Interact B.in

After almost 2 years of publishing two posts a week on Interaction Design, User Experience, work flow related tips, and reviews, interactb.in is going on hiatus.

The blog started shortly before I went to work at Blackboard as an User Experience Designer.  Little know fact, the blog style was inspired by David Desandro’s http://dropshado.ws/.

I am letting this blog go for the time being in order to focus on two other blogs:

• A new WordPress blog - wp.zacgordon.com that more aligns with my job teaching WordPress at Treehouse.
• My Kundalini Yoga Blog - yogizac.wordpress.com with records of classes I teach and insights related to yoga, meditation, energy work, breath and Kundalini

I have enjoyed writing for this blog and getting some great response from the community and readers.  Thank you all and if my new direction interests you, I’d love if you start to follow my new sites!

This simple app does exactly that: Menu Eclipse 2 

I recently wrote about the navigation over at SitePoint.com.  That led me to head over to their book section.  

I’ve read a good deal of SitePoint books and have always appreciated that they took creative approaches to displaying a “matrix” of their books to easily display their books by topic and level (beginner, intermediate, advanced).

Check out their most recent version, it’s pretty slick.

Well done SitePoint!  Keep up the good work :)

SitePoint has always been a company, in my mind, that has a hard time defining exactly what it does.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing, because they do a lot of great stuff - from publishing resources and books to managing forums and marketplace.  

Over the years they have made a lot of changes to their main navigation and homepage layout to reflect what was most important for them to share and convey about their company and offerings.  

Their current design is very very plain and almost too simple in my opinion because at first glance it looks like it could be any given tech blog.

That said, when you start to scroll down, a fixed position, transparent menu appears at the top of page that’s pretty nice. There must be something about transparency that still looks sexy to me.

When I noticed the menu it drew my attention to the Information Architecture and I appreciated again the effort that goes into organizing large sites with tons of different types of content.  What’s a little strange though about this main menu is that a number of the sites link to other domains with completely different navigation that offers no way back to the main site.

I would suggest they look into something like the approach Fuel Brand Network (and others have taken) with a single site navigation and then a global navigation across all their sites.

Just a thought.  Otherwise, keep on rocking the great content SitePoint!

A while back I responded to @pbuick’s tweet asking if anyone was using ActionMethod.

I said that I had used it in the past but wasn’t anymore.  I found it clunky to use and that’s a major turn off for a todo app, which should be super simple to use (at least for me).

In lovely Twitter as support fashion, ActionMethod got into the conversation and asked if I had tried it since the redesign.  I had not.  Now I have.

This is what it looks like now:

Unfortunately I don’t have a previous screenshot, but it’s definitely slicker and has been cleaned up a bit.

My biggest gripe with the online app before was that picking and assigning a date was cumbersome and involved too many clicks.  The date picking functionality on the iPhone app was great, but the online version was not. They improved that process quite a bit and better aligned the online experience with the mobile one.

Unfortunately I can’t show that because I cancelled my account.

With the recent design enhancements I may have actually kept using ActionMethod.  My reasons for canceling were purely financial.  $99 a year for a todo app is just not worth it to me, especially when I don’t use the group functionality that is one of it’s selling points, and I assume part of why they charge so much.

Overall I have to say well done on the redesign ActionMethod!  If you were way cheaper I would still be a customer :)

I’ve mentioned this before, but since coming on board to Treehouse I log a lot of time in Google Docs.  I think this has been a recent addition, or I just noticed it recently.

When you have a comment selected in Google Drive, it looks like this:

When you click “Delete” you get this notification:

A few things I like about this:

1. You can’t miss it
2. I like how it covers the whole comment
3. Something about the transparent black just looks good to me

Thanks Google for continuing to make Google Docs (I mean Drive) a lovely app to work with.

Folks who write a lot of tutorials with code appreciate a good and easy to use an encoder that converts HTML into safe characters.

After experimenting with a lot of them I have settled on using the HTML Character EnCoder from All Blog Tools.

There are a few things I really like about it:

1. It keeps the line and indent formatting.
2. It has a relatively small text field that makes copying very easy
3. It has an easy “Clear” button
4. It’s colorful and shiny 

If you need a good character encoder I recommend this one.  Thanks All Blog Tools! 

If you’re like me your menu bar on your mac can get pretty cluttered.  A big thanks to Jason Seifer, my Treehouse buddy, for noticing this and recommending Bartender, a mac app that helps address this exact problem.

Here is what my menu bar looked like before Bartender (19 items):

And here is what my menu bar looks like with Bartender (7 items):

You’re probably thinking that you can accomplish something similar by using the individual settings for each application in the menu, but that’s not always the case, for example, Bartender let’s you hide the following menu icons that I haven’t figured out how to hide natively:

• Spotlight (still accessible via shortcut)
• Volume (I just use the keyboard)
• Adobe’s update notifier (Not sure why this needs to be in the menu bar)

Plus it’s nice to have it all managed from one place.

