Andrew Stevens

We often talk about how to make our websites more usable, whether it’s tweaking the HTML structure of pages to benefit the user’s process or figuring out how best to display a message via CSS. But we never bring this thought process into our jQuery-based (and other JavaScript-based) elements. How can we enhance the user [...]

An interesting read on the Surfin’ Safari Blog: Before WebKit can render a web page, it needs to load the page and all of its subresources from the network. There are many layers involved in loading resources from the web. In this post, I’ll focus on explaining how WebCore, the main rendering component of WebKit, [...]

Parallel Information Retrieval is a sample chapter in what appears to be a book-in-progress titled Information Retrieval Implementing and Evaluation Search Engines by Stefan Büttcher, Google Inc and Charles L. A. Clarke, Gordon V. Cormack, both of the University of Waterloo. The full table of contents is on-line and looks to be really interesting: Information [...]

Most of the world’s sensitive data is stored in commercial database systems such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2 and Sybase – making databases an increasingly favorite target for criminals. This may explain why SQL injection attacks jumped 134 percent in 2008, increasing from an average of a few thousand per day to several [...]

The advent of Software as a Service and Cloud Computing has revolutionized the software industry by providing access to enterprise-grade software and services via the web to businesses of all sizes. SaaS and cloud environments are characterized by web-based delivery, multi tenancy, and centralized management and updates- completely unlike traditional software. As a result, new [...]

Apparently “The Opera Mini iPhone app is the most popular free app in every single country with an iTunes Store”. Well when I checked in, every store BUT Australia. I am proud to say that my fellow countrymen chose Bird Strike instead. Opera was number 2. Maybe it was blocked by Conroy?

As Jakob Nielsen said, “Too many websites have FAQs that list questions the company wished users would ask.” Most web site FAQs do patronise it’s readers. Check out this interesting article on A List Apart if you need some FAQ facts.

Sixteen government agencies in Singapore have joined forces to launch an intelligent online map portal. Built using web 2.0 technologies, ‘OneMap’ enables government agencies, citizens and businesses to mash-up geospatial data for their own purposes. The S$2.2 million (US$1.8 million) project is the first major product of the Singapore Geospatial Collaborative Environment (SG-SPACE) initiative, a [...]

I am working on faceted search across web and mobile sites at the moment and this article popped up so I check it out: Faceted search is extremely helpful for certain kinds of finding—particularly for ecommerce apps. Unfortunately, the designers of mobile applications do not have established user interface paradigms they can follow or abundant [...]

From UX Matters: One of the most important aspects of product development is the process of predicting the behavior of a product’s intended users. “Assumptions are important and useful. However, if not managed properly, they can definitely lead a project down the wrong path.”