Taking the screenshots for my last blog entry on Confusability with Acrobat Reader I ran into the cursor problem. How do I shoot my screen including the cursor?
Luckily, somebody already solved my problem. Just use the application Grab in the Mac OS X utility folder.
This is the second part of my little series about usability and its anti-patterns clarified by every-day IT examples that I found.
I found something I could not understand while using Adobe Acrobat Reader. If you look at a zoomed in page, you get a red square on the pages’ overview on the left side. It shows your actual location within the page. If you want to move this square via drag-and-drop, you have to click and drag while your cursor is on the red lines! You can’t click in the middle of this square. And I have no possible explanation why they did it like that.
It’s okay clicking and dragging on the red lines (look at the cursor).
It’s not okay trying to click and drag anywhere within the square (look at the cursor).
Here comes the first part of my new series of anti-usability patterns with examples that I have found during my daily work with IT.
Today I was on Microsoft’s career website and I was searching my search results, which were divided into three pages. So I had this small navigation thing at the bottom. Notice the normal next-link.
When I got to the last page, the next-link still looked the same, but was not clickable anymore.
Users could think that this link is still valid, because it looks and resembles exactly like the working link one page before. To avoid confusability awards for page navigation, one should either grey out this link or hide it. As easy as that.
UPDATE:
Something I did not notice before is the fact, that the description still says “Results 11 – 20 of 29”. So it seems to be a bug/glitch/whateveryouwant2callit.
As you can see in the 2601.me-logo, CSS allows a link:hover-effect which changes color for selective parts. It’s actually quite easy to achieve.
nav {
color: #424242;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
padding:20px;
width:84em;
}
nav a {
color: #A7FA31;
font-size: 1.75em;
font-weight: bold;
text-decoration: none;
text-transform: uppercase;
}
nav a span { color: #424242; }
nav a:hover span { color: #FFFFFF; }
There are some amazing things in technology you hear from when they launch – and then you never hear from it again.
One of them is wolframalpha. If you don’t remember it, let me explain it. In short, it was a major approach of making the semantic information in the world wide web searchable and processable. But the best way for getting to know it, is actually trying it out for yourself.
Microsoft stopped the production for their mobile phone family Kin. The company wants to focus on their Operating System Windows Mobile 7.
I liked their idea of reduced functionality to concentrate on social networking though. Unfortunately, Kin had some major problems (the 15min delay and a lot of missing features) and did not get started. It kind of reminds me of the Microsoft Zune, only less successful. Hopefully, Microsoft will bring out some really new and innovative products soon – I remember a good-looking concept of a mini tablet pc with the size of a notebook called Courier. Make sure to watch the demo animation if you haven’t already heard of it. I think that was Microsoft’s most promising announcement in the last months. I was almost so excited watching this as I was, when I saw the Microsoft Surface for the first time some years ago.
I disagree.
That's really a time-saver. I always used the Photoshop-method.
That's really a time-saver. I always used the Photoshop-method.
Seems to work only for "inline links". H1 background-color for example does not change if you try to do so.