Now, there are a few menu items that Bartender does not let you turn off from the app and you have to do natively.  Here they are as well as how to turn them off:

• Bluetooth (Preferences > Bluetooth > Uncheck “Show Bluetooth status in the menu bar”)
• Fast user switching menu (Preferences > Users & Groups > Login Items > Uncheck “Show fast user switching mode”)

A cool feature that Bartender has is the ability to store menu items in a drop down menu bar that appears when you click on the Bartender icon in the menu bar.

I’m not sure how much I’ll use this feature, but it seems like a cool feature.

Finally, you have the option to change or completely customize the icon that Bartender uses.

Overall, I would definitely recommend this app, and would also recommend picking it up for $7.50 while it’s still in beta.

Thanks again to Jason for recommending this app to me and Surtees Studios for building it!

I recently posted a link to the terminal code to show and hide all hidden files in Terminal.

Thanks to Kyle Cotter’s Alfred App extension you can now do this even easier!

Thanks Kyle!

For those who know and love the Command + Shift + T shortcut in Chrome, you’re probably like me and which that Safari had the same shortcut.

It does have something almost the same though. If you hit Ctr +Z it will open the prevoiusly closed tab.  However, if you do something like open a new tab it will no longer work.

For those who can accept using the mouse, you can also do this from the Bookmarks menu.

I posted previously about some useful shortcuts for working in Google Docs.  Today I want to share two specific shortcuts for commenting in Google Docs:

1. Command + Option + M: This creates a comment for the selected text or for the one word to the right of the cursor if no text is highlighted.
2. Control + Enter: This saves the comment.

Before I figured out the shortcut for saving a post I was able to use a shortcut to add a comment, but had to click to save the comment.  Now I can do it all via shortcuts, which is much preferred. 

I find that when I switch computers now a days, I’m needing less and less time to setup a new computer to where I feel comfortable with it and I’m working in my optimal work flow.

On my most recent setup, I made a list of the apps I downloaded:

1. Chrome - Currently my default browser
2. Alfred - Although I am tending to go back to Spotlight for some things and use Alfred more for advanced power pack stuff
3. Dropbox - Basically my entire harddrive lives in Dropbox
4. CloudApp - Love the automatically load to cloud for screenshots
5. Evernote - I store everything I need to remember in here, it’s so helpful!
6. SublimeText 2 - Still like TextMate, but am growing to like Sublime Text
7. MAMP Pro - A must have for working locally, especially the hosts feature
8. Adobe Cloud Apps - With the cloud subscription there is an app you download that let’s you download any of the other Adobe creative apps.
9. Fantastico - This is a great little calendar for the task bar
10. BetterTouch Tool - I use this to do things like swipe left to move a window to the left, or swipe three fingers down on the mouse to view desktop
11. TweetDeck - My favorite thing about this app is the ability to schedule posts.
12. Default X - This gives me shortcuts when saving and opening files that speeds my work up by so much.

Of course I download more apps, like Skype, as the need for them arises, but I’ve found I use these apps above the most.

When downloading Chrome the other day I noticed that their download page has some nice little responsiveness with the menu, positioning and fonts.  

It did not however have the images respond.  

Remember folks, apply responsive effects to your images when they break the flow of the page otherwise!

If you want to learn more about responsive images, I would suggest this ALA article from Mat Marquis.

I find that whenever I setup a new computer I install these four Google Chrome extensions every time:

• Xmarks - Allows me to sync bookmark bars across browsers
• Window Resizer - Let’s me resize the browser to standard as well as custom dimensions
• Screen Capture - This extension from Google let’s you capture a section of the screen, what appears in the fold, as well as whole pages.  Unfortunately I have never been able to get the keyboard shortcuts to work on a mac.
• ColorZilla - A really great color picker with all the features you need to grab and select colors

Since starting my job at Treehouse I have also come to rely on Google Docs Viewer for quick access to my Google Drive files.

Since starting my new WordPress teaching job at the fabulous Treehouse Island I have been using Google Docs on a daily basis.  I’d like to share a few features I find particularly helpful.

1. Shortcuts for headings: If you want to make a line a header of some sort just hit Command + 1 (or 2,3,4, etc.).  
2. Apply paragraph styling: This is helpful when you need to clear some styling.  Shortcut is Command + 0
3. Add bookmark: If you have a long document it’s nice to add bookmarks, which are basically anchor tags.  No shortcut
4. Add table of contents: A table of contents does exactly what you think.  It displays the hierarchy of the document according to order on the page and headers applied
5. Right click: I love the care Google put into the right click menu.  It changes based on what elements you’re interacting with.  It’s especially helpful with tables.

The one thing that I find strange is the shortcut for adding a comment is the same as for minimizing a window.  I have not explored yet if it’s possible to change that?

I like how Google+ shows users about new features.