McArthur GFX

This morning Jeff Atwood wrote about Fitts' law and the contrapositive in regards to big, bad eject buttons. The point of his piece was that you shouldn't have buttons with irreversible destructive results be right next to buttons with more frequent use.

I was actually more intrigued by a couple of the commentors when they mentioned a real life example of excellent "eject" button UI: these incredibly important buttons have a safety cap over them.

A few people in the web world have started an argument about whether websites need to invest in SEO. I understand why website owners would be confused about the topic, but it should be pretty straightforward for web designers. This article was a long time coming, they just provoked me to sit down long enough to fill up a page of my opinion. Actually, I think these people are trying to say what I’ll be saying: make a good website, and the rest will come.

I’ve started contributing to the MooTools blog, and today my post about all the cool things that the Element module does for us in MooTools.

It’s covers:

• Differences between $ and $$
• How to create a new Element (better-er)
• How $ and toElement interact
• The special properties of the return value of $$

And a code snippet to whet your appetite.

//this would loop through each time at addEvent, addClass, and fade
$$('li a').addEvent('click', function(e) {}).addClass('alertable').fade('in');  

//whereas this will only cause 1 loop
$$('li a').each(function(link)  {
    link.addEvent('click', function(e) {
         alert(this.title);
    });
    link.addClass('alertable');
    link.fade('in');
});

Read the rest at the MooTools blog.

I kinda like Twitter. It’s a fun place to leave occasional comments. It’s also a great way to find links to interesting information I would normally miss from my feeds. But being a Windows user, I have yet to find that Twitter application that is a joy to use.

I’ve tried out a couple applications, and found each one lacking:

• Tweetdeck
• DestroyTwitter
• Seesmic

There might be a decent application out there that I haven’t found, but these are the most popular ones available to Windows. It almost feels like people only want to make cool stuff for Macs.

In game development, it's very common to want a random number. Maybe you want to determine damage done, if there was a critical, or what slot on the board to insert your piece at. And surprisingly (or perhaps, not), programmers are often looking to make this random number a little less... random.