Most of them will sound too familiar to you (content is king, flash abuse anyone?), but when Norman, Maeda and peers write something you’d better read it. Here are the 10 commandments with more examples and comments of my own.

1. Thou shalt not abuse Flash
   Actually thou shalt not use Flash at all as an information container or as an interface replacement. Your users have already learnt how to use HTML interaction conventions. Don’t make them learn again something they’ll use only in your site.
   Hall of shame: Camper shoes
2. Thou shalt not hide content
   Readers come to your web for your content or for your ads? Do not hide contents behind ads. Google got to the top with AdWords and not with banners.
   Hall of shame: La Vanguardia online
3. Thou shalt not clutter
   The web is enough complex as it is. The huge load of information is difficult to structure and you should help your users once they land on your site. Unnecessary graphical artifacts, excess of information, poor website structure, lack of visual hierarchy, ad abuse, and misuse of the HTML conventions won’t make your user happy.
   Hall of shame: Catalunya Ràdio, RENFE
4. Thou shalt not overuse glassy reflections
   Apple’s website looks cool with all reflections on their products and we all love it (There’s even a reflection in the header of this site!). But this is Apple. Don’t think that you’ll turn your company in a 2.0 project by just adding a reflection to your logo.
   Hall of shame: Apple’s Mobile Me logo
5. Thou shalt not name your Web 2.0 company with an unnecessary surplus or dearth of vowels
   Web 2.0 is full of unique funny names with half of the vowels missing. If your company has not embraced the 2.0 philosophy getting rid of some vowels won’t help, and neither will adding an i at the beginning.Here’s a Web 2.0 company name generator to get your own.
   Hall of shame: iStalkr.com (not active anymore after a year. Bad naming for an RSS aggregator?)
6. Thou shalt worship at the altar of typography
   95% of the information on the web is written language. It is only logical to say that a web designer should get good training in the main discipline of shaping written information, in other words: Typography.
   Read all about it in the seminal article Web Design is 95% Typography
   Hall of shame: YouTube.com
7. Thou shalt create immersive experiences
   What else can you say? You’t better give your audience some good experience, content and functionality wise. After all she’s giving you her most valuable asset: time.
   Hall of shame: Second Life (funny that one of the worst immersive experience is a 3D immersive website)
8. Thou shalt be social
   Online success stories share the “social” tag. In fact marketers are working hard to find some business model around them. MySpace, Facebook, Last.fm, Flickr, Bebo or YouTube are the names of the game.
   Hall of shame: Second Life
9. Thou shalt embrace proven technologies
   Simple good. Complex bad. Google, YouTube, Facebook, Craigslist or Wikipedia have all something in common: plain old XHTML and a simple CSS. Simplicity goes a long way.
   Hall of shame: Second Life
10. Thou shalt make content king
    People are not interested in your abilities as interface designer or information architect. People want to get to the contents they’re looking for. The interface is just the means to them and not the end. A good interface will go unnoticed and so will the work of its designer. The better the designer the less you’ll notice her work. A nice paradox.
    Hall of shame: Any web with a Skip Intro link. Here’s Google’s Skip Intro new feature.

Original article: 10 Commandments of Web Design
Businessweek’s poll The Best and Worst of web design

Nothing new actually, as I had been using Ecto previously. But somehow, with the improvements to the Wordpress post editor and with the vision of “doing more with less” I ended up not using it at all. It got fed to AppZapper after a while.

But times change and posting in four different blogs currently, I thought I could use a little help from a desktop app.

With that philosophy in mind I tried to use TextMate, which I already use for programming, as a publishing client. TextMate’s versatility allow for that and much more and is the blogging tool of choice for many bloggers.

My experience with TextMate:

• Configuration is done and kept in a flat txt file
• Posts are not automatically synchronized with those of your database. You just write in a flat txt file that gets uploaded via rpc to your blog.
• No local copy of the posts is kept on your computer unless you save the file as a flat text file
• Categories are not passed down to TextMate from WP so you actually need to remember them and add them as meta information on your, again, flat text file
• I didn’t get any further

TextMate may be the best editor for the Mac OS (despite its funny tab management) but as a desktop publishing app is a nightmare.

At that point I left the “do more with less” philosophy to embrace the “do the right thing with the right tool”, which brought me back to Ecto, a nice app that worked extremely fine for me a couple of years ago. But when you use a Mac for a while you start to get very picky about the design of the user interface and functionality of the apps.

You want apps that are laid out nicely, have an internal and external user interface coherence, that are not too much bloated with features and excel at doing the essential. Ecto sure does a lot of stuff but the app somehow doesn’t look and feel right on Leopard.

So I decided to try MarsEdit, a blogging client extremely similar to Leopard’s Mail that also follows the one window approach.

My Experience with MarsEdit:

• Setting up the blogs was as easy as feeding MarsEdit the URLs and entering ID and password. No need to know where the xmlrpc file sits
• I automatically downloaded my 10 last posts and all my available categories
• No learning curve. Posting is as easy as sending a mail
• A live preview that shows you the final render of the post as you type. No need to reload constantly
• Ability to use TextMate (or any) as your favorite external editor
• Blog this! Bookmarklet on your browser
• Flickr integration. Enter you FlickrID and password, authorize the app, and all your pics are ready to be blogged
• Upload files with just drag and drop on your post
• Easily republish same content to another blog
• Spellcheck as you type
• Applescript support
• Works with WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, LiveJournal, Drupal, and Vox
• Growl! integration

I use MarsEdit to post to:
ganyet.com
iosephdurgell.org
RAC1.org/elmon
wearemortensen.com/blog

Heres one of my Flickr sets seen with Piclens.

