Photoshop Express Online

Adobe's Photoshop Express public beta went live over the last 24 hours.

Go check it out:

https://www.photoshop.com/express/landing.html

WAI ARIA Working Draft

On a train ride up the coast this weekend I had a read through a working draft of the WAI ARIA roadmap (Web Accessibility Initiative Accessible Rich Internet Applications).

New technologies often introduce new accessibility problems. The WAI ARIA goes a long way to describing in particular the accessibility problems introduced when you are using JavaScript to generate dynamic content and controls.

For a general understanding of how JavaScript affects assistive technologies I found this diagram very helpful:

http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-roadmap/#fig2

Learning Proposal V2

I've made a few changes to my learning proposal. Take a look at the new version here:
http://students.mim.iml.uts.edu.au/users/10685028/LearningProposal-JamesHunter-v2.html

Server Errrrrrrr

PHP documentation rocks at times. I'm not sure if it was the first to do so but the fact that the documentation allows for user generated content (comments) can be a massive time saver.

There have been times when I've not been able to get my head round the function / feature being documented but by sifting through the comments and taking a look at the user generated examples the context of use becomes so much clearer.

Today's prac got us into the date function. Dates can be messy indeed. I find it weird how php will let me concatenate a string into the output by simply throwing a \ in front.

Re-Learning JavaScript

One of my main personal goals for this semester is to learn / master JavaScript.

I've skimmed several JavaScript texts over the years and read many more articles. Simon's (Re)-Introduction to JavaScript is hands down the best cut to the chase run down on JavaScript I've read.

I've also had my JavaScript vars returning NaN time and time again. I knew its because I had messed up the type of the var but didn't know that there was actually a special value for Not-A-Number and what the common cause for it was. But now I do:
'This turns up when you do things like trying to convert a non-numeric string in to a number.'

During last weeks lecture there was a slide with various logos of standards associations. One logo was for ECMA, known for its ECMAScript (JavaScript) standard. Up until that point thats all I knew about ECMA. Prompted by a question from a client that I can now answer: "What does ECMA stand for?"

European Computer Manufacturers Association

Yay, one more acronym learnt :P

Portable Applications

The PC I was using last night at uni crashed during the practical exercise. As the environment at uni cleans the state of the computer with every re-boot I lost the extensions I'd added to firefox and the files I'd downloaded to the desktop.

This made me think: dang!... and then hmmm... I should get some applications onto a usb pen so that don't have to add extensions to Firefox every time I'm in the labs at uni.

I just thought I'd post a quick link to PortableApps.com
which is a site that has applications suitable for use straight from your usb stick / pen / device.

I plan on downloading some of the applications there. At the moment I think I'll get copies of Firefox, Filezilla, Putty, and Notepad ++, so that if my PC crashes again it won't cost me so much time.

Learning in progress

I've created a draft of my learning proposal for uni.

Check it it out here: http://students.mim.iml.uts.edu.au/users/10685028/LearningProposal-JamesHunter.html

Basically I'm proposing to do a few things:

• Build some blogger.com templates
• Build an image manipulation tool
• Build an interface to customise a blogger template

Enjoy!

Blogger

I choose to use blogger because I already have a google account and I'm trying to minimise password fatigue.

Three steps to create a blogger blog are stated on the start page:

1. Create an account
2. Name your blog
3. Choose a template




I wonder how much design work was done to create the process?

Overall I felt that the task was easy enough. I think that there are two decisions in the process that might cause a delay (while the user thinks):

1. Choosing a sub-domain name xxxxxxxx.blogspot.com.
2. Choosing a title for your blog

During the setup there is a progress indication element on the page which tells you which step you a currently undertaking. When I was setting this blog up I noticed that on the final step (Choose a template) the progress indication element changed and what I thought was three steps suddenly became two.

Step 1:



Step 2:



Step 3:




I don't know why it is this way. Perhaps there's a technical issue (such as you can't change your account details once you've complete step 2) or mabey its just an oversite? I'm not sure. It's a small detail but it made me wonder what had happened and it detracted from the overall experience for me. It also gave me an idea of what to blog about :P

Has anyone else noticed this?