Wahne's World

Pre-School Speak

2007-10-11T02:30:00Z

Go, Slow and Whoa Foods
Angry Fingers
Tricky day

Apple owns simple and contemporary

2007-10-10T03:25:00Z

The Apple brand is now so powerful we quickly associate simple, contemporary design with Apple. For example take the newly redesigned NY city bus shelters. These stainless steel and glass structures feel like an Apple designed product to me. Like Apple products these shelters are simple and blend rather than dominate the environment in which they live.

BYOB – Bring Your Own Bag

2007-07-18T04:52:00Z

Americans are bringing in their own shopping bags into stores to carry home their purchases. A trend that has been in Europe for ages is just now catching on in America.

I was in Ikea this Saturday and learned they no longer offer free shopping bags. If you want to take your purchases out in an Ikea shopping bag you will need to pay .5c each for the clear plastic or 59c for the big blue Ikea bag. “It’s to save the environment” said the cashier. That’s cool, but it would be nicer if they posted a sign informing you before-hand of their new policy and not after you’ve spent 3 hours in the store and 30 min on line to ring up a sale for stuff you really don’t need. Here is my suggestion…if you corporate heads at Ikea really cared about the environment then focus on making and selling furniture people don’t want to throw out within 6 months.

At Whole Foods in Princeton - I also noticed an increase in the number of families who were carrying their groceries out in environmentally-friendly totes instead of using the standard plastic and paper bags offered by the grocery store. Whole Foods offered free reusable bags… if you spent more than 100.00.

Hopefully this trend continues.

Remember to bring your own bag the next time you want to bring something home from the store.

Personal Annual Report

2007-04-12T18:23:00Z

Here is a link to a 'Personal Annual Report " - a visually beautiful and creative way to document a year in a life.

http://feltron.com/

2006

2005

Would be nice if one of these online digital printers/photo web sites (flicker) would offer something this beautiful as a template and anyone could easily create their own. It would make a nice gift.

Also enjoyed his valentine's index worksheet

Technology & the Single Mom - Fresh Direct

2007-03-20T06:30:00Z

With the exception of gourmet supermarkets like Wegman’s and Whole foods, I hate supermarkets!

They are often too cold. It takes forever to find and purchase just what you are looking for. I especially hate these indistinguishable mega-supermarkets that we have out here in the suburbs: Shop Right and Stop –n -Shop. They both have these wide and never ending aisles and a boring selection of food. Shopping at one of these places is especially challenging when you have to do it with your 3 year old son. When shopping with a toddler just going to get milk is an orchestrated event. Here is my typical drill:

- put him in the car

- buckle him into the car seat

- drive to the market

- find parking that is less than a mile from the entrance of the supermarket (these mega stores have mega-size parking lots)

- unbuckle the car seat belt

- remove him from the child seat

- negotiate with him to hold his hand before beginning the mini hike thru the market’s parking lot

- securing a clean shopping cart

- convincing him to get in it

- locating the aisle with the milk

- and then going thru the same drill again to get him back home

It is a nightmare. And that is why ever since moving from Brooklyn to New Jersey I miss online grocery shopping. The best online grocer I have experienced is Fresh Direct.

If you are lucky enough to live in a zip code that is serviced by Fresh Direct I highly recommend this service. Why? Well besides the obvious reasons: great UI, fantastic photos of the food, easy checkout, shopping from a previous list, my number one reason for loving this service and why I am putting it on my single mother technology list is

It offers a one-stop-shop for a recipe’s ingredients.

Everyone knows you can never find all the ingredients called for in a recipe in just one store. So if you happen to be reading Gourmet Magazine and stumble across a wonderful recipe that you may want to try, all you have to do is launch Fresh Direct in your browser and search for all the ingredients listed in the recipe, add the items to your cart and expect them at your doorstep the next day.

Give Fresh Direct a try and for those of you who don’t happen to have a copy of Gourmet Magazine lying about I’ve include here a wonderful recipe for Coconut Cream Pie by Tom Douglas as printed in Cottage Living.

Technology and the Single Mom

2007-03-20T06:26:00Z

I’ve decided to create a segment of posts that discuss how technology enhances my life as single mother. Look for them and hope you enjoy.

Rosie

2007-03-15T00:17:00Z

Rosie O'Donnell is getting on my nerves. She tries to come off as so high and mighty, but all the things she accuses others of she is also guilty off.

I’m not a fan of Donald Trump but he is not as bad as she tries to make him out to be.

Cablevision's DVR Box UI

2007-03-14T01:15:00Z

To,

The designers of Cablevision’s DVR box User Interface, I hope you are reading this.

Hint: People who get DVR boxes are at the very least interested in saving time. That said here are my suggestions for UI improvements:

Make it easier and faster to select a program to record - If I want to record a program why do I need to select it by browsing thru to the date and then to the channel?

I would love to search by entering the name of the show I want to record and get back search results listing all the available channels and timeslots for the show.

You can’t expect users to have intimate knowledge of your channel numbers nor to have intimate knowledge of your program schedule.

Sorry I don’t buy TV guide. That's what you need to provide – an electronic, well organized and easily searchable guide that allows me to search for and find all the wonderful programming available - of which I pay an arm and leg for - as intuitively and as easily as possible.

Take a look at TIVO when you have a long weekend, their designers have a created a fantastic UI and they do an excellent job with navigation and program discovery/search.

I have a TIVO box as well so maybe that’s why the deficiencies in your UI are so noticeable.

Could you help girl out and not make it a requirement to have to remember that 707 is ABC in HD and that if I want to record on my downstairs TV Ugly Betty which airs on Thursdays at 8 pm and it is Monday at 8pm I have to navigate using the forward button on my remote one click at a time thru all the days and all the time slots in between Monday and Thursday to retrieve and then select Ugly Betty to record it.

It would sure be a lot faster if I could just enter the name.

Goodbye Frozen Forms

2007-03-11T13:10:00Z

Visual Studio 2005 includes design time authoring tools that make it easier for developers to build Windows Forms which allow content to flow freely as the Form resizes. They have introduced 2 new layout panels that "defrost" Forms.

The new layout panels TableLayoutPanel and FlowLayoutPanel can be used to mimic the layout behavior of Web applications. Formerly, controls in Windows Forms were laid out with absolute positioning, which made it difficult to respond to resize events. This was in sharp contrast to Web applications, which support flexible positioning through a variety of table or CSS properties.

This may be old news for some and perhaps of all the new features and improvements offered by windows 2.0 considered NO BIG DEAL but, from the perspective of a UI designer this is awesome. I tested it out and it really works checkout this tutorial. Use it in your next project.

Now if only Microsoft would improve the HTML generated by their web controls packaged in Visual Studio by building them to generate DIVs and CSS positioning instead of HTML tables for page layouts and tabs.

A few considerations when designing applications using AJAX Technologies

2007-03-07T02:57:00Z

Progress & Activity Indication – must provide controls that provide users with progress and or activity indication. Can’t always rely on the availability of the browsers progress bar to indicate a use case within your application is being processed. Even with AJAX there are processes that can take a while and the user must receive feedback if there is a noticeable wait between transactions.

The Back Button – need to provide a back button. Studies have shown that many users rely on the back button for navigation. With AJAX you can’t completely rely on the browser back button for your application’s navigation. Often within the browser there is no page to return to or page history to navigate to.

Contextual Help – Provide contextual help to aid users and as a technique for informing users on many of the features, built in short cuts and other rich-UI features that in your application. Contextual help is help within the context of a user action rather that through documentation and or a help section for example tool tips. Using AJAX technology you can build additional and richer contextual help options through out your applications.