Marketing Interactive Technology Executives Blog

Taking Google Chrome for a Test Drive: First Impressions

Sep

2008

by Mark Patten

I can't say I'm remotely surprised by Google's entry into the browser market (was anybody?). In fact, I'm surprised it has taken this long to happen - the writing has been on the wall for years. I'm more curious how they kept such a relatively tight lid on this? There have been rumors for years, but they seem to have gone quiet recently. And then all of a sudden -- here it is!

Anyway, as an interactive agency I can't say the addition of another browser, especially one that is likely reasonable adoption, to test was the most welcome of news. But the inner geek quickly takes over and the excitement got the best of me.

Convert Your ASP:Button Controls to Sliding Doors Styled Button Elements

Aug

2008

by B-ri

History of the Sliding Doors Method and the HTML Button Element

About a year ago, the button element was rediscovered by Particletree as way to add consistency to your website's buttons. A few months later the filament group took the button element a step farther with sliding doors. We really liked both of these articles and wanted to use them in our latest projects but we ran into a problem with the rendering of the asp:button control.

The Problem with Standard asp:Button and Form Input Controls

A basic asp:button control renders as an input element with type="submit" (<input type="submit" name="btnAddChoice" value="Submit" onclick="__doPostBack('btnAddChoice','');" />). In order to render our asp:Buttons in more flexible, skinnable way with sliding doors,we needed to alter the HTML output of the asp:Button control to render like this: <button type="submit" id="btnAddChoice" onclick="__doPostBack('btnAddChoice','');"><span>Submit</span></button>.

For more info on the benfits of sliding doors and the HTML button, please read the following articles:

The Solution

We decided to write a Control Adapter to change the rendering of the asp:button to render as a button element. A Control Adapter allows you to override the rendering of any ASP.NET server control. The best part about using a control adapter is that it will render every asp:button the way that we tell it to; we don't have to rewrite any of our old asp:buttons. For more info on control adapters check out this post on Scott Gu's blog.

jQuery Style ASP.NET Form Validators

Jul

2008

by SMercer

Recently, we here at delphic sage having been starting down the road to adopting jQuery as our client side framework of choice with regards AJAX and DHTML deliciousness. Part of this process included identifying which .NET controls we needed to replace with jQuery plugins. One of these that came up was the ASP.NET validators, which although highly effective and easy to use, offer a rather dated UI experience. I did a bunch of searching around and discovered these wonderful jQuery validators provided by bassisstance.de (Jörn Zaefferer has written many great jQuery plugins, check them out!). These validators are just what we were looking for, but it didn't take long to discover that (A) they are not very .NET friendy because they rely on elements having a "name" attribute, and (B) they are not nearly as easy to implement as the asp.net validation controls from a developer perspective.

validator in action

Here is a look at the final result. See Demo | Download the Source Code

OK, So Let's Eat Our Cake, too

The jQuery validators look and behave greatly, but the asp.net validators are much easier to use. My mission here is to extend the asp.net validator controls to highlight and focus on invalid form fields in way that is comparable to what Jörn has done with his jQuery validators. The key advantage that I will try to attain is that I want the validators to be completely transparent to our developers when implementing in forms. They should continue to implement ASP.NET validation the same way they always have, and I should be able to upgrade the validators accross various legacy projects with very little effort. Because of this requirement, using inheritance to override the control behavior was out of the question since it would require developers to use new control tags and references for the new controls. Now that the goals have been defined, it's time to get hacky with some javascript.

The Business Value of Web Redesign

Jun

2008

by Cliff

In this day and age, a website is integral to a company's success and just about everyone already has some type of web presence. More often than not, we are redesigning existing sites for our clients. Of course we get work from companies that are rebranding, merging, or funded startups where we do get a clean slate, but more than half our work is a web redesign. So we have experience in making the improvement a sensible, empowering and motivating leap forward. In some cases this involves dynamic functionality as well as the visual change but for this post we will be focusing more on the visual (the dynamic nature of a site is almost always unique, but when we discuss the look, we can apply that philosophy across any project).

Much like the approach to a design from scratch, we focus our efforts on the following pieces of the puzzle to recognize business value form web redesign projects. The difference is that we will take into consideration improvements in these specific areas:

Visual Aesthetic
Usability - Navigation & Site Architecture
Functionality
Content

Open Source and the Design Community

Apr

2008

by Mark Patten

Here's an interesting article from Computerworld - Why open source is under-utilized in graphics? The article ponders why there has not been more penetration of OpenSoure technologies and collaboration in the design community.

I have to confess, I never really thought about (technology software speaking) it till I saw this article. For some reason I always think of the design community as generally supportive of OpenSource. Perhaps it is the inherent anti-Microsoft / pro-Apple slant common among Designers. But there really isn't a viable alternative to Photoshop and like minded, commercially based programs. Certainly not one that has achieved much market penetration.

Interesting. Wonder of Google has given it much thought?