BlogmyQuery – BMQ

One thing about iOS browsers that can be pretty frustrating, both as a developer and as a user, is when you open a site on an iPhone or iPod Touch (not iPad) and want to enter some text in a text field or pick an option from a select menu. Very often the browser will automatically zoom in on the entire page a little when you tap the form control.

The intention is likely to be helpful and ensure that you can see the text you’re typing or the options in the select element. This is fine, of course. What’s annoying is that the browser doesn’t zoom back out once you’re done with the control, so you have to pinch the screen and manually zoom out. Not showstopping, but rather annoying. This behaviour seems to be the same for all browsers that use WebKit, which as far as I know means all iOS browsers except Opera Mini (which does not auto-zoom form controls).

For end users I don’t know if it is possible to avoid this, but for web developers there are a couple of ways.

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Posted in CSS, iOS.

Copyright © Roger Johansson

Design is important. As you are readers of Noupe, one of the best design magazines this side of the milky way, you are certainly aware of that. Recently I had the chance to take a deeper look at three design-oriented hotel concepts over here in Thailand. And I saw that design sometimes just isn't enough. For a hotel to be successful it must have a strong concept that appeals to an increasingly wide range of people from all over the world. I went to check the Millenium Resort, the Pimnara Hotel and the Color Kata Hotel, all three located in Phuket, Thailand. And this is my story...

How many times have you stumbled into a website that captivates you with its unique, remarkable design, where every functional part shines with originality? Then, when you decide to follow this creative person you suddenly discover that social media icons are just ordinary squares with recognizable colors and logos that barely fit into the whole composition. And as a result the overall effect fades away, the first impression proves wrong. It would seem that such a tiny thing as set of 32 px sized icons can’t bring disharmony, but as all we know, good design depends on attention to the details. Put that way even such a small part can radically change th general impression of what you see. An alternative would be creating everything from scratch. But that can be really time-consuming, especially with uncommon design intentions. What do we all do? We stroll along the broad avenues and tiny sideways of the world wide web, hoping to find these little helpers to make the web design shiny and impressive. Though this might cost a little time as well as money, generally, it is worth it. To save you from wasting hours of your productive time, we have picked 25 diverse social icon packs that can definitely outshine other ordinary collections and make your website design exceptional and memorable.

The people at UK web hosting company Heart Internet wanted to find out what web designers think of their jobs, their perspectives and the industry as a whole. As 5oo designers had their say, the results may well be seen as at least not totally out of range. Still they are not representative for the industry as a whole. With that in mind, let’s take a look at the key findings…

Every now and then I’m handed a design comp that has customised checkboxes and radio buttons. This used to make me think “Oh no, not again� because I simply didn’t know of a reliable way to customise these particular form controls.

Sure, if all you care about is replacing the browser default with a custom graphic it isn’t that hard. But if like me you’re also interested in doing so without degrading user experience, especially during keyboard interaction, you have a number of problems to deal with.

Fortunately the situation is a lot better now than it was a few years ago. My first attempts at custom checkboxes and radio buttons involved quite a bit of JavaScript trickery to toggle between different states of the buttons, and I never got it to work perfectly cross-browser, cross-input device. However, since recent versions of all major browsers support the :checked CSS pseudo-class, you can now leave it to the browser to handle the states and focus on the CSS. No JavaScript involved.

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Posted in Accessibility, CSS.

Copyright © Roger Johansson