Griffin Interactive: March 2004 Archives

As seen on Safari

Mar 1

iCapture is an online app created by Dan Vine; you submit a url and it will create a screen capture of what the site looks like on the popular Mac browser Safari.

I dont know how long this facility will remain free for use and whether it will scale to 50,000+ users a day when more people find it 'cause it is very useful.


Filed under:: Apple
Tags:: Mac; Safari; Web Browser

A value driven Intranet

Mar 2

Shiv Singh of Boxes and Arrows writes on how to define a 'Value-Driven Intranet'.

The article attempts to brush past the current Intranet related buzz words and encourages the designer to focus on the customer (employees) requirements. This may mean building an Intranet site that consists of tailored core services specific to individual business needs, but in the same instance not too narrowly sighted that these services are seen to be catering to an individual team, as this may create the opposite affect and encourage the growth of silos within the organisation.

As a result of creating smaller focused services the Intranets overall success and effectiveness will be difficult to quantify. Raw website hit results should not be used to measure the Intranets success but instead overall project efficiency should be observed so as to evaluate if the core Intranet services are being utilised. These observations can then be used to refine and define future services for the Intranet.

Intranet objectives such as increased employee communication, collaboration, and knowledge management are hard to quantify and measure. As a result, some corporations choose to establish tactile goals in the form of metrics such as page views, total hits, and customer satisfaction ratings. This approach is not effective for understanding and measuring the value creation driven through your intranet. Measuring the value is difficult, as the intranet's greatest benefits to an organization are not in a measurable, packaged, and corporeal form.


Filed under:: Web design

Game Links

Mar 3

There are quite a few good 'free' online games floating around the web at the moment. They are so addictive I致e decided to add a games area to my links / bookmarks so I don稚 have to hunt around for them in emails.

I've added links to some all time classics including Pac-man, bomb jack, Tetris and loads more. It痴 amazing what you can do with Flash.


Filed under:: Misc

Rasmus Lerdorf's PHP

Mar 4

The creator of PHP Rasmus Lerdorf once mentioned at the Euro Apache conference in 2000 that he created PHP simply to make his life easier when developing web applications were he worked. I'm sure he didn't envisage it would ever be quite as popular as it is today. His short article 'Do You PHP?' notes PHP's current usage, advice for architects and its future within the web development community.

He also mentions that it is all to easy to write messy code in Php :)


Filed under:: Scripting

Get active with this UI toolkit

Mar 5

I hope im wrong but I'm starting to think that most client-side developers have given up on common widget libraries, the inherent problem is the fact that supporting all flavour of browsers becomes so difficult and error prone that most development stops within the first few months.

Is it really the case that increase in bandwidth will be the death of the thin-client application? or is common client-side application delivery just before its time?

Anyway whatever your conclusion there is a new widget library called Active UI. It is a cross-browser Web GUI toolkit. This opensource project currently comprises of the following widgets, grid, tree, tabs, menu. It is built using DHTML, Javascript DOM, CSS and XML and can be integrated with any CGI page generation systems such as JSP, ASP, PHP and anything else that will generate the script at the Standard-Output level.

You will like this band

Mar 6

The one thing I really missed from Audio galaxy was its facility by which it showed you other bands that might appeal to your taste.

Well horay for Music Plasma it does the same type of thing, you enter your favorite band / pop group and it responses with a list of similar groups that may also interest you.

Give it ago. (I'm sure ive see the GUI before from another visual search engine).


Filed under:: Misc
Tags:: Music

Colour-blind awareness

Mar 21

There are a few good tools on the web that can help you (the designer) see your website design from the perspective of somebody that has a colour vision deficiency.

Here they are:-

Vischeck -(Photoshop plugin)

Color Vision

ColorMatch Remix


Filed under:: Web design
Tags:: Colour

Speak and Spell

Mar 24

Play speak and spell online with this wacky flash version - not many words know, but a great nostalgia trip.


Filed under:: Misc

A clean Spellchecker

Mar 25

The Medical University of South Carolina has created a spellchecker that is accessible via a SOAP webservice. This is very useful for somebody like me whose spelling is atrochous.

The site also shows how you can call the service via a simple javascript bookmarklet to post to the webservice.


Filed under:: Misc

A Madcarrot in the Zen Garden

Mar 26

Back in May 2003 I blogged an entry about the CSS Zen Garden, its only taken me about 10 months to submit my own (which isn't too bad, I guess?).

It didn't make an official entry, but at least it was categorised under 'Fun'.


Filed under:: Web design
Tags:: CSS; CSS Zen Garden; Web design

Mobile Versions of XHTML

Mar 31

Is there really a need for a specific mark-up language for mobile devices? we have seen WML, XHTML Basic, and CHTML. However the latest offering is XHTML Mobile profile and WML2.

Little Spring Design specialise in design and usability UI specifically for mobile devices. Check out this site to keep up-to-date on the latest that is mobile UI.


Filed under:: Mobile
Tags:: cHTML; Mobile UI; Mobile Web; Usability; WML