Protonotes - More and more online tools for creating and collaborating with interactive prototypes are being released. This is the latest.

Give Up and Use Tables - While I believe you should only use tables for tabular data/information, I guess some people do give up.

Wassup - Not just a Budweiser commercial anymore, this is a WordPress plugin for viewing in realtime what’s up on your blog.

AC/DC Excel Music Video - Working in the Entertainment industry, I’m exposed to a lot of unique promotional ideas. This is one of the most unusual ones I’ve seen.  I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall to hear the reasons they chose Excel as their medium for this video.

BlueTrip CSS Framework - Supposedly this combines the best of Blueprint and Tripoli.

To be clear, my work isn’t boring. However, videos of people working do tend to be quite boring. So in an effort to change this, and give me a chance to play with After Effects, I made this silly video late last night while everyone was asleep.

http://www.foodtidings.com/SignUp.aspx?ScheduleGuid=00000000-0000-0000-
0000-0000
00000000

The quick solution is to use a site like TinyURL or URLZen to generate a short URL everyone can click on:

http://tinyurl.com/00000

Some people might utilize this work around, or realize you could copy and paste the two pieces of the URL into the browser address field, but what about those that don’t?

This makes me wonder why more websites don’t provide this functionality out of the box (i.e. use short URLs by default). Do most people need to know the page they’re going to is SignUp.aspx or do they know what a ScheduleGuid is? I understand the technical and business reasons behind these choices but I imagine the company would prefer people get to and use their site. Perhaps the following might be a more appropriate solution:

http://www.foodtidings.com/signup/00000

So should YOU.

I spend a lot of time reading about software products. I also spend a lot of time deciding whether features of other software products are worth incorporating into the products I personally design and build. While I think it’s important to consider what the competition is doing, the sheer volume of what’s out there can be stifling to productivity.

Don’t always look to improve.

I’m often asked to review designs to see how well they work. I always have to remind myself that the purpose of this exercise isn’t necessarily for me to improve something but rather to understand what the goals are and whether or not the design is an appropriate solution for those goals. If it is appropriate, leave it alone. Don’t overdesign something if it already works.

Thanks for getting back to your roots MTV. Thank you.

Gary Flake - Fast Company article about how he was convinced to join Microsoft and how he’s working as a change agent within that company.

Google Analytics API - Google announced quite a few new enterprise features for its analytics product. This includes an API. The wheels are turning.

Nielsen on Email - Love him or hate him, at least he’s thorough. Jakob Nielsen’s latest Alertbox explores the usability of transactional/confirmation email messages.

ProtoShare - Interesting web app for creating wireframes and prototypes.  I haven’t used this but it does look promising.

Inside Google’s Design Process - “Design is integral to everything we do. We don’t say ‘here’s a feature, here’s a spec, now go and build it.’ We design it, we build a prototype and we make it real…”  This looks to be an approach being adopted by a large number of individuals and organizations and I personally find it to be very effective.

Calculating Color Contrast for Legible Text - Color + Code = Nice Solution.

Alan Cooper Quotes - “If a 10-year-old child behaved like software, he’d be sent to his room without supper.”

Sketching Tutorials - A large collection of videos, from MIT, about sketching.