2009 has been a somewhat interesting year for the internet; it’s become more mobile & more user friendly. However here are a few ideas I have had over the year, which I would like to see arrive in 2010.
Video Stream Caching
One of the big annoyances I have with streaming video files (normally on websites such as YouTube & Megavideo) is whenever I go to jump to another section of the video I lose what I currently have already loaded. It would be really useful if I could quickly go back to the section I’ve previously loaded.
This is a mock up I done, the video I used is from RayWilliamJohnson
I’m quite sure this would need to be implemented by the software, but I can’t see how it would be difficult to add.
Zebra Stripping is the technique of having different colours per each line on a list. It generally is considered to help users read large tables of information; however there is evidence suggesting the effectiveness of zebra stripes is somewhat overrated. Having said that, in CSS3 it’s very easy to implement so it’s worthwhile adding.
To add Zebra Strips to a list, all you need to do is adding the following pseudo-class to the end of the CSS element you wish to edit:
Recently Google Announced a new exciting product called Google Chrome Frame. Which is an add-on for Internet Explorer which offers Internet Explorer users all the features of other browsers without having to install a different browser (When a certain Meta tag is used on a web page)? The video Google released explains the product in a little more detail.
Create forms on a web page is relatively simple, however what most developers forget is the golden rule of usability, “Users are Idiots”. In a large number of websites they fail to provide a clear indication of how a form field needs to be formatted. Some even seem to even forget to clear the field when the user clicks into, which is really useful if your website has users with motor skills.
Here is a really neat piece of jQuery I use to make forms a little easier for users which takes little work to integrate (Just copy and paste before the tag).
