My conclusion was simple; of course it bloody is!

The number of people online has shot up in recent years and web users have become more savvy with it. In fact I can see where this conclusion about the page fold being irrelevant has come from. There have been lots of studies which show that users aren’t adverse to scrolling and have become used to doing it more.

At the same time lets not forget about the research that was done in the earlier days of the web (and is still going on). We know that web users are selfish and impatient and can make up their mind about whether they like a site or not in the blink of an eye.

In the blink of an eye all they’re going to see is content above the fold, and if none of that content looks like fulfilling their requirements then they may bounce off to somewhere else that does – after all, a list of (increasingly) relevant search results is just a back button away.

Then again maybe visitors have calmed down a bit and take their time on the web these days – but I doubt it.

Don’t worry, I do realise that ThereIsNoPageFold is an extreme case, and that most designers/developers/researchers advocating we obsess less about the fold don’t mean for us to forget it entirely but I sometimes think that simple (and quite clever) sites like this can lead to people making the wrong conclusions.

Another site I worry about is http://dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com/ – a great idea, very nicely done but I’ve noticed a trend where people forget the word exactly and end up using it as an excuse to present a radically different experience to users of ‘less popular’ browsers (and by that I mean IE of course).

I’m not saying let’s stick disclaimers over all these fun sites – I think they’re awesome, but let’s at least consider that someone new to the world of making websites professionally may reflect on what they’ve seen and make a site which, while really great looking, completely fails at retaining users because when they land they can’t tell what’s going on.

I type in a query and expect to see a nice list of relevant results, but now instead I see not only a couple of adverts (which I’ve gotten used to ignoring, unless a company is stupid enough to bid on their own name, in which case I click it) but now 2 massive twitter quotes too, which pushed the search results to almost below the pagefold on my 15″ laptop screen!

Did Google not usability test this before launching it, or did they only survey the morons that spend every waking moment on twitter?

It also appears that you don’t have the option of turning it off; I checked the options, advanced search page and search settings – nothing at all about ‘real-time search’ results. I did click the pause link, but that just stopped it updating, it didn’t get rid of it.

Is this another desperate attempt by Google to keep users interested and delay the inevitable time when another search engine will arise to conquer them?

Don’t get me wrong, Google’s been a great search engine for years, but now it seems like I’m getting annoyed with them more and more frequently. Time to give Bing or Yahoo another go I think.

I stumbled upon the post again and was reminded that Andrew Daniel, who leads the UX team at Sears asked Mr. X to send his resume and portfolio so they could discuss the possibility of a job. So now I’d like to know how that turned out!

Did Mr. X send his portfolio? Did he get a job with Sears? And if not, what’s the poor bugger up to? He’s become something of a celebrity in the web design world so should make the most of it!

So, anyone know where we can find out?

I’m writing a couple of articles about browser testing, browser support, progressive enhancement etc. and as a bit of research I’ve been browsing around to see what opinions there are on issues such as supporting IE6.

Well today I can across a project (http://www.ie6update.com/) which disgusts me. They’re advocating using Conditional Comments and a bit of JavaScript to display a message to Internet Explorer 6 users, telling them that their browser is out of date. That in itself isn’t that bad, but they’re copying the design of the IE information bar, and even using the Windows security shield icon to make it look genuine. The message isn’t a simple ‘Please upgrade’, oh no. It tells the user that their browser is missing updates and they should please click to get them. They are then taken off to the IE8 download page.

So why do I have a problem with this? It’s exactly the same as the tactics used by virus writers, hackers and phishing scammers to trick people into downloading fake anti-virus software and giving them money. I don’t care whether their cause is noble or not, fooling the user into thinking that Windows is advising them to upgrade, when in fact it’s their crappy website is just plain wrong!

If it’s your website and you’ve decided not to support IE6 then by all means display a polite message to the user but don’t deceive them or scare them into doing something they’re not properly informed about.

Better yet make your site work in IE6, if you’re at least half decent at building websites then it’s not that difficult.

UPDATE: looks like I’m not the only one who feels this way, http://audioboo.fm/boos/7486-a-rant-about-ie6-update.

Josh Sears’ post, “25 Examples of Web 2.0 and Traditional Design Rules Coming Together” doesn’t just list the websites, but each one is also accompanied by a good chunk of content which talks you through the site and how elements of its design apply to the topic at hand.

I’ve often lamented to my friends, co-workers, long suffering wife etc. about the huge number of blog posts that are appearing these days which are simply lists of websites/themes/plugins/whatever and how bored I’m getting with them.

