My Impressions of the Samsung Galaxy Tab

Posted By: Mark Aplet 2 Comments November 13, 2010

I am working on a interface for an Adobe Air app that is intended to run on the Samsung Galaxy Tablet. So this weekend I set out to find a Galaxy Tab that I can play with to see how it works. I was especially interested in testing the interactions of some of the other Android applications. I have a few tricky things to address myself, I needed to see how others worked around them.

I found the Galaxy Tab at a local Verizon store, and after a quick introduction to it by the sales guy I was off and swiping. I spent all of 45-55 min playing with the device. Not enough to be an expert by any stretch of the imagination, but enough to formulate some opinions about it none the less.

Overall, I thought the device was well constructed. It felt good in my hands. I liked the high quality screen the most. It was bright and vivid. the built in icons all looked great. Of course it looked as though some of them were apple derivatives. My first impressions were really good and I thought wow this might actually be a cool device. But then I spent another 40+ minutes with it. That's when things went downhill.

What I don't like about the Galaxy Tab

My biggest complaints about the device was the fact that all the applications I demoed relied on the devices primary back button to navigate applications. Some apps even used it as a way of saying "done" bringing up a save or cancel dialogue prompt. This feels so wrong to me to have to leave the application window to click a button to go back a step or to say done. What were the developers thinking? To make matters worse, if you are using the tablet in the landscape mode the back and home buttons no longer communicate what they do. Take a look at this screenshot. The home button now looks like a backwards arrow, and the back button looks like an undo button or something else. 

I'm sure you will get used to the oddly oriented icons after a while, but shouldn't these devices be intuitive and easy for anyone to understand? Samsung could have remedied this glaring issue buy rotating these icons when the tablet was turned to on it's side. I am actually more of the opinion that most users will use this device primarily in the portrait position so it may not matter much. In the end it's a horrible design and bad user experience. 

That brings me to my second gripe. Holding the device in the landscape position was difficult. Mostly because it didn't feel right in landscape mode. This is probably fine for gaming or watching videos, but for most other tasks portrait felt much more comfortable to me. I found hat even though I was trying to test the device in landscape mode I kept turning it to portrait without even thinking about it. It was a subconscious move that I was doing based on how the device felt to me.

What about Adobe Flash?

Since the application that I am working on is going to be an Adobe Air App, I decided to test the flash capability. I tested several sites known to use flash. I tried youtube, CBS, and a few sites that I have worked on that use flash for some elements of flash. Sadly, the video on CBS did not want to play at first. Then after trying another, the video finaly did play but was not very smooth. Testing sites that used flash for some elements made the page a bit sluggish to scroll. Sadly, the animation playback was also not all that smooth either. Personally, I just don't think that flash is going work that great on this device in the long run. If you really want flash on your portable, you might want to hold off on the Galaxy Tab. Perhaps the Blackberry Playbook will be a better platform for Flash.

→ Respond NowTags: Opinions & Rants

Fixing Photoshop's Shape Tool

Posted By: Mark Aplet 2 Comments November 11, 2010

Have you ever used the vector shape tools only to discover that the edges can sometimes look aliased? To make matters worse, sometimes you could draw a shape and it would turn out nice. Sometimes it looks like poop. The tool is so inconsistent and frustrating that I actually recommended that interface designers stop using the tool all together.

The problem with these tools are that the default (horrible default) behavior for the tool is to use a sub-pixel placement on the screen. What I mean by "sub-pixel" is that drawing a vector shape can actually split a pixel in half. When the pixel becomes split like that then it has to alias the shape in order to compensate for the split pixel. Contrast that to a marquee tool. When a marquee tool draws a shape it snaps to the nearest full pixel creating sharp edges that appear crisp and clean. Lets take a look at what this looks like.

The fix for this shortcoming is pretty easy. Although it may be a bit hidden. With the shape tool active (U) select the rectangle or rounded rectangle shape tool, then look towards the end of shape options there is a disclosure triangle. If you click on it, you will be shown options available for that tool. For each of those tools there is a checkbox that reads "Snap to Pixels" checking that box will allow the vector shapes to snap to the nearest whole pixel curing the sub-pixel display issues. In the photo above. The right shape was drawn with Snap to Pixels box checked, while the left shape was not checkeded. What a difference it makes. Why dosen't Adobe make that the default for the tool?

→ Respond NowTags: Photoshop

Facebook LikeMe Plugin

Posted By: Mark Aplet 3 Comments September 14, 2010

The likeMe plugin adds the facebook Like or Recommended buttons to your posts footer. The Like button lets a user share your content with friends on Facebook. When the user clicks the Like button on your site, a story appears in the user's friends' News Feed with a link back to your website.

Okay, So I am must admit I am not a big Facebook fan. In fact, I deleted my facebook account and haven't looked back. But that does not mean other people don't use. In fact the only reason I wrote this plugin was because my co-worker who's in charge of or companies marketing asked me too.

I was not the first to release a Facebook like button plugin for Mango Blog. Pyae Phyoe Shein actually announced his plugin about the same time I finished mine up. No I didn't rip him off, it was just a coincidence.

The LikeMe plugin follows the same configuration convention as the Facebook developers like button configuration wizard. So if your used to the wizard then this plugin functions very similarly.

Download and Installation

Plugin version:

1.0

Last Updated:

September 16, 2010

Requires:

Mango Blog 1.3+

Auto-install URL:

https://www.visual28.com/assets/content/mango/LikeMe_1.0.zip

→ Respond NowTags: Mango Blog · Plugins

Showcase of Beautifully Designed Mystery Meat Navigation

Posted By: Mark Aplet No Comments September 10, 2010

I was looking at one of those design showcase sites today, and was surprised to see such a strong resurgence in mystery meat navigation. So I thought I would throw out my own showcase of beautifully designed websites with mystery meat navigation.

Bert Timmermans

Cavica

Got Milk?

Hull Digital – (recently updated to include text)

Harry Ford

Square Girl

The Box

→ Respond NowTags: General · Inspiration · usability

LESS/SCSS Syntax Highlighting in Dreamweaver

Posted By: Mark Aplet 2 Comments August 17, 2010

I started using less css a short while ago and really like having variables and nesting options for css.  The only real downside was Dreamweaver's inability to apply syntax highlighting to files it does not understand. Thankfully the solution is pretty easy and takes only a few seconds.

NOTE: This technique modifies the core configuration files used by Dreamweaver so be sure to make a copy of the file and store it in a safe place until your certain things are working correctly.

We will be modifying the document called MMDocumentTypes.xml located here:
Macintosh HD/Applications/Adobe Dreamweaver CS?/configuration/DocumentTypes/MMDocumentTypes.xml

Windows users, the configuration file is called the same thing, and is located here:
C:\Program Files\Adobe\Dreamweaver CS?\Configuration\DocumentTypes\MMDocumentTypes.xml

Edit the file in a plain text editor. You can use Dreamweaver if you like. You will need to restart Dreamweaver before the changes take effect.

Do a find for "CSS" and modify the either macfileextension="css" and/or winfileextension="css" to include the less file extension. it should look like macfileextension="css,less" when your done.

Also note. If you use Sass you can also add in the scss extension and use the longer scss notations, but the shorter sass extension offers no syntax highlighting since it does not contain the curly braces like css does.

Now save the file and restart Dreamweaver and open your less file and you will see all the syntax highlighting just as you would with traditional css.

→ Respond NowTags: CSS · Software

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