I’ve been invited to be a part of the 2003-2004 AIFIA Advisory Board. There’s so much exciting stuff to be done in IA, especially in the Spanish-speaking world. I’m commited to be a useful resource to help increase awareness of our profession in our part of the world, and AIfIA can be a great vehicle to do this.
Sitepoint: “You visit Tower Records, go to the Electronic section, find category K, locate Kraftwerk, and select their Tour De France CD. Great! You?re off to the checkout and? Hang on. Where?s the checkout? hey?ve moved it to the second floor.” Great way to point out the inconsistencies that some sites permit on their interfaces; it’s a useful analogy to explain UI/IA issues to lay people. It’s going into my arsenal…
Douglas Bowman has published a technique for rendering CSS-based tabbed interfaces with image backgrounds. This is something I’ve been looking to do for a while, and Douglas’ implementation seems simple and elegant. Thanks Douglas!
![[Stylized tabs using rounded corners and subtle three-dimensional shading.]](http://www.alistapart.com/d/slidingdoors/tabex2.gif){kind=small}
(While you’re there, check out A List Apart’s new design.)
I’ve always been cautious about recommending Flash for use on public sites. Although I think it has valid uses (demonstrations that require animation, for example), for the most part it is used as “instant excitement”. I believe that this is because there are people that believe that things on a screen have to move if anyone’s ever going to notice them. In other words, they think that if the web were more like TV, they’d be able to sell more.
Here’s a good reason to be conservative about the use of Flash: it seems that Microsoft will release a new version of Internet Explorer early next year that will address Eolas Technologies’ lawsuit. In order to make IE compliant, MS will be changing the way it displays active content, including Flash. This will probably wreak havoc on hundreds of thousands of sites that use Flash.
Here’s an MSDN article advising developers on what to do about it. My advice: before putting a Flash item on a page ask yourself: “Does this really need to swirl/swoosh/rush/shift/turn/zoom/fade/fuzz, or is it just a lame attempt to make something boring seem exciting?”
Office 2003 is out. The most interesting thing about it is its collaboration functionalities. I’ve seen demos of this, and it’s very cool—however, it requires that everyone in the organization be using Office 2003, which is unfortunately not the case in most companies. Used correctly, these tools could go a long way towards the much-vaunted concept of the “paperless office”.
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