Tabs in applications are the new thing. They’re hip, they’re cool, they’re useful to organize and save screen space. They’re the closest thing you can get to “black” other than web 2.0. My biggest irk is that application makers can’t seem to come up with a standard for the keyboard shortcuts that will cycle through tabs.

Adium is an example of a great application that gives the option to choose how tab cycling should work:

Considering how varied this process is, I think the programmers/designers of that project stumbled upon a great idea that more developers should implement. There are so many good reasons to do this. It gives the power user a choice without going in and editing the resource file. I don’t want to do this each and every time I update your application. Let me save this in the preferences and be done with it.

I have cycled through a few preferences for the way keyboard shortcuts should work since I started using OS X. Recently, I settled on the Safari method for cycling tabs:

Every time I download an application that does not utilize the Safari method, I go through the process of manually modifying the resource file for the application, customizing the keyboard shortcuts as I see fit.

The following applications utilize methods other than the Safari method: Transmit, Firefox and Camino. I can’t think of anything else off-hand but especially when it comes to browsers standardization is vital!

I can’t give Firefox a really bad rap when it comes to tabs though, simply because Firefox has a feature that I really miss: The ability to go directly to tab 1, tab 2, tab 3, tab 4, etc. simply using the option + 1 shortcut. I wish more developers would do that.

My final thought on this is creating an application that would easily allow you to modify the keyboard shortcuts of any application in OS X would be really useful and might even make enough to support a small software company. Being a developer though, I’d rather just see developers allow for choices in their applications. In that sense, a free framework allowing developers to implement customized keyboard shortcuts in their application might be useful.

A local design firm, Vitamin, who used to be housed in the building where we started Fusion Bay, wrote an interesting post on their blog yesterday:

At the end of the day, Eisner did whatever it needed to do in order to maintain its precious public perception until the very end. People, families and compassion took a back seat to it all. Eisner not only compromised its integrity and the integrity of its owners, it compromised good business ethics. More importantly, Eisner compromised human decency.

I can’t agree more.

I’m sure we’ll go into detail about our interactions with Eisner Communications at some point in time, however today is not the day that I’ll divulge details and lessons learned.

Click to view “Another one bites the dust” »

We’ve all seen web applications that require the user to do a repetitive task. Unfortunately, programmers often ignore how unnatural it is to go through a multitude of form fields, how unclean the design looks, and how hard-coding the number of elements one can enter at a single time limits the use of your application. Stick with keeping it simple, and keeping it simple means keeping things clean and intuitive. (more…)

Fusion Bay is a web application development firm in Baltimore, MD and was founded in 2004. We provide contract application development and programming resources throughout the US and the majority of our work comes from partnerships with web design firms and advertising agencies. Our skill-set includes programming in most of the popular languages, infrastructure planning/engineering, and database administration. (more…)

Form validation is vital to every web based application, and too often I’ve seen it implemented page-by-page. Custom code blocks to check for email address formats, telephone numbers, social security numbers, etc.

If you need client-side form validation and you can rely on javascript, I highly recommend Andrew Tetlaw’s “Really easy field validation.” It does require prototype.js and of course, java script enabled browsing.

I’ve written a few additional validators that I’ll post sometime soon for anyone that might be interested.