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.

Punchcut is explaining some of the things we need to consider when designing UIs for touch-based interfaces such as the Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch, HP’s TouchSmart tx2 multi-touch laptop, Microsoft Surface.

source: http://blog.ekini.net

An ugly url such as http://www.example.com/page.html?sid=asdf314159265 can specify in the HEAD part of the document the following:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/page.html"/>

That tells search engines that the preferred location of this url (the “canonical” location, in search engine speak) is http://example.com/page.html instead of http://www.example.com/page.html?sid=asdf314159265 .

Check out this video by Matt Cutts of Google who explains the new element in-depth:

There are already some plugin for WP Canonical links, or e-commerce Magento plugin canonical URL’s extension, and Drupal CMS.

I would love to hear what you think about the canonical links.

He propose a new layout system on extending the CSS property “position” by adding value “:matrix (x,y)”. The Matrix Layouts should be like table-based layouts combined with absolute positioning and without any “hacks” for overflowing.

How this should work? You use the position property to specify where the box should be placed within the grid. Have a look at the following example diagram:

It’s a 3 column design but with a little extra pizzazz in the middle column. I’ve also lettered each section by their source order. Now, let’s look at what that code would look like with matrix layouts:

#a { position: matrix(1,2, 1,4); }
#b { position: matrix(2,2); }
#c { position: matrix(2,3); }
#d { position: matrix(2,4); }
#e { position: matrix(1,1, 2,1); }
#f { position: matrix(1,5, 2,5); }

I think this be a kick-ass CSS feature and I would love to use in my layouts. This will bring so much fun to CSS work and I’m sure that others would love it, but there is long way till it’s really implemented. Also will be good to have the Matrix Layout implemented in a CSS framework.

You can read the full blog post here or the Matrix Layout concept here.

One of the elements that need to be translated are the buttons. They are very fancy, with icon and glow effect so I’m implenting them using the full-button-resize technique that I described in a previous post. Everything is going ok but I have some problems with Safari, the height of the button should be with 1px less that the Firefox css code, so I search for a css hack.  Nobody likes css hack but most of us have use of them once in a while.

Here is the way that I solved my problem:

@media screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio:0) {
/* Safari 3.0 and Chrome rules here */
}

If yesterday I post about wireframing, today I found a awesome resource that can make sketching a easier job: OmniGraffle Sketch Stencils. This is a set of shapes for making wireframes in OmniGraffle. It consists of most of the basic elements you’ll need to create user interface specifications. Starting from this, here is another Sketch Stencils that could be very handy when trying to communicate to clients for which you are not doing  visual design, you are only sketching ideas.

Clive Howard, has a interesting post where he talk as his personal experience with a project without a plan and wireframes.

Wireframing is one of the first steps in your planning process and arguably it’s one of the most important ones. This is when the idea starts to take shape as an application, becoming boxes and buttons that users will interact with. This article will take you through a wireframing process; who should be involved, the tools to use and tips to enable you to make better wireframes.

Here are 20 short tips that you should take in consideration:

1. Be Clear About Your Objective
2. Make it Functional, Not Pretty
3. Draw on Your Experience
4. Decide Who’s in Charge?
5. Involve Everyone
6. Set a Deadline for Completing the Wireframe
7. Keep it clean
8. Avoid Designing Your Wireframe Too Much
9. Remember that UI is not UX
10. Think About the User
11. Don’t Get Lazy
12. Organise Your Wireframe into Sections
13. Number Your Pages
14. Look for Repetition
15. Check it all Makes Sense
16. Ads are Functional
17. It’s Not Just the Public Site
18. Know When to Stop
19. Choose the Right Tools
20. Consider Dependencies

Do you have any other tips to add to the list?
What do you think about wireframing?

Discover more about how this works in practice…

• Read Effective Browser Support
• Read A Demonstration of Graded Browser Support

http://www.jamesward.com/census/

Here is a good video tutorial on how to make Adobe Flex to work with PHP true XML and AMF (Action Message Format). You will learn how Flex WebServices and RemoteOjects work with Zend Framework. For me this tutorial has answer to many questions and I recommend you to have a look at it if you are Flex beginner like me.

http://www.viddler.com/explore/skinnerfam95/videos/1/

As the title say I have start to learn Flex. I’m consider myself a beginner and I will try to post my experience developing Flex applications. So let me start from the beginning ….

What is Flex?

Flex is a highly productive, free open source framework for building and maintaining expressive web applications that deploy consistently on all major browsers, desktops, and operating systems. Flex is designed in order to give Flash Developers an edge when developing Rich Internet Applications (RIAs).

RIAs created with Flex can run in the browser using Flash Player or on the desktop on Adobe AIR™, the cross-operating system runtime. This enables Flex applications to run consistently across all major browsers and on the desktop. And using AIR, Flex applications can access local data and system resources on the desktop. Pretty cool!

One of the major reasons why Flex is becoming more and more popular is because it utilizes ActionScript 3.0.

• Flex Showcase
• Flex with ActionScript 3.0

What do I need to start Flex?

In order to start to develop fast Flex applications you need to download from Adobe.com website Adobe Flex Builder, which is free.  Flex Builder 3 it is an Eclipse based development tool enabling intelligent coding, interactive step-through debugging, and visual design of the user interface layout, appearance, and behavior of RIAs. It includes the complete Flex framework, including compilers, a component library, and debuggers, pretty everything what you need to start to work.

• Download Adobe Flex Builder 3
• How to use Flex Builder 3

What is a Flex Application?

A Flex application at it’s very basic level is a Flash .swf file embedded in a generated HTML file. Since Flex outputs it’s data as a .swf, this allows you to utilize everything that Flash Player is famous for; dynamic animations, sound and video handling, and of course, the Flash Drawing API. The HTML that Flex spits out has the necessary JavaScript code in order to detect whether the user has the Flash Player installed, or whether they need to update to the current player.

More documentation

The community for Flex developers is big. You will find most of you answers on Adobe Flex 3, if not search Google. Here are some important stating points:

• Flex Developers Center
• Flex 3 Developers Guide
• Flex 3 Language Reference

From the Youtube Blog:

Last year we launched our eCommerce platform for YouTube, which allows users to easily “click-to-buy” products — like songs and movies — related to the content they’re watching on the site. The past few months have demonstrated that great content on YouTube leads to increased sales. For example, when Monty Python launched their channel in November, not only did their YouTube videos shoot to the top of the most viewed lists, but their DVDs also quickly climbed to No. 2 on Amazon’s Movies & TV bestsellers list, with increased sales of 23,000 percent.

Hat tip to Xavier Casanova of VideoRetailer.org for posting this news update on the Youtube ecommerce project.

Chris Coyier has post a very interesting tutorial of tracking clicks. Why do I need this? Well it’s a cool proof of concept and can be used in production as tool for examine users behavior in some situations.  Some major design decisions can depend on it.

The tutorial shows you how to develop a clickmap using PHP, Mysql and of course …. jQuery. Basic we will track the mouse clicks and post the clicks data to the PHP file doing the database saving. Then some graphics are displayed on the click locations.

Read the tutorial