HRT robbed BBC.

This is the embarrassment of the decade for the Croatian web community.

Follow the original thread at mi3dot.org. It is a Google’s translation from Croatian to English, but you’ll get the picture.

If you care, please let us know.

More voices:

• zytzagoo: HRT vs BBC
• Marketing Servis: HRT.hr i BBC.co.uk ko brata dva!
• T-portal: HRT ‘posudio’ dizajn od BBC-ja?
• Davor Peić Gavran: Croatian HRT vs BBC.co.uk, totally rip off
• Index: Iz koda HRT-ove stranice najednom nestalo ime tvrtke koja ju je radila
• Index: HRT-ova nova web stranica besramni plagijat bbc.co.uk
• Index: Hašim Bahtijari: Pitat ću na Vijeću koliko je novaca utrošeno na izradu novih stranica HRT-a
• Index: Dizajneri složni: HRT je pokrao BBC, i to loše

Typetester user Jason from Robbinsville asked:

Why are some font sizes in the typetester drop down size list in red and others not?

The highlighted values in font size drop-down match the ones in Photoshop.

Those values are also known as Typographic scale. Mark Boulton wrote a series of short articles on the topic. Here’s a quote from Five simple steps to better typography - Part 4.

In the sixteenth century, European typographers developed a series of typeface sizes, a scale (the musical analogy is a good one - stick with me). As shown in the diagram they are sizes we’re are all familiar with. Six point through to Seventy-Two point type has remained pretty much intact for over four hundred years. In fact, they are the default font sizes in many applications (give or take a few.).

So, what’s so special about these sizes? Well, because this scale of sizes has been used for centuries, if set correctly, type set in this scale will appear more pleasing to the eye and therefore more legible.

Downsides

Too many sponsor slots, sponsor slots too long and timetable was re-arranged on-the-fly a couple of times during the day. But that will be taken care of next time. They promised. And I believe in that, because the team behind the event is getting better and better each time.

On the tech day

All the non-sponsored slots were quite engaging. I only regret that there was no more designers and developers in the crowd, who could make a good use of those. I love how most of the speakers were authentic and shared their tips without a blink.

On the biz day

We found out about all about funding — how much money one can raise for a start-up, what kind of profit angels and VCs are expecting and how the things are going to change in terms of decision making once you’ve been funded. I was surprised about such both-directional and transparent dialogue. Kudos to that.

People as always made my conference

Getting together with some old buddies and seeing online acquaintances becoming friends, T-shirt exchange, iPhone battles, geek porn stories, practical jokes… if only we could arrange such meetings more often.

Next time? Sure.

See some pictures @ Marinshe

Addenum

Superawesome Dragan Babić also wrote an article and reminded me I haven’t linked my presentation :)

If that’s the case, here’s the quick tip.

First, make sure the Time Capsule recognizes the printer. You can check that under the “Manual Setup” in your Airport Utility.

Next, open System Preferences, choose “Print & Fax” and hit the plus button on the left (i.e. add printer). At this point you should already have your printer drivers installed on the computer.

The default tab is the most probably IP and that is misguiding. Switch to “Default” and wait a couple of seconds. This however could take a while, just don’t close the window too soon. When the list is updated, select a printer from the list (the “Kind” column should indicate Bonjour).

Finally, hit “Add” on the same screen and you’re done.

I had a quest.

My Old Man asked me to find a decent mobile phone for him. He wasn’t after anything fancy — “Just to have the large letters on a display”, he requested.

My Dad doesn’t care about the model and make. His only concern is avoiding troubles he used to have when sending text messages. He is having trouble reading text on the small screen.

To make things harder, my Dad is a tiler. Tilers have enormous fists and fingers. Probably, the largest of all builders. When your hands are like paws, you’re having trouble using a small keyboard.

So I bought him a Nokia. I found a model that has both — large display with large letters and fairly large buttons.

I have two phone numbers.

The phone I use to talk to my parents is a personal one and we have cheap calls, since we’re on the same carrier. When he calls me on my business phone, they charge him much more than they should. But Dad keeps calling me on that phone. I wondered why.

When I gifted the new phone to my father, I added my business phone number, just in case.

This new phone has large letters on the large display and large buttons. The phone also has large icons which you can assign to any contact in the address book. When I added a new phone number, I automatically assigned an icon to it. Since then, my father calls me to that number.

I will have to remove the icons.

Illustration by Marko Kršul

This year the schedule is really, really promising. If you are around and you understand Croatian, you shouldn’t miss the opportunity to hear what’s going on at the local startup scene.

On the other hand, if you have an interesting project yourself, then there is a chance to meet some quality VCs to help you out.

I’ll be there both days, so drop by and say “Hi!”. If I look confused, don’t worry — that’s just me being full of excitement about my presentation ”What the users want?”. The presentation will give a short insight in user’s needs, based on our work with users and focus groups at Croportal.

There are times when those so-called “ugly fonts” work extremely well.

And if the target group loves Comic Sans, they are going to get the Comic Sans. Using particular font or avoiding it — based on a personal preference is utterly ridiculous. That is not designing, that is creating an artwork.

Use what your users love. Use what communicates best.
Even if that’s Comic Sans. And try to live with it.

TODO (me):

• contact page
• about page
• favicon done.

TODO (you)

• enjoy!

What? Where did you get that?

The Accessibility Superhero Detective Joe Clark was hired to discover the truth about the subject. We all hoped the situation is not so dramatic, but boy — were we wrong!?

Yea, but why exactly captioning sucks?

