This idea started with an accidental discovery: if you put a CSS perspective on a scrollable <DIV>, then 3D elements inside that <DIV> will retain their perspective while you scroll. This results in smooth, native parallax effects, and makes objects jump out of the page, particularly when using an analog input device with inertial scrolling.

via Making Love to WebKit — Acko.net.

The web, early 2012. Scroll s-l-o-w-l-y.

The mysqlnd replication and load balancing plugin (mysqlnd_ms) adds easy to use MySQL replication support to all PHP MySQL extensions that use mysqlnd.

via PHP: Introduction – Manual.

Has anyone ever asked you for help troubleshooting some combination of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and they copy and paste the entirety of all the files into an email or forum post? Its super common, and so consider this an intervention. When you are having trouble figuring something out:

via Seriously, Just Make a JSFiddle | CSS-Tricks.

You’re using minimalism for the wrong reason

If you’re sacrificing usability in any way

via Minimalist Web Design: How Minimal is Too Minimal?.

My kind of designs!

7-inch tablets have either a glorious future or will fail miserably. I doubt there’s a middle path in their future.

via Kindle Fire Usability Findings (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox).

So will the Fire sell in the millions? or will it be a fire sale?

Case in point: At some point in the past, perhaps the distant past, Apple added the capability to jump from letter group to letter group by holding down on the letter column, rather than just stabbing at your letter of choice and usually missing. After four years of using iDevices, during the course of writing this column, I accidentally held down for a second on an alpha character, causing the slide bar to appear.

via Browse vs. Search: Which Deserves to Go?.

Interface geeks (and non-geeks) should spend some time with Ask Tog.

The PC is dead. Rising numbers of mobile, lightweight, cloud-centric devices don’t merely represent a change in form factor. Rather, we’re seeing an unprecedented shift of power from end users and software developers on the one hand, to operating system vendors on the other—and even those who keep their PCs are being swept along. This is a little for the better, and much for the worse.

via The PC is dead. Why no angry nerds? :: The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It.

Working on the web, however, is a wholly different matter. Our work is defined by its transience, often refined or replaced within a year or two. Inconsistent window widths, screen resolutions, user preferences, and our users’ installed fonts are but a few of the intangibles we negotiate when we publish our work, and over the years, we’ve become incredibly adept at doing so.

via A List Apart: Articles: Responsive Web Design.

I wonder, Do you recognize your organization somewhere on the pyramid?

via The Corporate Curmudgeon: THE DAUTEN HIERARCHY OF ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE.

All check boxes have labels, but not all check boxes use label tags to dis play their labels. This can cre ate click ing prob lems for users. Check boxes are small and hard to tar get. With out the label tags, users can’t click the check box labels to tick the check box. Instead, they’re forced to tar get and click the small check box itself, which can cause user frus tra tion, espe cially for motor-impaired users.

via Why Your Form Checkboxes Should Always Use Label Tags – UX Movement.

Obviously, tablets might become truly personal devices in the future as competition drives down the prices. But for now, you should assume that youre designing for a multi-user device. For example, users might be reluctant to stay permanently signed in on an app, and theyll still forget their passwords. Its also important to design recognizable application icons so theyll stand out in the crowded listings of several users apps.

via iPad Usability: Year One Jakob Nielsens Alertbox.

Mainly, though, let’s stop cramming information into tiny peepholes. Optimizing the UI for the available screen space is a key strategy for improving usability (and thus lifting your conversion rates).

via Utilize Available Screen Space (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox).

Face it. The web has gone mobile (and small).

Nielsen’s words on Mega Drop-Down Navigation are informative as well.

A study of how University of Washington graduate students integrated an Amazon Kindle DX into their course reading provides the first long-term investigation of e-readers in higher education. While some of the study’s findings were expected – students want improved support for taking notes, checking references and viewing figures – the authors also found that allowing people to switch between reading styles, and providing the reader with physical cues, are two challenges that e-readers will need to address in cracking the college market.

via College students’ use of Kindle DX points to e-reader’s role in academia — University of Washington – washington.edu.

Whilst a truncate table operation is underway a lock mutex around the table is created to ensure data consistency; if using innodb file per table the physical .ibd file must be removed which is a painfully slow operation under ext3.

via A quicker drop table within MySQL:

In short, if your systems failed in the Amazon cloud this week, it wasn’t Amazon’s fault. You either deemed an outage of this nature an acceptable risk or you failed to design for Amazon’s cloud computing model.

via The AWS Outage: The Cloud’s Shining Moment – O’Reilly Broadcast.

Having worked with interaction and graphical design for iPhone applications during the last couple of years I’ve managed to pick up some lessons the hard way, and in this post I would like to share my thoughts on a couple of do’s and don’ts.

via The iPhone Tab Bar « SignificantPixels.

Take one Central European folk dancing team, a small folk band and an added overlay showing array locations and get them to dance the algorithms in time to “appropriate” folk music. The result is slightly surreal and for a time at least slightly hypnotic.

via Sorting algorithms as dances.

Although some analysts questioned the finding of search dominance, its a user behavior that gets stronger every year. Today, many users are so reliant on search that its undermining their problem-solving abilities. Ironically, the better search gets, the more dangerous it gets as people increasingly assume that whatever the search engine coughs up must be the answer.

via Incompetent Research Skills Curb Users Problem Solving Jakob Nielsens Alertbox.