Category / Usability

by Aaron

5 Great Online Color Palette selection and design tools

Can’t find the color that matches your favorite cyan? Use one of these web based color palette selection tools to help you find the perfect match!  My current favorites are the first two, Color Scheme Designer and Kuler.

Color Scheme Designer

Easy to use and has a simulation of what some people may see who have various color vision deficiencies.

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Kuler

A slick Adobe Flash based color selection and sharing site.

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ColorJack

Although not as easy to use right away, a very powerful color selection tool with many different features.

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Color Wizard

Although the actual selection of color isn’t as much fun as some of the other online options, the Color Wizard has lots of onscreen colors at one time for easy identification of options without a lot of fuss. (The worst part is that the page is heavily loaded with advertisements).

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Sessions Color Wheel Color Calculator

The link to this is actually mid-way down the middle of the page. This is a another nice interactive color selection tool. I would have prefered that they hadn’t picked an orange/gold color as the base color for their selection application.

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And a bonus,

SitePro Central’s Colour Scheme Chooser

Simple and efficient.

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by Aaron

E-mail verification, still a necessary evil?

It’s tax time in the United States. Many have already submitted our taxes, some are working on them, and others waiting.

Here’s my e-mail inbox for one of the e-mail accounts that I maintain:

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Seeing that, you’d probably think that I’ve been working on my taxes and submitted them …. Well, nope. We haven’t started yet. However, someone named Nicole did work on and successfully complete her taxes yesterday (and congratulations Nicole, the return was accepted!).

Until we move to a more universal form of online identification, like Open ID, a Facebook account, Windows Live, etc., is there a better way? My paranoid side says though that I would be uncomfortable linking my financial accounts, my tax returns, my healthcare records, to a common “social” account, but when I skip making that link, I’m back to needing e-mail verification. Would you make that link and use a common account?

By the way, H&R Block did not send an e-mail verification to my e-mail account for Nicole.

I did try to find a reasonable way to contact H&R Block to notify them of the issue, but they seemed to want every piece of personal information about me just to hear my contact that I decided not to:

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And there appears to be no way to contact them about their web site – so it wasn’t clear that giving out this information was going to actually help Nicole.

Sorry Nicole.

by Aaron

XMRadio Account Updates – Yikes!

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“We are in the process of updating your account. Certain features will be in accessible for the next 10 minutes. We apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause.”

Excuse me?!?!??!??  I make one small change to my account, and then I’m unable to make any additional changes? What kind of CRAP-CRAZY programming is this? Seriously, this isn’t just inconvenient, it’s stupid and disrespectful of the user.

Who at XMRadio thought it’s OK for a system to behave this way? Seriously.

by Aaron

Holy Intimidation Editor-Man!

I’ve been looking into some programmer editor choices again, this time downloading some that have been recommended (and a few that weren’t). I’ve tired of the clunky feeling and most recently the crashing of Notepad++, and decided I was willing to pay for an editor if it was reasonable overall (and of all things, STABLE!).

Tonight, I’ve downloaded Ultra Edit 14.20.

The first impressions – scared:

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I’ve counted 107 top level places / functions / buttons visible on this screen. I believe during setup I selected the “Web Programmer” mode as the default.

I know, I shouldn’t let the little things bother me – but I’m not impressed with their concept of “tabs”:

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The tabs don’t contain the content. They’re just an illusion (just good old SysTabControl32 from the common controls library). (Plus, they take up more space vertically because of this odd implementation choice). When that toolbar is undocked:

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First impressions – not so good. I’m so overwhelmed by the UI that I don’t feel like trying to even explore the multitude of options presented. Uninstalled UltraEdit. Moving on to next option.

by Aaron

Do you worry about the URL?

Guess what content this URL points to…

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Hard to guess, isn’t it?

If you guessed the WEATHER, you’d be right.

I had typed in the domain name followed by /weather, thinking that would take me immediately to the weather page, but was greeted by a 404 Error Page (not a nice one … just the one built into the browser).

When you’re coding a web application, do you make it so well known/used destinations are easy to reach by using clean/simple URLs?

Do you like it when a web application uses URLs that are understandable, rather than everything being codified?