User Interfaces | Raam Dev

Posts Tagged: User Interfaces

Two useful iPhone features you might not know about

Here are two iPhone features I discovered entirely by accident and that I now find myself using several times a day. They’re not terribly exciting, but you may find them useful if you’re not already aware of them.

Easily Access the First Page of Apps

The first one appears to be a newly added feature included in the latest software update. If you have several pages of application icons on your iPhone, you may find yourself constantly going back to the first page to access things like the Camera, Calculator, or Safari apps (which cannot be moved from the first page). Now instead of flicking back through your 5, 10, or 15 (!) pages of apps to get to the first page, you can do it with one click.

Press the home button on the bottom of the phone one time to immediately go to the first page of apps.

Delete Email Gesture

The second feature is a little more interesting and it has been around for a while. I discovered it by accident while scrolling through my list of emails:

From the email list, you can use a single-finger gesture to bring up a delete button on a per-email basis. Simply flick your finger across an email to the left or right (I found going to the left works better) and a Delete button will show up next to the email (see screenshot below).

Browser Resolutions of the Interweb

I have often advocated designing websites to support as many screen resolutions and browsers as possible, including tiny mobile devices and text-based web browsers like Lynx (though I prefer Elinks myself). Whether I’m under-the-gun at work, or just designing a new WordPress theme for my blog, when time and resource constraints force me to decide on a minimum resolution I look for statistics to back up my choices. In a perfect world, all sites would be usable with all browser resolutions (and CSS would play nice with all browsers and 1px would be 1px… don’t get me started).

It wasn’t too long ago that a lot of people were still browsing the web with an 800×600 screen resolution. For most of us now though, the only time we see that screen resolution is when we don’t have the correct video drivers installed. W3Schools keeps lots of interesting web stats based upon visitors to their site, including Browser Display Statistics. Here you can follow a clear trend to higher browser resolutions through the years:

This lead me to check my the visitor browser resolutions for this blog through Google Analytics. I’ve been keeping stats on this blog since September 2007 and with over 40,000 visits I figured I could get some good metrics:

raamdev.com Visitor Screen Resolutions

These stats seem to indicate the same thing as W3School’s stats: 1024×768 is a clear winner. This got me thinking though. How many of the popular sites out there are viewable in 1024×768? What about 800×600, or even 640×480?

Yet Another Window Resizer is an excellent Firefox add-on that allows you to easily resize your browser to various resolutions. I visited various popular sites and tested their minimum browser resolutions:

[1024x768] – Amazon.com
[1024x768] – eBay
[1024x768] – Yahoo!
[1024x768] – Wikipedia
[1024x768] – CNN
[1024x768] – YouTube
[1024x768] – Apple
[1024x768] – Microsoft
[1024x768] – Digg
[1024x768] – Delicious
[1024x768] – Facebook
[800x600] – Twitter
[800x600] – WordPress 2.7 Admin Dashboard (screenshot)
[640x480] – Google Search (screenshot)
[640x480] – Google News
[640x480] – Google Maps

Clearly most sites have chosen to ignore smaller browser resolutions in favor of supporting only the most popular as a minimum. (Although this blog has a 1024×768 minimum requirement, the main content area is fully visible in 800×600.) The nature of the content presented by the site dictates a lot of the size requirements. For example, Google search presents textual content that can easily be (and most certainly should be) confined to a small area. In fact, the Google search results maintain a 640px width even when you’re using a much higher resolution (leaving a lot of white space to the right, but maintaining readability).

There is much to be said about textual readability on the web, but I’ll leave that for another post.

HTML Radio Buttons: A blast from the past!

So there I was sitting in my C/Unix class at Harvard barely paying attention to the professor as he talked about HTML forms (!) when I heard him start talking about the history of the HTML radio button. I often wondered why they were called “radio” buttons so I shifted my attention and listened.

He started by trying to explain to a room full of people a third his age how car radios did not always have tiny touch-sensitive buttons and that they used to be single mechanical buttons that when one was pressed, the other would come out (much like the old cassette-based walkman’s).

This little fact fascinated me because I have been using HTML radio buttons for so long and until now, I have been so oblivious to the history behind their name. A quick search on Wikipedia confirmed my professor’s story:

A radio button or option button is a type of graphical user interface widget that allows the user to choose one of a predefined set of options. They were named after the physical buttons used on car radios to select preset stations – when one of the buttons was pressed, other buttons would pop out, leaving the pressed button the only button in the “pushed in” position.

Google Autocomplete for Search

I just noticed the main Google page now has autocompletion for the search box:

The feature, called Google Suggest, has been in the Labs for awhile. It “graduated” to the main front page almost exactly one week ago.

This is going to make it easy and lots of fun to check the most popular search term for a particular topic!

Could this be the future of touchpads?

A multi-touch color screen touchpad using the same touchscreen as the iPhone? It could replace the OS X dock and provide a whole new method of interacting with your computer! Fingerprint security device, electronic signature pad, an electronic sketch pad for better photo editing accuracy… the possibilities are endless!

Posts Tagged: User Interfaces

Two useful iPhone features you might not know about

Browser Resolutions of the Interweb

HTML Radio Buttons: A blast from the past!

Google Autocomplete for Search

Could this be the future of touchpads?

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