Rather than go over extensive details here, I’ll just link to a page I set up for it. I’ll try to post notifications here when I add features or make other significant updates.

Feedback is very welcome. Just hit up the contact form.

Enjoy!

There are plenty of details to discuss, which I’ll do as I get closer to launching the app, but for now a little video preview. You’ll see a few bugs and please forgive the clumsy narration. And yeah, it’s a little small.

It’s kind of cool, certainly addresses a need (though it’s not the only site doing so), and is pretty handsome. It has a nice, clear search form so that I know exactly what to do and have a good idea of what to expect Goby to do. Hurray! But… when I fill out the form from any search results page (e.g.) Goby doesn’t search. I mean, really? And once I have searched, if I choose a search result and then click the back button, Goby performs the whole search—which, as Goby seems to crawl a large number of websites, can take a long time—again. This is very disruptive, as I might do this five or six times for a given search.

And a minor caveat: the search form asks “What would you like to do?” and lists examples like “bed and breakfasts, hiking, live music, museums.” What would I like to do? Stay at a bed and breakfast. Hike. Listen to live music. See art or visit museums.

Get the basics right. (And I’ll try not to be a hypocrite and do the same.)

Don’t get me wrong: I find nothing categorically wrong with innovation. How could I, right? But as a designer, 90% of the time I’d rather do something really damn well than do something that’s innovative. I like much of Bela Fleck’s music, but I hope we’re not celebrating the man because he can make pitch-perfect quail calls with his banjo or because he’s sure to be the all-time best-selling heavy metal banjo crossover artist of all time. Innovative (if a bit hyperbolic), but not necessarily great.

There’s nothing innovative about any of the design I do, save for (maybe) a CSS hack developed as a means to an end now and then, but I can’t see why there needs to be. I’m in the business of communicating content visually and interactively. I respect the designers who not only push the craft forward through excellence in execution, but actually push the medium forward through innovation. Maybe the iPad (e.g.) will really enable us to better communicate content. I’m not denouncing innovation, but if no one ever calls me “innovative” I’ll be totally okay, as long as someone calls me “really good.”

I can specify direction: rtl and text-indent: Xpx at the same time in order to give some breathing room to the right of an inline element.

But there’s a fix: If you apply CSS outline-offset with a negative value, e.g. outline-offset: -2px;, I suspect it still takes up space (in a sense), BUT that space is inside the element’s current boundaries, so no harm done (unless you really needed that outline to conform precisely to the boundaries.

I’m working for a small (5-person, myself included) webapp startup called Angry Lapdog Productions. I’m the front-end web developer (XHTML, CSS3, and JS for now) for a Rails app. This means I don’t get to design, but I do have input on design. But the dev-heavy focus has been good in a lot of ways: I’m finally coming to understand Rails (and MVC in general), getting my OO JavaScript up to snuff, learning to compromise on my ideal coding standards/practices (and/or find super-clever CSS solutions) in order to serve designs that are not my own (as opposed to abandoning standards altogether in my last software company job). Basically, it’s a great job, though I’m bummed to have so little time for twelve8 creative and personal projects.

What does Angry Lapdog Productions do? I’m going to hold off on telling you until I can show you a production version of our app with my code in place. But it’s cool! (And sure to have me buying my first yacht within a few months.)

Oh, and if you’re in Seattle, give me a call.

I’m pointing to the bullets separating the links in this menu. The anti-aliasing gave away the fact that they were images, not “text.” Frequently, sites will use a pipe (“|”) to separate links like these. In these cases, the pipe is either separated from the link with regular old spaces, or appended using :before or :after. Not semantically ideal. Some sites I’ve seen have placed the separators (be they bullets, pipes, or otherwise) in separate <li>s. Definitely not semantically strong, though I admit that I’ve turned to this approach before, even after semantic enlightenment. The key advantage is that there’s no need for :first-child and/or :last-child to avoid placing spacers to the left of the left-most link or right of the right-most. Other sites recreate the same effect using the CSS border property (along with padding for spacing). Much better, but limited.

But Happy Cog (I think this was done by Happy Cog) did something else here: they used a background image, positioned in the left of each <li>, along with padding-left to separate the link text and the bullet.

Here’s the (relevant) code:

#utility li {
background: transparent url(/i/screen/bullet_utility.gif) no-repeat scroll 4px center;
padding-left: 14px;
}

I see myself turning to this approach in the future.

Some of you may know that I’ve been looking to move into a full-time role as a web interaction designer for the right company. [Potential clients: Don’t let this scare you! I’m adamant about keeping alive the possibility of freelance work alongside any full-time position I may accept, and I’ll always be honest about my ability to perform requested work in a timely manner.]

In my job search, I’ve seen an amazing number of grammatical errors in job listings—something I really think reflects poorly—but this one from a company called Zurb really takes the cake. It’s not merely in a topical job post but on a prominent page of the Zurb website. And it’s huge: “People that design.” I know times are tough, but surely it’s worth paying a copy-editor for the 45 seconds it would take him/her to find this error.

via The Dieline