avanderzwan

I have been working lately… and have proof. Besides the indentation in my office chair [insert Steelcase shout-out here], I have some ‘artifacts’ worth sharing. Here are a few of the websites I’ve worked on that have recently gone live.

Whats Your Art?

View Site

Sebago

View Site

Bates Footwear

View Site

Don’t do it! (yet)

With getting a new Google Wave account, I wanted to forward my Gmail emails to my Google Wave account. I saw that my Google Wave account was [username]@googlewave.com so I figured I could do it. I went into Gmail. Followed Settings > Forward and set up Gmail to pass all of my emails on to google wave.

I left it on for a day or so, and maybe that was my big mistake. I have been getting emails every 20-30 minutes that have been telling me they cannot send my emails to Google Wave, and that they will retry for the next 2 days. They have a subject line of ‘Delivery Status Notification (Failure)’. Obviously I turned off my forwarding, however now, 3 days later, they are still coming in every 20-30 minutes telling me that the email failed.

So moral of the story. Don’t automatically forward your emails to Google Wave (yet!) and also, don’t leave that forward on any longer than you have to. Google Wave is not ready for it yet and it will get REALLY annoying.

Okay. So ‘Browse’ has been rolled into something called ‘Column Browser’. If you want to get iTunes 9 to have the same pane layout as the old, default, ‘Browse’ option, you can. Here is what you are going to want to do:

1) Turn on Column Browser: View > Show Column Browser
2) Show Albums as well as artists: View > Column Browser > Albums
3) Show Genres as well as albums and artists: View > Column Browser > Genres
4) Setup Column Browser to show up above your song lists: View > Column Browser > On Top

This plugin is meant to expedite the basic process of making form fields empty or clear on focus and refill on blur, depending on a few specs… a watermark. The three different scenarios that I have built for are represented.

1. A normal form field watermark that empties on focus and refills on blur.
2. A value that is set by the server trumps anything that the plugin does. (Note: this way, if a user has to fill out the form again because one of the fields didn’t validate, the server can send values so that the user doesn’t have to refill the whole form)
3. There may be a time when you want to ignore the plugin and keep your label visible. Just add a ‘ignore’ class to your label and the plugin doesn’t touch it.

This solution focuses on accessibility as it does not remove the label, just moves it off the viewport. This way, if a user does not have Javascript, CSS, or uses a screen reader, they will still get normal labels.

View a demo
Download plugin (link to jQuery plugins)

Please let me know what you think about it, or if there is anything I should do to improve.