Karl's Blog

If you were hired to improve cars’ designs, with what aspect would you start? My first thoughts would be:

1. Performance
2. Fuel efficiency
3. Entertainment system?

I think I could go on for a while before I could even think about the car’s door. Recently I stumbled upon this video of an innovative way to design a car’s door. The majority of the cars use the same door’s design since 1897. Seriously, 1897! There might be some other systems out there, you could even consider lamborghini’s scissors doors, but they are insignificant compared with the amount of “normal” doors out there.

This interesting video made me think about how we innovate on the web. How many web “normal doors” are out there that we are forgetting to innovate? Sometimes you don’t know innovation is needed until you see it. Because after today I think all cars doors are lame and I want one of those!

I decided to have some fun with HTML5 canvas and Javascript, so why not develop a game. Well, I’m really happy with the decision. I realized that developing a game in a language gives you the opportunity to deal with really basic logical problem solving. Dealing with the dynamics of the moving ball and collision was so much fun. I’m in the process of getting it better, specially the collisions, they need some more work. I have to give some credit to the basic logic to this tutorial, but I basically didn’t like the code so I changed it a lot to be OO. Also the collision dynamics with blocks wasn’t great for something that should grow with more levels.

If you’re interested in trying it out you can play it here. Soon I’ll have more levels designed. Now if you want to get the Javascript and modify it or add more levels feel free to fork it on GitHub. I’ll add more comments to the code so it’s easier to understand.

If you’re a web developer that is interested in understanding more about Javascript I would definitely recommend developing a game, it’s fun and it will improve your skilss.

Thank you all for the feedback on this plugin. I fixed some bugs and made it compatible with the latest version of jQuery and jQuery UI. Also now in order to give more information about the image you can use the html attribute data-.

For those first visiting here, this is a Facebook like photo tagging plugin for jQuery, it’s mainly for tagging people into pictures but it can also be used for notes.

For more information on how to implement visit the jQuery Photo Tag plugin post.

Demo and unit testing
GitHub Project Home Page – On the download section you can find some examples on how your server responses should look like.
(more…)

It is/was well known that Apple is the king of UX/UI, their UI designs are awesome and you can see that UX is big deal from the moment you unpack your Apple product. But I believe that’s about to change, Apple will keep their great UX/UI, the point is that Microsoft will provide even a greater UX to their users (I never thought I would never say this words). It’s clear that Microsoft is investing a lot on the UX of their products and I believe the results are about to come, and this is why: (more…)

Eloquent JavaScript: A Modern Introduction to Programming

I read the whole book even though I was interested in a few chapters. I would fully recommend for almost any level programmers. It starts with the very basics of JS, but it climbs to a good advanced level.

Javascript can be fun and evil, so I strongly recommend you always seek more knowledge on this language. If you read the article about learning jquery or js and realized you’re a great jquery programmer but doesn’t know javascript yet, this is a great book to start with.

Javascript is a language created for everybody: developers, designers, both advanced and beginners. That can be good and bad at the same time, what we can say is that it has been proven effective since is so widely used. The problem for advanced programmers is that it’s oversimplified and not strongly typed, at the same time, those two problems are the solution for designers and beginners. It makes it easy to get results without understanding what exactly is happening. But there are things in Javascript that need to be explained, someone cannot live their whole life without understanding what’s happening behind the scenes, it’s just not right. That’s why I’ll try to explain a few weird things that Javascript does to make it work for everybody. (more…)

A Project Guide to UX Design: For user experience designers in the field or in the making on Amazon.com

Strongly recommended for anyone in the field, specially if you’re starting your career on UX or even development, it will put you on the right tracks.

The book is really detailed about every step of a project related with UX design (any software out there). It even gives you a guide on creating proposals for clients, but a lot of that knowledge can be used if you’re part of an internal team.

I mostly enjoyed Chapter 4 and 5, “Project Objectives and Approach” and “Business Requirements”, it’s a great guide for what I believe can be the hardest part of a project.

Professional ASP.NET MVC 3 on Amazon.com

I started reading this book to see what was new in MVC 3, I’ve been developing with ASP.NET MVC 2 for a while and now I finally had the opportunity to start a new project with MVC 3. Anyway, the book is really good and highly recommended for those getting their hands dirty with MVC 3.

The book goes from basic to some really advanced topics, it doesn’t only explain how to extend but also shows how the MVC 3 framework works inside.

I would spend a little more time on the unit testing chapter, I think it was a little poor on content but there’s a lot of content out there that you can go to get more info.

CSS3 for Web Designers

First of all pay attention to the title, I didn’t and I got a little bit frustrated. It’s for Web Designers, not for developers so it’s kind of basic. It’s good to get an idea of the possibilities that CSS3 can give to you.

Like all books from A Book Apart, it’s quick and basic, sometimes they just feel like a long blog post, but at least you know that it’s a well written blog post. (more…)

Forms that Work: Designing Web Forms for Usability on Amazon.com

I really liked this book because it gave me really good insights on the best ways to build forms. I shows what to do, what not to do and why.

The structure makes it really easy to read and follow the main ideas. The book is separated in 3 parts: relationship, conversation and appearance.

One thing that I thought it was interesting was how important (talking ux, not design bs) it can be that your forms have good appearance, how much that can affect the efficiency of the form.