EclecticGuy

For the last several weeks I’ve noticed strange things on my blog. For instance, when editing a post, my theme’s header appeared in the edit area! Occasionally I would see load failures on admin and blog pages. Yesterday, when I returned from SuperBoo VII, I logged in to post and there were no editing tools! I loaded a previous post and the text area was blank – or so I thought. Turned out the text was all white and I could see it if I selected … Continue Reading

I pre-ordered Snow Leopard from Apple to have it delivered first thing on its release date – August 28th, 2009! Apple came through, the package arrived by 10am and was waiting for me when I got home from work. The package is a single DVD installer. Simply insert the disk and double click the installer, it does the rest (no rebooting from the DVD). It took about 55 minutes start-to-finish to install on my 3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo iMac with one automated reboot during the … Continue Reading

Wow, another super easy and trouble-free, automated upgrade of my blog to version 2.8! Thank you Open Source.

The upgrade went smoothly last night during low activity hours. It always impresses me how sophisticated yet simple WordPress is to manage.

As I mentioned in the last Shrugh post, we’ve been getting a lot of great feedback and doing some brainstorming on Shrugh. Last time I described how users respond to shrughs. This time, I have a demo that shows the simplified shrugh creation process. It also has a couple of new bells and whistles – like how Shrugh automatically finds other shrughs similar to yours based on words in your shrugh and description.

My goal is to have this idea implemented in the next week … Continue Reading

My friend and UI guru Bob and I have been thinking about Shrugh. This collaboration has been really helpful and some good stuff has come out of it. As part of the initial discussion, I created a short demo on how a user responds to a shrugh that has been posted. You can see it here (and please leave feedback at the end). (This was, of course, created with balsamiq Mockups and my technique for making an … Continue Reading

As I make progress on Shrugh, I plan to capture the experience as I go. Last week I gave a status update on the Shrugh concept demo and feedback I’ve received. I’m still getting feedback (a good thing) but I have enough already on the concept and usability (collected on this Google Form) that I am ready to start exploring implementation.

As I mentioned in the last status update, I had done some prototyping in both … Continue Reading

First, I want to thank everyone for their feedback on Shrugh! The response has been great! I’ve been working on the demo (you may have seen several versions of it already) and now have a scripted demo that is reasonably complete. It shows how to create all 3 types of shrughs – Yes/No, List, and Pros & Cons. It also shows how you can tag and add notes to other Shrughie’s shrughs and follow Shrughies that you are interested in. Finally, the demo ends with … Continue Reading

I’ve cleaned up the Shrugh demo – thanks to everyone who emailed comments! I also end the demo by taking the user to a Google Form where they can leave feedback and comments. If you want to jump right to the form now (because you have already seen the demo), click Shrugh Feedback. If you want to see the updated demo, click here.

I am also considering using Google App Engine to develop and host Shrugh. I already know Python and there … Continue Reading

I’ve received lots of very positive feedback on my Assembling Demos from balsamiq Mockups posts. However, there have been a number of people asking “How do you know what the hotspot rectangle position and dimensions are?”.

To that, I have an answer: look at the Mockups generated XML file! Here is an example for a Button:

<control controlID=”23″ controlTypeID=”com.balsamiq.mockups::Button”
x=”139″ y=”393″ w=”82″ h=”-1″ zOrder=”6″ locked=”false” isInGroup=”-1″>
<controlProperties>
<text>Push%20Me</text>
</controlProperties>
</control>

It will have the x, y coordinates for the top left corner of each item on the Mockup. For many, it will have the width (w) and … Continue Reading