Easy Reader

At SXSW, I gave a sneak peek at the new bizhub Pro site I built for Konica Minolta and, in particular, the “scroll and flash” usability enhancement I added to the product pages. I have gotten a lot of questions about it and the technique even generated some discussion over on Geoffrey’s site. Well, the site finally launched and you can now see the “scroll and flash” for yourself.

To check it out, go to a product page (the bizhub PRO 920, for instance) and click one of the links on the upper right of the focal image and watch the show (or you can go directly to a bookmark). AJAX is used to refresh the page content (with bookmarkable links) and then the “scroll and flash” takes over. Feel free to take a gander at the JS file to see how it’s done.

I have to give it up to Shaun Inman and Thomas Fuchs as it was their hard work that made this easy for me to do.

Update: It looks like someone has not taken proper care in managing these pages since I left Cronin and Company (where I had built the site), so not all of the links appear to be working (because their anchors have been removed… tsk, tsk). I’ve let Cronin know and hopefully that will be fixed soon.

In case you missed the real thing, you can now listen to the podcast of How to Bluff Your Way in DOM Scripting, the presentation international male model Jeremy Keith and I gave at SXSW this year. And If you want to follow along, you can pick up the slides on DOMScripting.com.

I received an email announcement yesterday that WestHost (my host of choice) is going to be offering Ruby on Rails for install through its Site Manager. I guess it means that, sometime this month, my tutorial on the subject will no longer needed. Still, I’m glad it will be a bit easier to set up Rails on WestHost now.

We feel bad about missing Grey Tuesday, CSS Reboot and all the April Fools shennanigans (too much work, not enough sleep), but we finally found something we can join/support in with little to no difficulty: CSS Naked Day. For the whole of today (April 5th), we’ve turned the CSS off for both this site and Easy Designs. We hope you enjoy their rich, semantic goodness.

While building a Flash game, I wrote some code to alternate through squares on a grid system and it seemed rather slow. My code made use of the % (modulo) operator and, thinking that was the cause, I went in search of a better solution. I blew the dust off the Bitwise operator (&) and researched what it actually does. As it turns out, this little bit of programming’s past can be quite handy.

Comments & corrections are always welcome and if you have any similiar tricks to share, I’d love to hear about them.