No changes, no chances

On March 17th, the new Mutts site (www.muttscomics.com)was launched. But it was not until today that I noticed. I happened to browse to the site to send my colleague a link to the daily strip subscription page.

Guess what? The HOMEPAGE is now the subscription page! I am probably not the only one that never views the site but does enjoy the daily comic strip in my mailbox. How's that for user-centered design!

It features a logo and some high-lighted links to the shop and the news, that are pulled out of the main navigation. Beneath that you see the simple yet well functional main navigation in a horizontal bar. Underneath it they placed a fairly large main visual of Mooch and Earl (the two main characters of the comic series) with a short review comment by a paper or writer or client on top of it.

Beneath that, there's the daily strip for the current day. Here's a good thing: the strip shows up halfway the page-fold on a resolution of 1024x768 (with a clearly visible yet subtle link to the past daily strips). Only in 800x600 it might be missed by the visitor but hey - 800x600 in 2009 ... ;) Thus, the majority of the visitors will have to scroll down to see the entire strip - which gives them great chance to end up at the call-to-action underneath it: the Daily strip subscription. Well done! Perhaps the subscription-field could have placed in the lower-right corner of the main visual, so it shows up above the fold.

I think it's great that Patrick McDonnel acknowledged the needs of his site visitors, instead of wanting to tell all about all the stuff that HE thinks are important at first.

Look, we in Holland know all about making compromises .. it's THE country in the world where everyone needs to be happy and no-one may have any slight sense of feeling hurt .. Of course sometimes this results in endless meetings, discussions and the end result is some uninteresting solution that no-one is really happy with but to which all agree ..

Sometimes you just need to take a stand .. Just use your power and make the world a better place, because you actually know what's better .. Don't be a Plato and whine about it - take action .. The developers of Tortoise SVN, a tool that enables multiple people to do software programming work on one single project, understand how that's done:

My HTC Touch Diamond phone just got more fun! I am totally addicted to Pocket Gravity .. Since the phone has an accelerometer (it detects when it's tilted) there are heaps of new fun games being programmed for it ..

Pocket Gravity is one of those .. By drawing cubes and circles, which you can interconnect you can play with gravity and build things that fall, roll, collide, etc .. The longer you play with it, the more ideas you get, and you start building chain reactions .. here's some images of saved scenes (by others):





Great fun! Highly addictive ..

I hadn't visited Webmonkey in quite a while but today I did .. I wanted to use the site search and was happily surprised with a neat usability/design improvement ..



Apart from prettyness, nothing special seems about this everyday web thingy .. But wait! Hover over it with your mouse and a little bit of neat magic happens:



The section-filter pops up as little tabs above it - nice! The good thing about this design choice is that having it in view permanently might very well clutter the screen(design) and I think (especially considering Webmonkey's target user group) no one is scared sh*tless with a feature popping up like this after an action - future feedback is not always needed if you ask me, if it is replaced by a happy surprise :)

I myself would maybe have left the selected tab visible .. Also it could be an option to make the tabs pop up when you hover over the area where they appear, other than when I hover over the search field itself .. But still, I love this thingy :)

Photos deserve to be printed on tangible matter .. and when that tangible matter is part of a magazine, it is even better!

Lucky was I, that the next issue of Digiphoto Pro would be all about reviewing lenses .. Adding lens tags pays off! The editor of Digifoto Pro (Dutch magazine) found my image on Flickr, by searching for a lens tag .. So they asked if they could use my photo to be placed with the review of the Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8 .. :) .. Not my sharpest shot, but they liked enough nevertheless ..

Here's the photo of the little bugger in my photostream .. Thank you for being so cute little fella! ;)