Author: Daniel

Ghost Buttons – The Brand New Design Trend

April 30, 2014 / Daniel / 0 Comments

Ghost is a mysterious and cryptic creature that triggers such associations as consternation, transparency, clarity as well as charisma and attractiveness. Though it seems that it has nothing to do with a website design, in fact, this frightening, yet adorable phantom manages to transfer its genetic traits into graphics, adding to integral elements its strong appeal and personal charm. The so-called ghost buttons are today’s talk of the office and are apparently a prevailing trend that is growing day by day. So, what actually does an almost translucent entity have to do with it all? Let’s figure it out. Ghost Buttons in Web Design Ghost button – that also can be called naked, empty or hollow – represents a basic …

See original article here:

Ghost Buttons â€“ The Brand New Design Trend

How Disqus Went Realtime with 165K Messages Per Second and Less than .2 Seconds Latency

April 30, 2014 / Daniel / 0 Comments

How do you add realtime functionality to a web scale application? That’s what Adam Hitchcock, a Software Engineer at Disqus talks about in an excellent talk: Making DISQUS Realtime (slides). Disqus had to take their commenting system and add realtime capabilities to it. Not something that’s easy to do when at the time of the talk (2013) they had had just hit a billion unique visitors a month. What Disqus developed is a realtime commenting system called “realertime” that was tested to handle 1.5 million concurrently connected users, 45,000 new connections per second, 165,000 messages/second, with less than .2 seconds latency end-to-end. The nature of a commenting system is that it is IO bound and has a high fanout, that is a …

See original article here:

How Disqus Went Realtime with 165K Messages Per Second and Less than .2 Seconds Latency

Use the ‘Eisenhower Box’ to Stop Wasting Time and Be More Productive

April 30, 2014 / Daniel / 0 Comments

Dwight Eisenhower lived one of the most productive lives you can imagine. Eisenhower was the 34th President of the United States, serving two terms from 1953 to 1961. During his time in office, he launched programs that directly led to the development of the Interstate Highway System in the United States, the launch of the internet (DARPA), the exploration of space (NASA), and the peaceful use of alternative energy sources (Atomic Energy Act). Before becoming president, Eisenhower was a five-star general in the United States Army, served as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during World War II, and was responsible for planning and executing invasions of North Africa, France, and Germany. At other points along the way, he served as President of Columbia University…

See original article taken from here:

Use the ‘Eisenhower Box’ to Stop Wasting Time and Be More Productive

Redesigning The Country Selector

April 28, 2014 / Daniel / 0 Comments

Advertisement The country selector. It’s there when you create an account for a new Web service, check out of an e-commerce store or sign up for a conference. The normal design? A drop-down list with all of the available countries. However, when conducting a large session of user testing on check-out usability (which we wrote about here on Smashing Magazine back in April 2011), we consistently found usability issues with the massive country selector drop-downs. Jakob Nielsen reported similar issues as far back as 2000 and 2007 when testing drop-downs with a large number of options, such as state and country lists. So, this past summer we set out to redesign the country selector. This article focuses on the four design iterations we …

See original article taken from here:

Redesigning The Country Selector

Amazon Price Tracker – camelcamelcamel.com

April 28, 2014 / Daniel / 0 Comments

Use our site to ensure you get good deals on your holiday gifts this year. Before you buy, inform yourself by checking our price history charts. Our free Amazon price tracker monitors millions of products and alerts you when prices drop, helping you decide when to buy. Create Amazon price watches and get alerts via email and Twitter when prices drop. View the price history of over 18 million Amazon products. Add our price history charts to your browser with The Camelizer, our extension for Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. Signing up is quick and makes using the site more convenient. It’s also free! Have a Google, Facebook, or Twitter account? You’re welcome to sign in with those, too. Ever since I discovered it a few weeks ago…

See original article taken from here:

Amazon price tracker, Amazon price history charts, price watches, and price drop alerts. | camelcamelcamel.com