Posted: October 31st, 2010 | Author: Jeff Soo | No Comments »
Looks like today’s Google logo “Happy Halloween featuring Scooby Doo!” is the first time they’ve used a carousel to paginate. Fittingly, it’s like flipping through a Sunday morning comic strip and brings back some great memories from when I used to watch Scooby Doo every weekend which always ended with “…and I would’ve gotten away with it if it wasn’t for you meddling kids!” From a customized game of Pac-Man to an embedded YouTube video for John Lennon’s birthday, Google has been creating more and more innovative “Doodles.” Check out the entire doodle collection.
Posted: October 21st, 2010 | Author: Jeff Soo | No Comments »
YouTube has started rolling out a subtle new feature in embedded video players. At anytime you push pause, you’ll see a new arrow icon that, when clicked, will open the deep-link for the YouTube page the video lives on in a new window or tab. Because it’s the same size as the play button, it might take away from the prominent call-to-action to resume playback. So far, I’ve only seen it on the newer player UI, and is most likely not planned to be implemented in the older players, but it’s definitely a great feature.
Posted: October 19th, 2010 | Author: Jeff Soo | No Comments »
My friends have launched their “travel inspiration” service Wanderfly today. Co-founded by Evan Schneyer, Christy Liu, and Cezary Pietrzak, “Wanderfly answers this basic question: ‘Where can I go?’”
Just enter your departure city, budget, approximate time frame, location (if you know a general vicinity, i.e., “Europe,” or you can be completely spontaneous and leave it defaulted to “Anywhere”), and interests (casino, eco, food, culture, outdoors, romance, shopping, spa, party, beach, entertainment, and/or luxury). “Get Going,” and the system will recommend custom-tailored locations along with flight and hotel options and a collection of things to do pulled in from services such as Foursquare, Yelp, Eventful, Nile Guide, Find. Eat. Drink, and Lonely Planet.
Posted: September 29th, 2010 | Author: Jeff Soo | No Comments »
Stumbled upon this awesome browser “game” while reading Gizmodo. It’s like a game of Asteroids on most any webpage where you shoot up objects on the site – just drag-and-drop the javascript code into your bookmarks menu, visit a site, and launch the code. You steer your ship with the arrow keys, and shoot with the spacebar. Like it says on the site, “it’s cooler if you make your own sound effects.” Have fun!
Posted: September 27th, 2010 | Author: Jeff Soo | No Comments »
I’ve been visiting ui.stackexchange.com recently as a resource for ui/ux information. It’s a network within Stackexchange, a community powered Q&A hub that allows members to ask, answer, and rate. Here’s what I grabbed from their wiki:
The websites feature the ability for users to ask and answer questions, and through membership and active participation, to vote questions and answers up or down and edit questions and answers in a wiki fashion. Users can earn reputation points and “badges” through site participation; for example, a user is awarded 10 reputation points for receiving an “up” vote on an answer given to a question, and can receive badges for their valued contributions. By collecting reputation points, users are given more and more permissions, ranging from the ability to vote and comment on questions and answers to the ability to moderate many aspects of the site.
There have been some pretty good topics posted (284 as of today), but as with any great site, content is king, so once the community grows, it’ll be a great spot to gain some community insight.
