Note from the author: apologies if this post sounds like a Microsoft marketing campaign, but I am really excited about this technology!
Let’s say you have a website and you want to give your visitors the experience edge.
The media experience can be improved by using Microsoft Silverlight on your website. Some of the features include:
- Vector graphics with light, degrade and other effects
- Overlaying your HTML with Silverlight content
- React to keyboard input
- Video overlay
- Real-time data
- AJAX
Some impressive examples can be found on the Silverlight website. Here’s a few from the top of my head:
- Single coloured backgrounds? Forget about them! Create amazing forms, patterns, shades and colour rich backgrounds
- Animation effects, including menu transition, drag and drop, zoom, pop-ups, animated drop down, 3D wheel and “page turning”
- Better user experience patterns
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Telmo wrote this on 18.03.08 – 33 comments
It's filed in the Design, Development, Marketing, User experience box
The analytics tool we use most often in NixonMcInnes websites is Google Analytics. Analytics tools help you gain detailed insight into how your customers are interacting with your website.
Google launched a new version of their free Google Analytics package a few weeks ago.
Benefits of the new implementation include:
- More reliable tracking capabilities
- Lighter code
- Advanced features and sophisticated reporting
- New Multi-line Graph (beta feature) that graphs two different metrics against each other over time
- Reports available in six additional languages, bringing the total number of supported languages to 25
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Telmo wrote this on 29.02.08 – 4 comments
It's filed in the Business, Development, Internet, Marketing, NixonMcInnes, Our sites, Strategy, User experience, Web analytics, Web technology, ebooks box
Here at NixonMcInnes we love all things social media so I couldn’t help but blog when I came across a new release of an uber cool web browser. It’s called ‘Flock’, is based on Firefox and has lots of wonderfully cool social media plugins that integrate seamlessly into the browser. After all, it does call itself ‘the social web browser’.
Why is it a social web browser? Does this mean it talks to you more than your friends do? No, of course not. That would be silly (cool, but silly). So what does it do thats different from Firefox. Well, the key bit for me is its integration with the various social web tools we all use. For example, it hooks right into Twitter, Facebook and and Youtube and has customised sidebars that allow you to see all your updates, actions, friends, status changes etc without having to go to the website.
It also allows you to upload photos into your social media accounts directly through the browser. Want to add photos to your facebook or Flickr app? Just click the upload photos icon, select the service you want to drop into and drag and drop. Lovely.
And a further note to cement its coolness, its allows you to blog directly from within the Flock browser - working with most blogging services like Blogger, Drupal, LiveJournal, MovableType, Typepad and WordPress. Nice.
Have a look for yourself, and let me know if you discover any other neat tricks it can do!
Matt wrote this on 19.02.08 – 4 comments
It's filed in the Blogging, Interesting, Social media, Social networks, User experience box
I really enjoy computer programming - trying to solve some intricate problem with as few lines of code as possible, making code libraries more efficient, or playing detective to find the causes of obscure bugs.
My only gripe is that computer programming has to be done on computers. I think I would have preferred the days when programming was done with punch cards - not the hours upon hours sitting scrunched and staring at a screen. Even with good posture, a comfy chair, wrist pads, arm rests, a raised screen and frequent breaks, it still stinks.
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Paul wrote this on 23.11.07 – 5 comments
It's filed in the Development, Interesting, User experience box
I’ve recently traded in the job title ‘Producer’ for a shiny new model - ‘Experience Designer’. I’m still not entirely comfortable with it and have found myself mumbling and stumbling over it when I introduce myself. I don’t think ‘Producer’ was all that explanatory but at least it didn’t sound wanky.
I think part of the problem is that experience design isn’t a phrase in common usage as yet, so it’s something that has to be explained and expanded on.
My favourite way of explaining anything is to think of an example - so what’s the best example of the process and output of experience design?
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Jenni wrote this on 20.11.07 – 8 comments
It's filed in the Design, User experience box
