Design vs Art Blog

It seems that if you don’t write the word "Apple" on an article this week your blog will be totally ignored. To be honest, watching the Steve Jobs presentation at the MacWorld I got inspired to write about direct manipulation. I was specially impress by the multi-touch function of the MacBook Air trackpad.

"New features like swiping and scrolling will help impaired people…"

This is not just a new toy, from the usability point of view this is great. New features like swiping and scrolling will help impaired people. As Steve Jobs showed, these two features works with the Safari internet browser, enabling to easily go forward and backwards and to scroll around the page. All with your fingers.

 

The screen zoom feature and the "pinch and expand" work also with Safari, helping visually impaired people to read web pages. The other features like tap and "click and drag" could also help people with problems to point with the mouse.

Many might wonder how is possible that nobody did it before. This is Apple Computer design, user-centered and easy to use. This proves that designing for impaired people is actually designing for all. See other articles on how usability can help impaired people.

Popularity: 16% [?]

I have recently done a mobile version of this blog and would like to share my experiences about it with you. I have a Nokia E61 and spend a lot of time surfing the web on my phone, although this device is not the best I could have. So I decided to make a mobile version of this blog to make it available to more readers.

I landed to Andy Moore’s site, a dotMobi Certified Mobile Web Developer who has been working with the mobile internet for some time (as he says on his home page). Andy has developed a nice plugin for WordPress to automatically create a mobile version of WordPress blogs.

The plugin is very easy to install and once you do it displays a “WordPress Mobile” configuration tab where you can change many settings for your blog’s mobile version like the use of CSS, mobile posting and tracking configurations.

Click here to see Design vs Art Blog Mobile Version on an emulator

The plugin comes with AdMob Mobile Internet Advertising ads embedded that you can set with your own publisher ID. This is a great feature as you can enable ads on your blog’s mobile version without any extra settings. The plugin creator, Andi Moore, asks you to share the earnings with him and he also embedded this  feature into the plugin but lets you decide how much would you like to share. This is something you can get rid of if you get into the code but to be honest sharing a little bit with somebody that is making your life easier is totally fine.

In my opinion the design of the mobile version of your site is quite OK if you are more interested in the content, but Andy says that you can always modify the CSS file. Navigation and usability are fine and adds do not disturb at all. It is worth giving a try!

Popularity: 23% [?]