Don’t get me wrong, sometimes I love to see a list of nice looking websites; whether for inspiration or just to see some new trend emerging, but I’ve been getting worried that the ‘list culture’* of modern design/development blogs was going to take over to the detriment of  good quality, well written content.

I’m aware that I’m making generalisations, and that there are other great ‘list posts’ out there with more than just a thumbnail and a link but Josh’s article reminded me just how strongly I’m beginning to feel on the subject.

So come on everyone, next time you’re writing “27 great sites I saw while eating my breakfast”, maybe write a paragraph or two about each one telling use why you’ve included it. After all, we’re reading your blog so we must want to hear what you’ve got to say!

Coming soon, 12 great ideas for Wordpress plugins I had while clipping my nails.

Sorry, couldn’t resist.

*If no-one else has coined the phrase ‘list culture’ in this context I call dibs + bragging rights if it becomes popular!

Another nice effect of this is that we can now put GA code at the top of the page, meaning accuracy will increase!

I won’t go into the technical details, you can read those over at the Google Code Blog, and you should check out the migration examples too.

The reason I’ve never bothered with it is twofold. Firstly I’m quite happy with arial, verdana and georgia, and using the odd bit of image replacement when I need something fancier. Secondly, creating the correct format of font file for IE (EOT) is a pain. I tried it once and the application microsoft provides for the purpose, WEFT, either crashed or just plain didn’t work.

But now I’ve started to think about using it, because I came across a free font site called Font Squirrel. Not only do they have a huge range of 100% free for commercial use fonts, but they package a lot of them up ready for use on the web.

Simply download a ZIP file containing all the font formats you’ll need, ttf, otf, svg, eot etc. and even a sample html and css file to help you use them – it’s a great idea and I’d like to see all font makers providing similar resources to their users.

I’ll be giving it a go soon on the design I’m currently doing for this site, so keep an eye out for the new look!

I’ve decided therefore to try and come up with some simple rules for making sure my laptop batteries last much longer than this, hopefully for many years.

My own personal experience of this (the most recent one anyway) was with my wife’s Dell Inspiron 1525. It’s just over a year and a half old and gets at most 30 minutes of when not plugged in. Naturally I kicked off with Dell (with whom I have a 4 year warranty for the machine) but they said that the battery wasn’t covered and a new one would be £99. So I told them to sod off.

I read around on the web, looking for tips to try and prevent this in future and found that we’d probably been making a few basic mistakes withour battery care. I’ve tried to summarise the tips here. There are 3 things that every site mentioned so I’m going to assume they are the most accurate. I don’t claim to be an expert, but I’m going to try them myself. I’ll update this post in the future with results.

Take the battery out

If you’re plugged into the mains, and will be for a while, take the battery out. Leaving it in will lead to its temperature increasing (more on why that’s bad in a minute). In fact my battery it sitting on my desk as I write this, at 40% charge.

Store the battery at 40% charge

If you’re going to store the battery for a while, do it at 40% charge, and in a cool dry place.

Keep it cool

Heat will kill your battery. So don’t leave your laptop in a warm place (by a radiator, in the car etc).

Don’t drain to zero

I don’t mean 0%, when your laptop will go into standby. I mean fully empty i.e. what will happen if you leave the laptop on standby with an empty battery. Even standy mode uses a small amount of power to keep a charge going through RAM. This is how standby can resume so quickly to the desktop. So eventually the battery will be fully empty and will probably never be the same again.

That’s all for now, I’ll let you know how I get on.

Just finished watching a couple of programmes in iPlayer and the Intel graphics handled it fine, so that’s all good – I never expected much from the X4500.

Everything’s still nice and quiet, a small amount of hard drive noise when Windows is installing updates and the battery life is still good for about 4 hours of web / word / programming.

On the subject of battery life, I recently had trouble with a Dell Insprion 1525’s battery. It’s just over a year and a half old but the battery now lasts no more than 30 mins at best. I’ve been looking into how best to prolong the life of a laptop battery so I will post what I find out soon. I’ll also be using the X5DIJ as a guinea pig to see how long I can make it live for.

Stay tuned for the battery life tips and part 3 of the review – although the laptop’s working so nicely I doubt I’ll need to say much more on the subjet. Maybe when I’ve installed Windows 7.

javascript:void(prompt('',gApplication.getMap().getCenter()));

To use it simply go to Google Maps, centre the map on the place you want the coordinates of, enter the code above into the address bar and hit enter. A nice text field alert will pop up allowing you to copy the Lat / Long values.

If you’re going to be doing this regularly you may find it useful to create a Firefox bookmark with the code set as the location. That way you can simply hit the bookmark and have the coordinates appear (as long as you’re on Google Maps that is).