Getting ready to go Mobile: What should I do first?

Posted by on May 17, 2012 in mobile | 0 comments

Our client’s analytics proved that Mobile traffic was on the increase.  Traffic to their sites actually tripled over a 9 month span with 1 in every 20 visits coming from a mobile device.  So the decision to create a mobile optimized site was easy, but where to start?

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Touch Optimized jQuery Picture Gallery in SharePoint 2010 and Office 365

Posted by on May 14, 2012 in 2010, Development, O365, Office 365, SharePoint 2010, Visual Studio 2010 | 0 comments

Touch Optimized jQuery Picture Gallery in SharePoint 2010 and Office 365

Last week, I came across a couple of blog posts that talked about the TouchTouch Gallery which is a jQuery based image viewer that is optimized for touch screen devices. After checking it out, I figured it would be a good thing to throw into SharePoint 2010 (more specifically, my Cribtoso sandbox site) and see how it worked.

TouchTouch Gallery

According to the developer of TouchTouch, it is a jQuery 1.7 plugin that makes it easy to display a set of photos on your site as a touch-optimized photo gallery.

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What is SharePoint?

Posted by on May 9, 2012 in Miscellaneous | 0 comments

I’ve often been asked by different people, “What is SharePoint?” Usually I’m asked this in response to: “What do you do?” and I’ve learned sometimes it’s best to just say something along the lines of “I work with computers.” However, sometimes I go further and tell people that I am a SharePoint administrator or consultant and then have to figure out how to answer their follow up question.  When that happens, my answer usually is dependent on a few other things. Yes, I know, I just said “It depends” but really the product doesn’t change, but how I answer the question.

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Typographic Tribulations: Making Sense of the Fancy Font Fad

Posted by on Apr 27, 2012 in Design, Display, Miscellaneous | 0 comments

I got the memo a little late. “Drop everything,” it read: “fancy fonts are the new rounded corners and must be used now. Everywhere.”

Easily one of the most noticeable trends in web design over the past several months is a surge in the use of non-standard fonts. Time was, non-standard meant Comic Sans. In hot pink.

But thanks to font embedding, via the now widespread implementation of the CSS3 @fontface declaration, typographic creativity is now limited only by the designer’s imagination. After a slow start, fancy fonts are everywhere.

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Quick Mac Office Tip: Get Rid of Outlook “Documents” in All My Files View

Posted by on Apr 13, 2012 in Mac | 0 comments

Yesterday, Microsoft released Office for Mac 2011 SP2. It contains a number of important fixes and compatibility updates. I’m happy to report that I’ve installed it on two Macs so far and have not encountered any difficulties.

One of my least favorite features came back after I installed the service pack, however. I don’t like the way Outlook “documents” (email messages, contacts, tasks, etc.) are displayed in the “All My Files” view on Lion. As a matter of fact, it drives me absolutely insane. I get way too much email in the day to have it show in this view. I had struggled with getting rid of those documents in the All My Files view for a while now. I stumbled across a quick and easy workaround.

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Changing things up: Help your team cope

Posted by on Apr 8, 2012 in Project Management | 0 comments

Let’s face it, if you are part of a project you are part of change.  Change is inevitable, but why is it so hard for people to cope with things changing?  Fear.  Fear of what?  Of the unknown.  Uncertainty brings fear, but you can help your project team cope with change and become fearless by doing a few simple things.

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Vector v. Raster #672,000,001

Posted by on Apr 2, 2012 in Accessibility, Design, mobile | 0 comments

The varying pixel densities, resolutions and screen sizes of mobile and tablet devices wreak havoc on our 72dpi masterpieces. I want to share a neat trick for ensuring crisp, beautiful, pixel perfect display across devices. The trick is SVG.

Although SVG has been with us for some time, bizarrely enough only with the release of Honeycomb has Android cottoned onto this graphical godsend. Luckily, we don’t have to wait several years for Android 2.x to fade from prominence. Thanks to basic feature detection, we can use SVG right now and have our vectors look great on any device.

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