In a moment of weakness (also known as a visit to the Apple Store) last week, I found myself parting with more money than I can easily justify for a shiny new iPhone. What followed was somewhat painful; canceling T-Mobile this soon after I had come back to them hurt, just not as much as the early termination bill soon to arrive in my mailbox.

I’ll get the obvious cheers and jeers out out of the way (I don’t expect that you, dear reader, will have missed them in any of the other thousand iPhone reviews, so feel free to skip the following lists)

Cheers

• The User Interface is amazing - I can’t imagine going back to my once loved PEBL (loved until last Tuesday)
• Apple did some amazing bargaining with AT&T over cost of the plans - I can’t imagine how much this would have cost on any other carrier right now
• I actually seem to like the keyboard

Jeers

• EDGE can be slow - I mean, a couple of minutes to download a text email slow
• The battery life is a bit low - I’m not one of those guys who plays chicken with my cell phone, but at the tail end of a normal day, I look at the battery indicator and wonder how this thing is going to die. It hasn’t yet, but it generally gets a bit too close for my comfort.
• Text selection - I find it interesting that the company famous for bringing GUI concepts like cut and paste to the masses seemed to forget to add that functionality to the iPhone
• Including the YouTube app was a mistake - now I lose so much time just killing my battery whenever I have free moments. I could take some personal responsibility, but blaming Jobs is so much easier
• Ear buds - why couldn’t Apple released at least their in-ear headphones with the push button microphone?

Now that we have the major items out of the way, I would like to discuss how this device changes things for me.

I no longer carry around a creased and bled index card full of notes to myself (the exact title of the book you are looking for is x, it is also found by other name of y). Instead, I put a note into Ta Da Lists and if I need more information, search Google (or Amazon or IMDB). This is handy.

I now understand the usefulness of Twitter and its ilk. I couldn’t understand dealing with it via SMS or just a computer, but with the iPhone it helps keep me sane (like when I spend two hours to see if certain contact lens work (they didn’t and then did) with my poor eyes).

I’m no longer dependent on restaurants (take out or otherwise) that I am familiar and/or have a menu for. Instead, I select my apartment bookmark in Google Maps (or wherever I am) and type in the type of food I am looking for. Minor annoyance, sometimes the most obvious (and closest) place doesn’t seem to make the grade (a direct search does work in those cases). The benefit of being able to call directly from Google Maps has been wonderful.

All in all, there are a number of features that don’t always make sense (why you can only edit contacts from specific screens, why a missed call and a voicemail look the same on the home screen, etc.), but ultimately, the iPhone shows a different perspective in how a cell phone should work. For me, it has ultimately been an extremely positive experience, and I truly can’t imagine going back to any other phone. Nothing even approaches the iPhone with regards to the pleasant experience (even if I cannot stand ear buds - I am not using them, by the way) you simply cannot avoid.

Thank you, Apple. Now, go and finish 10.5 and make me some in-ear headphones so that I may lay even more capital upon your retail alter.

I don’t how many people even remember the olden days of web development. I’m talking about the time when under construction GIFs were accepted, even if a site had been “under construction” for over a year. It was during this era that what has been known as the “browser wars.” We pretty much all took a side, and our pages advertised quite obviously what side we chose. These ubiquitous banners saying “This Site Designed For…” inhabit some dark and painful corner of our minds. When the wars were over, it stopped mattering if you were a Netscape supporter or a Microsoft supporter. You survived and that was all that mattered.

People talk about the war; they say that Firefox started it up again. I don’t think I believe that. Microsoft and Netscape worked very hard at pushing the differences. These days, all of the major players (even Microsoft) work towards a standard. This makes all of our lives easier. I wake up and realize that one day in the future I won’t have to worry about whether or not my design works in both browsers.

Don’t misunderstand; it already has gotten much better, and we are continuing on that path, even if our progress isn’t always in the direction I would hope. But then I see something like this(theregister.co.uk), and I lose much of that faith. For even a small manufacturer to say that the standards are “too hard” or able to be compromised is a statement of arrogance. For it to come out of one of the major players is unforgivable. As a developer and designer, I want to know that by working with one set of rules I can reach the most people. As I have a number of Mac users in this audience (a member am I), as well as an important minority at my full time gig, I can assure you that any solution for me will address them. That solution has historically been the standards.

Reading this article, I find myself imagining a new series of website badges proliferating. It is this vision that shows that, despite all talk towards progress, we still feel the need to homogenize. Microsoft has made some unique strides as of late, and the corporate dialog is one of working together. They have sat on a broken html renderer for the better part of a decade. If Trident cannot be expected to handle web content correctly, it is past time to replace it. And if there are sites that get broken by this fact, it is time they were made to uphold the standards we have all agreed upon years ago.

Bandying around the term “backwards compatibility” is a disingenuous way to say that you are above the standards the community has set.

You are not.

This moment is the one I have feared for months: IE7 is here. Along with this momentous day comes the possible breaking of a great many sites.

If you haven’t figured this out about me yet, well, I’ll just tell you. I see the worst possible end result constantly, and, in this case, my Powerbook is of no use in determining if I have reason to be frightened. I have heard good things about the betas, but I do understand that the rendering engine, while much better, has some different behaviors when playing with compliant sites. If you are a Windows user who has upgraded, please let me know if anything isn’t working with my site…

On the project I am currently working on, I have a specific singular instance where I have one page on my CMS that needs to push content into a sidebar. Unfortunately, I am only able to directly affect the main content div, so a dirty solution was needed.

