Sam’s random musings

lAsk 37signals: What is the best way to get customers who signup to actually use a product?:

This reminds me of the old “hosting a party” metaphor for web apps. Just because you’ve invited someone over to your house/app, doesn’t mean your hosting duties are over. You still need to welcome your guests, show them around, offer some introductions, and make sure they get into the flow.

That’s why the blank slate, the first screen people see, is so key. If it’s unwelcoming, people may not stick around.

This is a big deal for services/sites that have self sign, or have anykind of unguided experience. It is said that a ui should be self teaching, but have you ever seen one. The on the web we are so free to make unique user experiences that are not tied to interface guidelines or even native control widgets. In this is a great danger there are advantages to things like the Apple Human Interface Guidelines as limiting and restrictive as they may seem. To be able to leverage the vast experiences that your user has had (remember that a user is a human not a thing) has immense value. It speaks to using native widgets (or at least try to give the same sense of purpose as the native widget)

But let it be said that what you do for your user on their first experience in your app will reap great rewards (I mean $$) if you leave your user hanging they will not ‘hang’ out and find all your cool stuff. Assume that your mental model of how the app will be experienced is wrong, show them they way.

(Via Signal vs. Noise.)

Multi-Safari: Testing with 10 versions of Safari at once:

Michel Fortin has created special versions of Safari that allow you to run them all on the same machine. This allows you to test your Ajax application in a variety of versions.

There are similar things for explorer and firefox so this is a great addition to the developers tool box…

(Via Ajaxian Blog.)

PHP on Cruise - Assuring compatibility with new PHP versions:

This is definately something I really want to add to my workflow, but I need to tune it to work with SimpleTest that I use with my PHP Projects….

(Via Sebastian Nohn.)

Styling File Inputs with CSS and the DOM:

Nifty CSS and JavaScript library from Shaun Inman for styling file inputs in web forms.

 ★ 

Ok now these look ‘nice’

(Via Daring Fireball.)

Navigating the HTML email jungle:

We’re ramping up our emailing efforts and decided to start sending out HTML newsletters to customers. (We’ve always sent out plain-text emails but figured some minimal styling would help liven things up a bit.) So we designed a nice, simple email using clean code. The first one is this brief Basecamp Newsletter.

It took a while to get to this version though. First, we ran our simply styled email through Mailchimp Inbox Inspector (demo), a useful tool you can use to view HTML newsletters in a variety of email apps.

It came up perfect everywhere except Outlook 2007, Windows Live Mail, and Lotus Notes. Strangely, it looked fine in Outlook 2006 but busted in Outlook 2007.

The reason? As Campaign Monitor put it, Microsoft decided to take email design back 5 years.

If you do find yourself inclineded to do html email generation it does behoove you too check out the mailchimp inspector and take the time to read some of these links…

(Via Signal vs. Noise.)

jMaki 1.0 Final Release: Ajax for Java and PHP:

Greg Murray has put the stake in the ground and released jMaki 1.0. The release comes with “bundles” for PHP and Java which you can choose on the download area.

Included in the bundles:

• The core jMaki framework.
• Sample applications.
• Ant task for creating applications and adding widgets and necessary dependencies to those applications.
• All the scripts and widget libraries.

To see more, check out the jMaki Samples.

(Via Ajaxian Blog.)

CSSVista: Tweak CSS and see it in IE and Firefox at the same time:

CSSVista is a free Windows application for web developers which lets you edit your CSS code live in both Internet Explorer and Firefox simultaneously.

The software is brought to us by the authors of Litmus, a tool that tests your websites on a set of browsers.

cool tool for windows web developers, I won’t use it for a couple of reasons, I’m a mac-a-holic and too much of an engineer to worry about pixel perfection…

(Via Ajaxian Blog.)

Jonathan Street’s Blog: Lightning Fast Sites & Better Benchmarks:

Jonathan Street has a few tips for developers out there looking to speed things up on their site - seven tips towards “lightning fast sites”.

Some small things to look at but if you do them a lot, it might pay to change your ways… don't forget to read the fine print

(Via PHPDeveloper.org.)