook user who would respond to one of its polls is likely more security-conscious than the average user on the social network.

Still, more than 50 percent expressing concern and fewer than eight percent giving timeline the thumbs-up isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement.

SOURCE: Online Marketing Trends: Facebook Timeline Alienating 50% of its Users.

 

Google Drive Interface Leaked in Employee Presentation

 interface, Internet News  344 Responses »
Apr 202012
 

Tuesday we heard rumors that Google will soon be launching Google Drive — its own cloud service — and now we have an exclusive screen shot of the Google Drive interface that seems to confirm that rumor.

A Google employee giving a presentation at a university in Brazil Tuesday appears to have accessed that presentation via Google Drive. Pedro Henrique Moschetta was at the keynote, and sent Mashable a shot of what may be Google’s cloud service in action.

“Some friends and I were watching a seminar with a Google employee called João Itaqui Google Enterprise director in Brazil here at Universidade Feevale Feevale University in Novo Hamburgo, RS — Brazil when we noticed he had an option called “Drive” in his Google toolbar.” says Moschetta. “I think he, as a senior employee, has early access to Google Drive before public announcement or release.”

SOURCE:  Google Drive Interface Leaked in Employee Presentation [EXCLUSIVE].

5 Biggest Facebook Timeline Mistakes

 interface, Your Brand  452 Responses »
Apr 182012
 

The Facebook Timeline for brands has been launched a few weeks ago but some Pages still need to learn from their mistakes.

 

SOURCE: 5 Biggest Facebook Timeline Mistakes – Socialbakers.

 

Facebook pages for artists now include ‘listen’ button

 interface, Internet News  235 Responses »
Apr 182012
 

Facebook has implemented a “listen” button on artists’ fan pages that lets users instantly stream songs from an artist’s catalog.

The button, which sits between options to Like and message the page below an artist’s cover photo, plays music using whichever Facebook-connected streaming service a person uses most frequently. Users can play and pause a song with the button, but they have to visit the streaming service to skip to the next song or fast forward through a track.

The feature will help users sample music when they visit an artist page for the first time and could help make Facebook a go-to option for people looking for new music, similar to how many people used MySpace in its heyday. Streaming services will benefit from the traffic and artists will appreciate Facebook linking to legally licensed versions of their work. Page tab application companies like ReverbNation and BandPage could suffer, since one of the key features they offer is music players for artists’ Facebook pages.

SOURCE: Facebook pages for artists now include ‘listen’ button.

 

Facebook Rolls Out Bigger Profile Images, Days After Google+

 interface, Internet News  497 Responses »
Apr 162012
 

Facebook Rolls Out Bigger Profile Images, Days After Google+: “Over the course of the last week, Facebook has started to roll out a small improvement to Facebook profiles, increasing the size of a user’s profile picture on their Timeline, a move that comes just days after Google updated Google+ profiles to sport a larger photo.

Previously, a Timeline photo measured 130 x 125 pixels, overlaying a user’s Timeline Cover image. The image is a smaller version of a user’s profile image, which can be displayed in full when a visitor clicks it.

However, as Emanuele Bartolomucci and a number of Twitter users have noticed, Facebook’s profile images now measure 166 x 160 pixels.

SOURCE: Online Marketing Trends: Facebook Rolls Out Bigger Profile Images, Days After Google+.

 

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