Using the Fullscreen API in Web Browsers for Better UX!
Robert Nyman of Mozilla, recently in his blog post talked about the importance of showing something like a movie or a game or any specific element in fullscreen and the role it plays in creating great end user experience.
Check out the Fullscreen API demo and the code is available in the Fullscreen repository on GitHub.
Fullscreen API feature is now available in Firefox 10. It has also been available in Google Chrome since version 15 and Safari since 5.1.
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Lean UX: Delivering a Better User Experience
This is one of the best writeups appeared on smashing magazine in 2011. Jeff Gothelf a UX designer tells us how Leam UX is evolving & why it's better practice in building better user experience designs. Lean UX certainly gets designers out of the deliverables business and back into the experience design business.
Inspired by Lean and Agile development theories, Lean UX is the practice of bringing the true nature of our work to light faster, with less emphasis on deliverables and greater focus on the actual experience being designed.
Traditional documents are discarded or, at the very least, stripped down to their bare components, providing the minimum amount of information necessary to get started on implementation. Long detailed design cycles are eschewed in favor of very short, iterative, low-fidelity cycles, with feedback coming from all members of the implementation team early and often. Collaboration with the entire team becomes critical to the success of the product.
Interestingly and not surprisingly, one of the immediate casualties of Lean UX is the stereotypical solitary designer, working silently in a corner for a period of time, inviting only occasional peeks at their work before it’s “done.” This mindset is also the biggest obstacle to wider adoption of this practice.
Let’s take a look at the Lean UX process:

Stay lean and focus on the experience, not the paperwork.
Looks familiar? It should if you’re familiar with Agile or its derivatives. Lightweight concepting kicks off the process. This can be done on a whiteboard, a napkin or a quick wireframe. The goal is to get the core components of the idea or workflow visualized quickly and in front of your team.
The team begins to provide their insights on the direction of the design as well as its feasibility. Changes are then made to the original idea, or perhaps it’s scrapped entirely and a new idea proposed. The initial investment in sketching is so minimal that there is no significant cost to completely rethinking the direction. Once a direction is agreed upon internally, a rough prototype helps to validate the idea with customers. That learning helps to refine the idea, and the cycle repeats.
What’s most important to recognize here is that Lean UX is focused strictly on the design phase of the software development process. Whatever your organization’s chosen methodology (waterfall, Agile, etc.), these concepts can be applied to your design tasks.
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AMT Staff's Favorite Picks Of the Week
PHP
10 PEAR Packages for Every PHP Developer's Toolbox An interesting article written by Jason Gilmore on PHP Extension and Application Repository, better known as PEAR, and in this article he tries to shine the spotlight just a bit brighter on this fantastic community resource by highlighting 10 useful PEAR libraries (better known as packages) that has become an indispensable part of his programming toolkit. PHP as a data source for Flex applications If you have a RIA as the user interface the server no longer needs to mix the data with the visuals. This means PHP coders no longer need to worry about styling data, surrounding the information with tables, divs and tons of other tags. The only thing they need to do is send the data back in some usable format, and luckily XML is supported by Flex. Let's take a look at some code needed to start communicating Flex with PHP... Web Design Create an Elegant Patterned Web Design in Photoshop This web design tutorial on Design Instruct walks the learner through the creation of a beautiful and trendy web layout using Photoshop. The web design is best used on a personal portfolio site. A Study of Trends in Mobile Design The aim of this article is to showcase the variety of methods in which some of today’s most popular websites provide an interactive and (hopefully) useful mobile experience for their end users. There are plenty of big names which were analyzed, such as Facebook and Amazon, and you’ll see plenty of useful graphs to draw some inspiration from. With statistics and some really interesting revelations on the diversity of modern design, you can be excited about the future of mobile Web design! UX Designing for the mind Design is powerful because of the way our brain processes visuals. We might think of vision working by our eyes pulling in images and projecting them in the back of our mind. If this were the case then there would no be design or