Tricklin

The day has finally come! Since my POS HP took another crap on me, I've decided enough is enough. So I went out and bought myself a shiny new Mac. And I must say, I'm so glad that I did! I love this thing. It never ceases to amaze me just how much slicker a Mac is over a PC, and a majority of the reason is the software. Mac just has the coolest stuff. From dashboard widgets to GTD applications, owning a Mac has made these last few days a sheer joy.

Thanks to a great article by Paul Stamatiou, and some research I did on tons of other sites, I was able to find some really great applications. Here is a list of some of applications I've downloaded since last week:
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From start to finish, this by far has been one of my most enjoyable projects. It took a few drafts before I started to feel confident in my design, when finally, it all came together. I must say, I'm really pleased with the end result.

Working with Matt was a pleasure. He was very receptive to my ideas from the very beginning. In our first meeting, he came prepared, and gave me all his thoughts and ideas of what the site should contain. Based on this information, and the fact that this was a site for an attorney, I wanted to convey a strong sense of professionalism, with a minimum amount of images, and a sizable amount of textual content. This was not at all a problem for Matt. He was able to come up with some excellent quality content that made it easy to incorporate into the final draft.

For this site, I used XHTML, CSS, Magpie RSS, sIFR (for all headers), and a minimal amount of JavaScript and PHP.

Have a Look: www.mattalbrechtlaw.co m

When I first found out that our company was going to switch over to the SCRUM agile development methodology, I was extremely skeptical. After being with the company for 5 years as a web designer, I had already been a part of two major application overhauls. Both of which took months and months to design. Now, we were planning on implementing a methodology that crammed a set of tasks to be done by a team of designers, developers, QA engineers, and analysts into 30 days worth of work. Since day one, I wasn't sure how we'd be able to incorporate design and usability into this type of process. There were a number of questions I had:

• How many days out of the 30 can be dedicated to design and usability testing?
• How can you possibly design a usable interface in such a short time frame?
• How can you execute usability tests in such a short time frame?
• How can you make modifications based on the UAT results in such a short time frame?

As you can see, a pattern was developing here: "How can (fill in the blank) be accomplished in such a short timeframe?" When I approached anyone with these questions, the responses were not good. The reason: usability design wasn't necessarily thought about when this methodology was created.

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