Archives for July 2007

In the web design world there is a principle called "Above The Fold", which basically refers to the space that is seen by a user without the user having to scroll down the page. The idea has been to cram as much information and content above the fold because users don't like to scroll down. Well today I came across a research study that dispels the "Above The Fold" idea. It's says what I've known all along. A user will scroll to view content.

As shown in the previous section, visitors do scroll to the bottom of the page. But are they less likely to scroll to the page bottom if the page is really long? The answer is no, as can be seen in the next set of charts:

Another problem is that you can't accurately determine where the fold actually lies. A user can have their window sized to any dimensions, thus the point at which the fold can be in a user's browser is potentially endless. What is the fold on user A's browser is different from user B's browser. So to compensate this, clients and project managers set an arbitrary number for the fold which, in essence, is just a guess.

As you can see, the fold location is concentrated around three peak areas. The peaks are located at about 430, 600 and 860 pixels. Do you recognize these sizes? No? These fold sizes correspond to the three most popular screen resolutions used today: 800×600, 1024×768 and 1280×1024. Except that they are missing about 170 pixels that correspond to the most common size of the non-client area of the browser. The dispersion around these peaks is accounted for by variations in screen size, window size, browsers and browser add-ons.

Read full article

Last Saturday I went fishing with a couple co-workers at El Capitan Reservoir here in San Diego. It was such a nice relaxing day. I haven't been fishing since before I was in high school. My grandpa used to take me all the time. One of the guys, Matthew, had never gone before and of course he was the only one of us to catch a fish. It was unbelievable. We had just reached the first spot of the day. Travis showed Matthew how to cast and within 3 minutes of Matthew's first cast he caught a fish, a 12" bass. Unfortunately we didn't catch any other fish for the rest of the day. Matthew did take his fish home so the now the question is, did Matthew actually clean and eat the fish later?

Why can't we get game shows like this one here in the US? I like how the block breaks when it hits the big guy. This looks like it could be fun

via TechCrunch

So the iPhone was finally released on Friday, and it’s looking to be another success for Apple. In fact Apple’s stock is up $5.91 so far today. I don’t have one, but a few people here at work have one which has given me an oppurtunity to tryout the phone. I think it’s a great device. The touch interface is awesome and very easy to use. The phone itself is very thin and light. Actually the iPhone didn’t feel that much heavier than my own phone, a Sony-Ericsson W810i.

There are some issues with the iPhone of course, but there is one that really bugs me. The iPhone is supposedly running Mac OS X for its operating system. Steve Jobs has said this in all his interviews and even the Apple web site list Mac OS X in the Tech Specs as well. If this is true, then why is there no copy/paste on the iPhone. Something that is such a simple and standard feature for any operating system and yet it’s missing from the iPhone. My only guess is because there is no contextual menu on the iPhone and no gesture to bring one up. I’m sure they’ll come up with a touch gesture to allow copy/paste. My old HP iPAQ has a method where if I hold the stylus down, a menu comes up giving me the option to copy. Why can’t the iPhone do something similiar? Have the user select some text with their finger and then hold their finger over the text. A small menu pops up with the option to copy the text or even an audible/visual indicator that lets the user know the text was copied. Then the user can just repeat the process where the text is supposed to be pasted.

It seems Apple didn’t have time to get everything they wanted done so I’m sure the copy/paste issue will be resolved with a software update. Hopefully they’ll also fix the lack of voice-dialing as well. Perhaps Apple will also incorporate the really cool idea that 37Signals came up with to improve the iPhone. It’s called trails.