One important interaction indicator on the web is the mouse cursor. The default cursor arrow changes into a pointing hand when you hover over links for example, which indicates they are indeed links and can be clicked on. It also changes into other things to differentiate context, for example it can change into a text input cursor when hovering over text fields to indicate you can type there.

When styling your website with CSS, in some cases you may lose the correct cursor type for certain elements. It’s important to retain this indicator as it will inform the user about how the item they’re hovering over can be used (see affordances). The solution is easy: if the cursor type is wrong, specify it using the CSS “cursor” property.

Continue reading more comments and examples on the the original post on from Usability Post

Learn how to Create a Retro Animated Flip-Down Clock is a tutorial published by Nettus. They are showing how they create an animated flip down clock inspired by the 70’s. Using the Mootools framework, we are trying to replicate the flip action of the pads and make it as lifelike as possible. With it’s retro styling, it could be a really neat thing to add to your website.

The technique that they suggest is interesting and I see this tutorial applied on a maintenance page, something like “Back online in …. “. Pretty cool

Social media has become an integral part of modern society. There are general social networks with user bases larger than the population of most countries. There are niche sites for virtually every special interest out there. There are sites to share photos, videos, status updates, sites for meeting new people and sites to connect with old friends. It seems there are social solutions to just about every need.

Webdesignerdepot has reviewed the history and evolution of social media from its humble beginnings to the present day. Their conclusion is that Social media has come a long way since the days of BBSs and IRC chats and media continues to evolve on a daily basis. With major social networks and social media sites making changes and improvements on an almost daily basis, it’s sure to keep evolving in coming years.

Read more

Flex 3.0 CSS Properties List

The guys from teehanlax+lax have designed a iPhone application that introduces a new optional home screen. A screen that doesn’t require you to scan for red dots with numbers inside of them. Instead it would display information and notifications of things that are new and relevant to you.

I think their propose is quite interesting and awesome and Apple might implement it.

View here other screenshots.

Blank extension for building “System > Configuration” area of Magento admin interface.

You can download ActiveCodeline_CoolDash from Inhoo.net blog, there you can find also the original module announcement.

The order has a method setShippingAmount and a method getShippingAmount and I tried to use them. I adjust the total shipping amount by increading with my module handling fee.

$shipping_amount = $order->getShippingAmount();
$order->setShippingAmount( $shipping_amount + $mine_handling_amount );

The way that I did it was to create a method updateShippingAmount and add it as observe for checkout_type_onepage_save_order event in the module/etc/config.xml file:

public function updateShippingAmount( $observer )
{
   $MyPaymentMethod = Mage::getSingleton('namespace/mypaymentmethod');

   $order = $observer->getEvent()->getOrder();
   $payment = $order->getPayment()->getData();

   if( $payment['method'] == $MyPaymentMethod->getCode() )
   {
       $shipping_amount =  $order->getShippingAmount();
       $order->setShippingAmount( $shipping_amount + $MyPaymentMethod->getPostHandlingCost() );
   }
}

There may be a few other ways to do it, but this is my way of doing it and wanted to share with other Magento developer. If you know other way to do it please write it below.

Snippi is the community driven Magento code snippet sharing site. Site was started by Branko Ajzele, author of ActiveCodeline.com. Is is not another code sharing site is all about Magento code snippets. If you are a Magento developer this is a place where you can find your answers.

Check out http://snippi.net/

This is the best, simple and flexible jQuery Week Calendar. It is built on top of jquery and jquery ui and is inspired by other online weekly calendars such as Google Calendar.

Calendar events can be supplied as an array, url or function returning json. They can be dragged, dropped and resized. Lots of callbacks for customizing the way events are rendered plus callbacks for drag, drop, resize, mouseover, click etc. The jquery-week-calendar plugin is also highly configurable, enabling variable timeslots, readonly calendars, display of partial days, custom date formatting, direct manipulation of individual events for create, update, delete of events and much more.

This is one of the best jQuery plugins. If you need week calendar in your application I suggest to give it a try.

Origami is the Japanese art of folding paper, but the goal is to use small folds and creases to bring about delicate and intricate objects.

Origami Web 2.0 Logos

Paddy Donnelly has turned the Web 2.0 Apps/Sites Logos into origami style. You can download them here.

Tutorial

If you want to learn to make a simple origami logo you can start with Zen Elements tutorial: Create an Origami Logo

Nettuts released a basic Magento video tutorial last week.

Hundreds of ecommerce systems exist, but very few can match the power of Magento. In this screencast, I’ll demonstrate how to download and install Magento to a local host, configure some of the site options, and create simple and configurable products and categories for our test e-commerce site.

