More and more I’m noticing a new trend in web-based forms.

The days of the <select> tag are numbered. The most recent example is GMail’s “More actions” drop-down.

It’s gone from this

to this

I completely understand why. Unavailable CSS styling and <select> bugs in IE have always been frustrating, but the real motivation to move away from the tag has been its lack of features.

With a JavaScript/DHTML solution you can simply do so much more. In December 2004 when Google released “Google Suggest” (which is an auto-complete-like drop-down of the search field) many developers started to consider abandoning <select> tags. Add to that the flexibility of cross-browser styling, adding images to drop-downs and dramatic visual effects… The end is near.

However, I’m not suggesting the end of the tag’s use. Using a <select> tag gives the browser the responsibility to make the form accessible to vision and mobility-impaired people which is often overlooked in a small project or web-based application.

Online advertising is getting a great deal of attention days with players like Google, Double Click, Yahoo, just to name a few.

But with almost any advertising, there’s a movement to circumvent it.

.. TV vs DVR, time shifting, fast-forward.
.. FM radio vs Satellite radio, paid subscriptions, commercial free.

Remember the first years of pop-up advertising on websites? ISPs started offering “Pop-up Blocker” software free to their members. It was such a demand that most browsers now implement pop-up blocking as a standard feature.

Advertising is a balancing act. Google has been hugely successful with their text/banner-style AdWords - I believe because they’re not aggressive with their impact. Until this evening, I tolerated, sometimes enjoyed, viewing advertising. I felt like it educated me. A good advertisement might teach me of a new product I hadn’t heard of, a service I might use or recommend. Those AT&T commercials where two people are talking on mobile phones, and one is dropped… hilarious!

Until tonight, when I went to read this article on Wired.com.

Covering 50% of the first few paragraphs is an AT&T advertising overlay. I gave the ad 3 minutes to go away. I tried every key combo, tried following the link of the ad… nothing. The article is unreadable in Firefox. Same result in IE.

The Irony is: the article is about Safari 3 and how “Safari sucks.” Care to guess how the page looks in Safari? flawless. No content-blocking AT&T advertisement.

UPDATE: Wired apologizes for the ad.

In my last post, I briefly mentioned that I modify hotkeys for my applications in OS X. If you have ever wondered how to do this, it is quite easy assuming the item you want to create a hotkey for is in the main menu of the application. If it is in the main menu (File, Edit, View, Help, etc.) the file you’ll edit is usually called MainMenu.nib.

There is one caveat to this process. You’ll have to have the Xcode developer tools installed. I don’t know a way around this, but as a power user you should probably have this installed anyway so you can compile programs and do other nifty things.

1. To begin, right click the application you want to modify and select “Show Package Contents.”
   
2. Navigate through the Contents, Resources, and English.lproj folders.
   
3. Double click MainMenu.nib. It should have a pretty icon. If it doesn’t you don’t have Xcode installed.
4. Double click the MainMenu icon in the Instances tab that comes up and you’ll now see the menu as it appears in your toolbar in OS X.
   
5. And you’re done! You can navigate through the menu and double click any hotkey to replace it with something else. Just remember not to set two hotkeys to do the same thing! You’ll confuse yourself and your computer.
   
6. Oh, and don’t forget to save before you quit.

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.

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…)