art. There are in fact 30 areas in the back of your brain that process different aspects of the image. The various vision processing areas of the brain are individually recreating the design. So, in a way, the viewer is also an artist... Applying Lessons from UML to UX Software Engineering is typically much more formal than User Experience in they way they model an application before development begins. After pseudo code, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) is probably the most widely used modeling language among software engineers. It has... Is Realistic UI Design Realistic? When Apple introduced the iPad, along with it came a set of Human Interface Guidelines. The HIG encourages app developers to “delight people with stunning graphics” and to “add physicality and heightened realism…The more true to life your application looks and behaves, the easier it is for people to understand how it works and the more they enjoy using it.” jQuery Quaid - JavaScript Library Quaid is a JavaScript library that works with jQuery to help you write cleaner, more-robust code. You can think of it as a little framework with which to easily build widgets and other stateful jQuery plugins. Quaid provides two main services: a more modular way to write complex JavaScript applications with jQuery, and a robust way to handle errors from async server requests. Also included for convenience is multi-level, cross-browser logging with failover, a small framework for data formatting, and form handling utilities. How To Organize a jQuery Application with JavaScriptMVC Jupiter Consulting, a development outfit and the creators of the JavaScriptMVC framework, has posted a guide on organizing jQuery applications with JavaScriptMVC 3.0. Justin Meyer, the author of the post, felt that other guides to organizing jQuery applications failed to emphasize a crucial aspect: breaking up applications into separate and testable components. "The secret to building large apps is NEVER build large apps," Meyer writes. " Break up your applications into small pieces. Then, assemble those testable, bite-sized pieces into your big application." WordPress
Beginning WordPress Development: A Look at Common Functions WordPress is a great blogging and CMS platform. It’s easy to use and customize, and there’s basically nothing you can’t do with it. If you haven’t used WordPress, give it a try by installing it on your own computer using a web server package like xampp or WampServer. You’ll need access to WordPress in order to follow along with this guide. Using TextMate for WordPress Code Cleanup A Useful Post written by Ian Stewart a professional designer and WordPress enthusiast, on using TextMate commands for cleaning up wordpress code. New Features in WordPress.com : Linking, Sorting & Paging It’s that time of year again, when the folks over at WordPress.org start putting the finishing touches on the next version of WordPress (in this case, version 3.1), and the lucky users of WordPress.com are automatically included in the beta testing, giving you all access to new features about a month before they are officially released...
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10 Command-line Time savers for MySQL Tasks Although several great GUI-based MySQL clients exist, among them phpMyAdmin and SQLYog, I've always preferred to use the native mysql command-line client. It does take some time to get acquainted with using a command-line interface (CLI), particularly if you don't regularly work with an operating system offering a robust CLI environment. However, after some practice you'll be able to manage users, navigate your databases, and perform other tasks with incredible ease.Top 10 MySQL Mistakes Made By PHP DevelopersA database is a fundamental component for most web applications. If you’re using PHP, you’re probably using MySQL–an integral part of the LAMP stack. PHP is relatively easy and most new developers can write functional code within a few hours. However, building a solid, dependable database takes time and expertise. Here are ten of the worst MySQL mistakes I’ve made (some apply to any language/database)…Web Design520 Grid System: HTML/CSS Framework made for Facebook Page Developers Nowdays there are milions of Facebook Pages almost about everyting. Facebook Page creators try to impress first-time-visitors but also fans with atractive and useful content in custom made FBML tabs. Because I am one of them also, I always need some quicker and more efficient way to make my FBML content and show it as soon as possible to fans of my Facebook pages.
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UX
jQuery
50 Useful jQuery Plugins to Enhance your Forms
jQuery’s Data Method – How and Why to Use It jQuery’s data method gives us the ability to associate arbitrary data with DOM nodes and JavaScript objects. This makes our code more concise and clean. As of jQuery 1.4.3 we also have the ability to use the method on regular JavaScript objects and listen for changes, which opens the doors to some quite interesting applications.