If you are curious about Magento and want a basic “how-to” intro, then this is for you:

If you need help on how to install or customize a Magento shop, please contact me.

Apache’s mod_deflate module provides the DEFLATE output filter that allows output from your server to be compressed before being sent to the client over the network.

There are two ways of enabling gzip compression:

1. Using Apache’s mod_deflate
2. Using PHP’s built-in functions

Encoding the output and setting the appropriate headers manually makes the code more portable. Keep in mind that there are hundreds of Linux distributions, each slightly different to significantly different. To allow portability the application should not make assumptions about the OS or config involved.

Using Apache

1. Enable mod_deflate

Debian/Ubuntu:

$ a2enmod deflate
$ /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload

2. Configure mode_deflate

$ nano /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/deflate.conf

#
# mod_deflate configuration
#
<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
 AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
 AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
 AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
 AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
 AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
 AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
 AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
 AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
 AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript

 DeflateCompressionLevel 9

 BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
 BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
 BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

 DeflateFilterNote Input instream
 DeflateFilterNote Output outstream
 DeflateFilterNote Ratio ratio
</IfModule>

Using PHP

Create a gzip compressed string in your bootstrap file:

try {
    $frontController = Zend_Controller_Front::getInstance();
    if (@strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING'], 'gzip') !== false) {
        ob_start();
        $frontController->dispatch();
        $output = gzencode(ob_get_contents(), 9);
        ob_end_clean();
        header('Content-Encoding: gzip');
        echo $output;
    } else {
        $frontController->dispatch();
    }
} catch (Exeption $e) {
    if (Zend_Registry::isRegistered('Zend_Log')) {
        Zend_Registry::get('Zend_Log')->err($e->getMessage());
    }
    $message = $e->getMessage() . "\n\n" . $e->getTraceAsString();
    /* trigger event */
}

Reference

Use mod_deflate to compress Web content delivered by Apache

Google Wave is a new real-time communication service that will launch to the public later this year. What is a wave?

A wave is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

If you want to find more about Google Wave:

• Google Official post
• Mashable Google Wave complete guide
• or Google the Web

The best way to learn a new language is to go to a country where it’s spoken and immerse yourself in the confusion. Soon the unfamiliar will become familiar, and before you know it you’ll be fluent.

If you’re interested in getting to know more about user experience, I recommend doing the same. You may choose to simply understand the terminology, or become conversant. You might later decide to tackle some of the more complex concepts.

Read Part 1 on Whitney’s blog, Pleasure and Pain.

And above all, the library is constantly maintained and updated. Expect to see new releases coming out on a regular basis. This library is dual licensed under MIT and GPL 2+ licenses

Have a look at demos >>

In first part of ClickTale Scrolling Report, they show that visitors scroll in a relative way – relative position inside the page, not based on absolute position in terms of pixels.

In the second part of ClickTale Scrolling Report, they analyze how much time visitors paid attention to each section of different-sized web pages as they scrolled through them.

Their report on scrolling makes the following conclusions:

It appears that visitors scroll in a relative way – about the same percentage of page views will reach the middle of a web page regardless of the actual page height in pixels.

Visitors appear to be using the location of the scroll bar but not the size of the tracker when scrolling, since the scroll bar location is a relative indicator and the scroll tracker size is an indicator of page height.

Below the 1,000 pixel-line, the number of visitors declines in a linear fashion vs. their relative page location.

Visitors’ Attention follows a similar pattern for pages of different heights. It peaks both near the page top, at 540 pixels, and near the bottom, about 500 pixels from the end of the page.

Excluding behavior effects at the page top and bottom, attention decreases exponentially as visitors scroll down the page.

Recommendations (i.e. what does this all mean to me?)

• The most valuable web page real-estate is located near the page top, between 0 and 800 pixels.
• Visitor Attention and Page Exposure peak at about the 540 pixel-line.
• If you have a long web page,  add “stop points” such as headers and images to prevent your visitors from quickly scrolling down the page. It will prevent their attention from waning towards the end of the page.
• The footer of your page is important! Users do pay quite a bit of attention to that area of your page.

A better ways to organize fonts by creating a spoof of the Periodic Table of Elements.

The Periodic Table of Typefaces covers a number of major fonts and includes information about the family and classification of each, the designer, the year the font was designed, and a ranking as cribbed from a number of internet sources.

As with traditional periodic tables, this table presents the subject matter grouped categorically.  The Table of Typefaces groups by families and classes of typefaces:  sans-serif, serif, script, blackletter, glyphic, display, grotesque, realist, didone, garalde, geometric, humanist, slab-serif and mixed.