Under Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) I have been using PlayOnLinux for a while to install a variety of Windows programs (for example: Internet Explorer 7). After my upgrade from the 10.x Ubuntu series to the newest 11.04 version, I noticed that I was no longer able to install any programs within PlayOnLinux. The Ubuntu repositories offer version 3.8.8 of PlayOnLinux (at the moment of writing) resulting in the message ‘Sorry, PlayOnMac 2.5 and PlayOnLinux 3.8 are no longer supported.’ when attempting to install software. This short blog describes how you can update your PlayOnLinux version to the newest 4.x series that works correctly under Ubuntu 11.04. Read more »
Category Archives: Usability
A guide to better bug reporting
08-03-'11As a developer I continually receive bug reports from colleagues, clients and (sometimes) website visitors. While most of my colleagues file proper bug reports, this is not often not the case for clients and website visitors as they are unaware of the complexity involved in debugging processes. In this article, I will give some guidelines that will enable you as a reader to file better bug reports making it easier for developers to fix the reported issue. This results in a win-win situation as you will most likely benefit from the proposed fix. Please note that I will write this article from a webdevelopers perspective, but that most of the information given in this article will also be useful when filing reports for other software (and sometimes hardware). Read more »
Last Saturday, the city of Rotterdam in the Netherlands was the city hosting ‘Le Grand Départ’ of the Tour de France 2010. Being a fan of bicycle races, I visited this big event and used my mobile phone to receive updates about the standings and the World Championship match (Germany – Argentina) as the match was played during the prologue of the tour. It was then that I realized that most of the (sport)news websites can improve their services dramatically in the coming years, as I noticed three common flaws while checking for live sportnews. In this article I cover the flaws I recognized, which hopefully inspires other people to work on solutions and thus improve online services. Read more »
Last week I wrote about the need for women friendly eCommerce and its great potential. Today I’ll focus on differences between men and women in buying motivations. When you are abreast of the motivations behind your customers (online) buying behavior, you will recognize the important and less important elements of your (online) shop. That’s’ a starting point for earning more money!
Of course we know this shopping stereotype: the woman enjoying a shopping trip and searching about as many stores as possible, and that poor guy, slandering behind her, wondering how many stores to go… Nevertheless, what are the real and proven differences between men and women? Read more »
In an old version of XirtCMS, I have been using a multiple select-field in the administration panel for quite a long time. A few months back, a colleague of me commented on it and told me that the list was not really user friendly. The most common problem with the multiple select-field is that the selection of options might get lost when a user clicks on one item by mistake, without holding the [Shift]-button. Last week, I was rewriting one of the configuration panels using a multiple select-field and I decided to come up with a solution for the problem mentioned. On the Internet, I found a nice script that did more or less what I wanted: replace the multiple select-field in such a way that functionality was maintained, while eliminating the option to accidentally deselect the options. The script was written for an older version of MooTools (v 1.11) and in the repository I could only find a bad port (though working) for MooTools v1.2. In addition, the script did have some flaws which made it hard for me to implement it in the current version of my application. I therefor decided to rewrite the whole class using the ideas from the mentioned script, while taking care of some of the flaws. Read more »
Hi there,
“Women friendly eCommerce?! Do you women really have to take over EVERYTHING?” was the first thing a friend roared when I told him I was doing research in making websites attractive to women. Well, the answer is no. The reason I write about women friendly eCommerce is because we strongly believe the performance of websites and webshops will dramatically increase if they anticipate on women’s needs… Read more »
More and more SEO practitioners nowadays agree that the primary goal of SEO is not just to achieve top positions. About five years ago one thought: if a site is in the #1 position, SEO is successful. Currently one believes that attracting the right audience instead of ‘everyone’ and keeping your audience loyal is much more beneficial to your online business. Therefore, SEO has important interplays with other website characteristics such as usability, functionality Read more »
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