How long does it take for a new visitor/customer to be delighted using your product or service?

via 52 Weeks of UX – Time to Delight. Probably the most important and hardest metric. The most important because that is the real job of a product or service to delight the customer. The hardest because you have to go out and ask your customers one by one and find out how to replicate that awesome experience or that one thing that wowed your customers for all of the others.

One of the things missing from Texas Tech’s Computer Science degree is a course in Human & Computer Interaction, or along similar lines. We learn a lot about how to write good software but nothing of how to make people experience delight in using it. And the real key behind good software isn’t how bug free it is, but does the customer absolutely love using that application, if they do you’ve made a customer for life. Apple is the obvious and perfect example of this.

• Always store time in UTC
• Convert to local time on display (local being defined by the user looking at the data)
• When storing a timezone, you need the name, timestamp and the offset. This is required because governments sometimes change the meanings of their timezones (eg: the US govt changed DST dates), and your application needs to handle things gracefully… eg: The exact timestamp when episodes of LOST showed both before and after DST rules changed.

via bluesmoon – Handling Date/Times and timezones. The three basic rules of storing date/times in a web application.

In terms of repetition and annoyance, yes, the two are very much alike. But they’re fundamentally different in this way: Prefixes give us control of our hacking destiny. In the past, we had to invent a bunch of parser exploits just to get inconsistent implementations to act the same once we found out they were inconsistent. It was a wholly reactive approach. Prefixes are a proactive approach.

via A List Apart – Prefix or Posthack. This is an interesting opinion but I see the logic, eliminates the possibility of broken CSS styles as browsers change and create new standards and abilities.

CakePHP is a fantastic web development framework that I absolutely love working with every single day. CropInsight is a web application built using CakePHP, jQuery and a whole lot of sweat and time. Not only do I work with CakePHP for my full-time job, I also use it for personal projects, it’s a great tool for PHP developers. Trey Reynolds and I will get to spend time learning more about the inner magic of Cake and hopefully helping the core developers of Cake learn more about one of their users.

Photo Credit from Flickr user: koyhoge.

Merely removing warnings doesn’t save our work from peril, but using an “undo” function does. Let me say that again: The solution to our warning woes is undo. With a robust undo, we can close our work with reckless abandon and be secure in the knowledge that we can always get it back. With undo, we can make that horrible “oops!” feeling go away by getting our work back.

via A List Apart – Never Use a Warning When you Mean Undo. Rather than use a warning consider using the ability to just undo. Less hassle to do the action and easy to fix in the case of a mistake.

I have a flash project; it has many source files. I have a fairly heavily-used class, call it Jenine. I recently (and, perhaps, callously) relocated Jenine from one namespace to another. I thought we were ready – I thought it was time. The new Jenine was better in every way – she had lost some code bloat, she had decoupled herself from a few vestigial class relationships, and she had finally come home to the namespace that she had always secretly known in her heart was the one she truly belonged to. She was among her own kind.

via Stack Overflow – Flash CS4 refuses to let go. It gets even better.

In the past few days I’ve been revising the CSS compatibility table with information about the latest crop of browsers. There’s no doubt about it: this is IE9’s show. It just supports nearly everything. No hassle, no buts.

Besides, CSS3 selectors are now fully supported by all browsers but one. And that one browser is not IE. It’s, curiously, Opera.

via QuirksBlog – IE’s big leap forward; CSS3 selectors fully supported. Awesome news and big kudos to the IE team for turning IE into a real browser.

Simple HTTP+JSON method of accessing a user’s information in a user approved sandbox on the user’s desktop. List, upload, delete, move, copy, and get files as well as many other features.

via Dropbox – Developers. This could be a really fun API to play with.

You had your chance, Microsoft, and you blew it. There are enough browser makers now that care about the user experience, that care about the developer experience, and that realize what’s important in this community. Even if you did everything right from now on, there’s no amount of promotion, branding, or mock integrity that can change how developers perceive your products. It’s too late.

via Impressive Webs – Dear Microsoft, You Missed the Boat. It’s sad but in nine years the web design community has turned from being enthralled with IE to wanting it to wither away and disappear. It probably doesn’t help that most of the web development crowd has turned to the Mac and Microsoft decided long ago to turn it’s back on IE for the Mac, thus relegating it to a chore to test new designs or features.

The demos have three levels of obstacles for non-Safari browsers even if the other browsers implemented the HTML5 features being demoed (only video and audio; the rest is CSS!) and implemented the proposed CSS features once standardized:

via hsivonen – -webkit-HTML5. Apple promotes open standards by calling them by the wrong name and using the most closed version possible to prevent all other browsers from seeing the effects. Oh and one of the demos doesn’t even work in anything other than the latest version of Mac OSX.