Do yourself a favor and download this beauty.

Once you have it up and running try it with the just created group to save Flickr from Microsoft.

Cool design as long as you don’t see it too often.

Via hackaday.com I land on Johnny Chung Lee’s website and a brave (and cheap) new world opens before me.

In his page he has put a few do-it-yourself-with-a-wii-remote videos that will blow you away. The advanced interaction concepts he explores, the easy and cheap implementations and the clarity of the demos make the perfect combination for an instant YouTube hit.

It’s all about using the powerful 1024×768 infrared camera on your Wii remote and connecting it via bluetooth to your computer. The results?

Tracking Your Fingers with the Wii remote

Use your fingers to control a multitouch screen in the air à la Minority Report.
Tracking Your Fingers with the Wii remote video

Low-Cost Multi-point Interactive Whiteboards Using the Wii remote

By pointing a Wii remote at a projection screen you can create very low-cost interactive whiteboards or tablet displays. No projector? Point the Wii remote to your computer monitor and turn it into a multitouch surface.
Low-Cost Multi-point Interactive Whiteboards Using the Wii remote video

Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the Wii Remote

With a cheap pair of glasses, an couple of infrared lights and, of course the Wii remote, literally open a new window to an inmersive 3D VR environment.
Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the Wii Remote video

(By Johnny’s personal page URL cs.cmu.edu I gather that he’s from the School of Computer Science at renowned Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and he works in Human Computer Interaction there.)

Yet another case of popular use of tecnology that it’s creators never foresaw.

The article reviewed in a few paragraphs the abuse of flash used in websites at the time, especially the cases where entire websites were coded in Flash. The author worried that some day Tim Berners-Lee open source platform could be taken over by Flash. Not to mention that the author got heaps of hate mail.

I was at the moment developing Hoymesiento.com an emotion based portal (that whas the word back then) entirely coded in flash which was doomed from the begining. The outcome? the blog I created in 1998 still online, while you have to check Hoymesiento.com on web.archive.org

Helvetica everywhere!!!

Yes, Helvetica is the font for the iPhone. No Verdana nor pixel fonts but plain old Helvetica in decent readable sizes of up to 20px with nice antialiasing. Check the iPhone’s design guidelines at Apples Developer Center. (by the way, Helvetica the movie is out. Go and watch it)

Screen resolution of 160 dpi

When I first saw an iPhone I thought it still had the plastic film that covers most phones with some icons printed on it. Wrong. I was actually looking at the bright icons at a resolution of 160 dots per inch. Our eyes are used to dealing with screen resolutions ranging from 72 to 96 dpi. (I had the same impression when I first saw the Sony Reader).

The mic in the headset controls iTunes

This was the last feature I discovered and it was just some weeks ago. The distinctive white headphones come with a small microphone attached to the right chord. Well, if pressed while listening to iTunes it pauses the song, if pressed twice it skips the current song and if pressed while ringing it answers the call.

And all this without ever reading the phone’s manual.

Some “killer” features of this website:

1. No DOCTYPE at the beginning of the document
2. Page is laid out using Tables!!
3. Some parts of the are not rendered in Firefox
4. Contents font size is 10px wich makes the web hard to read in any decent resolution monitor
5. Usage of GIF for titles and section headers instead of correct XHTML markup
6. No titles for individual pages. All pages are titled adg-fad.org which is an acronym and the URL

Required verbage: These are my personal views and not those of the BBC, my employer.

Here are the principles taken from Tomski’s blog developed as part of the BBC2.0 project. If you’re familiar with blogs (you should be somehow if you’re reading this) you’ll notice how familiar this principles sound to you.

Tomski: The BBC’s Fifteen Web Principles:

1. Build web products that meet audience needs: anticipate needs not yet fully articulated by audiences, then meet them with products that set new standards. (nicked from Google)

2. The very best websites do one thing really, really well: do less, but execute perfectly. (again, nicked from Google, with a tip of the hat to Jason Fried)

3. Do not attempt to do everything yourselves: link to other high-quality sites instead. Your users will thank you. Use other people’s content and tools to enhance your site, and vice versa.

4. Fall forward, fast: make many small bets, iterate wildly, back successes, kill failures, fast.

5. Treat the entire web as a creative canvas: don’t restrict your creativity to your own site.

6. The web is a conversation. Join in: Adopt a relaxed, conversational tone. Admit your mistakes.

7. Any website is only as good as its worst page: Ensure best practice editorial processes are adopted and adhered to.

8. Make sure all your content can be linked to, forever.

9. Remember your granny won’t ever use “Second Life”: She may come online soon, with very different needs from early-adopters.

10. Maximise routes to content: Develop as many aggregations of content about people, places, topics, channels, networks & time as possible. Optimise your site to rank high in Google.

11. Consistent design and navigation needn’t mean one-size-fits-all: Users should always know they’re on one of your websites, even if they all look very different. Most importantly of all, they know they won’t ever get lost.

12. Accessibility is not an optional extra: Sites designed that way from the ground up work better for all users

13. Let people paste your content on the walls of their virtual homes: Encourage users to take nuggets of content away with them, with links back to your site

14. Link to discussions on the web, don’t host them: Only host web-based discussions where there is a clear rationale

15. Personalisation should be unobtrusive, elegant and transparent: After all, it’s your users’ data. Best respect it.