At first, I simply tried to add the content into the sidebar, a beginner mistake I know.  That worked, but left an unwieldy space within the main content div. So, I needed to try something else.

Next, I floated the material to the right. I knew that this plan had some flaws, but I wanted to see if it would work, as the sidebar itself is empty within these pages. That worked pretty much exactly as planned, so I needed to tweak it. I figured out the width of the content I needed within the sidebar and created a negative margin matching that. I tested my solution in Safari and Firefox. Everything worked. I took a break. Changing display to block didn’t make any difference.
I came back and tested in IE. It was as if the material never existed in the first place. Now, I’ve given up on pushing the content outside the main div. So, once again, thank you IE very much for making my life exciting once again.

I have done what I could. Not having a static page to actually present the material is a bit of a bummer, but I think the overall design should stand for itself. At this point, I have taken a look at the other entries (I had been avoiding it in order to keep my design “mine”), and I must say that some of them are truly impressive.

I hope the beeb views this whole experience as a success, because I have already seen a number of really creative entries. That said, I do feel that my design can hold its own. Regardless of the results, I do feel the experience was a nice creative outlet. I haven’t had the opportunity to stretch those muscles that much recently (except for here, but the content generally forces a fairly simple design).

Hope the other designers got as much enjoyment out of this as I did…

Oh yeah, you can take a look at my entry at http://bbc.billoday.net/.

And, from my entry:

My goal with this reboot was to incorporate two major features into a site that, simply due to its size is rather resistant to change. First, I wanted to include prototypical Web 2.0 content, which I feel I managed to do rather well with both the “From You” and the “My Places” panels. I also wanted to give a greater degree of customizability, which is evident both in the main page itself, as well as the within the “change this” page.

That said, my overriding goal was to implement these items while maintaining some degree of the “old bbc.co.uk.”  I think that anyone coming to this site would have little problem with making the adjustment, but would be able to take advantage of the new features.

Unfortunately, time has proven a bit of a problem in that I am submitting merely two images. I would much rather to present my design at least as a working static model of what could be done.  With an HTML design, I would be better able to implement a few other features that as of now will merely rest, never realized. An example of this would be barely increasing the text size of headings that large numbers of visitors click on, giving them precedence, much like the “glass” design has done.

Alright, so we already have a design that I’ve said that I liked. Why ae we back here with yet another design? The answer is simple: I still don’t have enough to do with my life. Aside from that, I have found Mr. Martin Belam’s most recent entry on the reboot blog inspiring in some sense.

One of the areas that comp 3 was lacking in was search (it was also browse, but we will get to that later). I had the standard search bar, but I removed one of the few items that followed the whole “wisdom of crowds” theory in the current design of the site. Today, it makes a triumphant return.

You will notice a blue bar under the news breakout I designed. Within this bar is a split up search box that has everything the current search has. You will also notice the A-Z index added under browse. This is the inspiration I was speaking of.

By including the A-Z widget right there with search, I was able to remove the old blue sidebar. With that content gone, I changed the “My BBC” panel to a three-column layout. This enhances the usefulness of the homepage as a portal.

Functionality-wise, only a small handful of changes have been made. Most of these are designed to improve usability within the system. First, the personalized greeting and login options have been moved down to the MyBBC panel. Even with the news breakout being modifiable, the most cutom content will be within the My BBC panel. Therefore, the user will see a logical connection between the two.

Next to the greeting, there is a “change this” link. In the third mock up, this link was in most of the individual widgets. Now, it will point to a specific page that will act as the customization engine. As my design relies on this link, my next mock up will be of that page.

On a more personal note, my underemployment does seem to be drawing to a close, and I will probably be forced to enter just the image mockups of both this page and the “change this” page. I don’t expect this to be a problem, but I do wish I could have had the time to actually create the XHTML shell of the site.

Maybe next time…

The fourth part in a series that should be closing in on at least some sort of a milestone, I think that I’m pretty close to a final design here. Earlier today, I discussed what I’m looking to do with this site, and I feel that this third version serves those purposes quite well. For this discussion, I will speak on what the visual layout doesn’t show.

This design refers back to the second comp I made in that much of the color scheme and content remains unchanged. Of note, the greater emphasis on the news, this is simply the default in this design and the user can set his or her preference.

In order to access the preferences of the page, the user must click on the link at the top of the page (in this instance, it would be “Hello Bill”). That link will put the user at a preferences panel that will enable him to define almost all of the page below the Today label.

Also added was the suggested links element within the “My Places” element. At this stage, I can only suggest that these links be suggested based on other bookmark lists with similiar choices, although the algorithm can be modified, obviously.

Another important feature in this design (as well as the earlier ones) is the prominent featuring of feeds. While they do not act in the direction of enticing people to set bbc.co.uk as the homepage, they do assist a “power user” without harming a user that has absolutely no idea what an RSS feed is.

Within the “My BBC” section, this design allows for the user to modify and order the news categories. As I mentioned earlier, any of these categories can supercede the news that is found outside of the “My BBC” block.

Also, in remembering the “glass” roots, section headings that are clicked more get slightly larger, giving an interesting perspective of a reverse-breadcrumb type of navigation. This preference could be expanded into overall visits by everyone, bringing in the “wisdom of crowds.”

On a more personal note, this design really takes what I liked about the second design and pushed it in better directions. I think the site becomes more useful with addition of the news section breaking out. A little more spit and polish and I think I have an actual entry that I can be proud of.