• Not enough of it
• They don’t listen
• It’s hard to read
• Deaf people settle for crumbs
• The wrong kind
• The fox is watching the henhouse
• There are no standards

You probably wonder about how do you clean your Inbox? Since you are asking, we intensively worked on the relaunch of Croportal last week, and as a reward, the team had a couple of days off.

At this very moment I’m writing the post in one of the 40+ tabs in Safari. And I still haven’t option-spaced NetNewsWire. There’s recent unpacked shipment from Amazon on a shelf across the table. If only days would last longer.

There was a time when web standards pioneers had all the important stuff only in the Bookmarks, because there was simply just a few resources. It was quite handy and convenient having them all in the Bookmarks bar. I sometimes miss that comfort.

Where there was just a dozen of on-topic resources to follow, now is the hundreds. Where there was 2 or three events a year, now is the ten or 20 at least.

I was introduced by 80/20 rule back in 2004. Fast-forward four years later and I wonder which ones are considered today’s 20% must-read authors? Even if I knew, one would still need considerable amount of time for all the latest stuff.

The above question applies to events, too — are there 20% events that cover 80% of the current topics?

The schedule can be occasionally a serious threat, time and budget-wise. Especially if you have to travel across the continent and have tons of work that just don’t allow frequent travel breaks.

We’ve been practicing various media diet programs. Should we also consider event diet?

How to judge which one to choose and which one to discard from the list? With media, you test it for some period and then decide is it good enough to enter reader’s A-list, but for obvious reasons, you can’t apply the same method with events.

Occasionally, people ask me to create XHTML/CSS template based on provided .PSDs. Most of the time, such projects are pretty straight-forward — I tell the hourly rate and the estimated hours. The prospective client then accepts the offer or not.

It could be zillion reasons why clients reject offers and I’m used to some neutral (read: polite) arguments, like “It exceeds our budget” or something like that. However, today I received an interesting response:

“You are a little-bit too expensive, XXX is an hourly rate for a programmer.”

Funny, huh? Or sad?

Why on Earth would anyone compare client-side coding with programming. What is it that people (or just this particular client) think some cog of the same engine should be valued more than others?

Is it because the work of accessibility consultant, CSS coder, SEO engineer or usability expert is not something you can point your finger at? Or is it ‘cause people tend to care for web standards in a way of questionably increased initial exposure on endless, but completely irrelevant CSS showcase lists?…

The first post in this year (better late, than never) and I present you 2 (that’s right: two) brand new web logs by my two fellow colleagues — Marko Kršul (the creative) and Tomaš Trkulja (the methodic).

I was more than happy to contribute in the development of these two beautiful WordPress themes, spiritually named Balance White and Balance Black. The White was deployed first on our company’s flagship project’s development blog in it’s original setup and Dudikoff and Roseanne (link removed for offending content :p) have been customized later on. (Ed’s note: Dudikoff and Roseanne is not a WordPress theme, it’s customized version of Balance White.)

Anyway, download Balance White 0r Balance Black and if you care, let us know what do you think.

Sample sites:

• Croportal Dev Blog
• Zytzagoo’s Den

• Superfast web sites in 20 minutes beginning at 19:20 and ending at 19:40 in Gray room and
• Typography for web, 10 dirty tricks from 20:00 to 20:20 in White ‘the Geekier’ room

Just a few more seats are available, so hurry up and grab yours for an intensive Wednesday afternoon.

1. users are tagging recipes
2. advertiser reserves a desired set of tags
3. in this case, the company brand “Eva sardine” reserved the following tags: fish, shrimps, main course, sea food, sea, … eva (the name of the company brand)
4. if the recipe is tagged with some of those preselected tags, there is a relevant ad displayed.

Clever, huh? But the most interesting part is the following edge case.

Update: “Eva sardine” is actually a brand, not a company. Spotted and pointed to by lekke.

The event is organized by Initium, the guys behind the successful web.start conference, held earlier this year.

At the time of this writing, I already got a booking confirmation from EventWax and if you are coming (and I hope you are), keep an eye on the official web site.

BarCamp rules for attendees are pretty simple: all of the crowd should participate actively in some way. I’m still not quite sure about the topic which would be the most appropriate for me to join with, but I have a few dirty ones — if I am lucky enough so the others would find those interesting:

• Typography for the web
• DIY high-performance web sites
• Usability testing on a shoestring
• Bit-literacy on the web

Now, I whipped this list in hope that I will at least make myself publish an article or two in the near future about the mentioned matters.

Networking

Prior the conference every attendee was asked to sign-up to FOWA Crowdwine and choose her interests, so the organizers can help us meet more people. Those who did, received unique badges at reception with their tags, matches and opposites.

My tags were naturally: user experience, web standards, typography… and my matches were Robin Christoperson, Andrew Pendrick, Sarah Ward and George Zafirovski. I actually met George, who moved from Macedonia to London some 10 years ago, so we easily switched to Croatian (Macedonia and Croatia are both former Yugoslaw republics).

There was a couple of considerable job offers on the conference and if one was available, she could walk away with a brand new position.

Randoms bits

• Erika Hall said Users don’t complain about wording as long as you don’t change colors. (Copy is Interface)
• Matt Biddulph said Internet is small pieces loosely joined. (Coding on the Shoulders of Giants)
• If you need reliable standalone “DOMContentLoaded” JavaScript function, take a look at the shortloaded by famous Stuart Langridge.
• Identity Matcher, extracted from dopplr.com codebase, enables you to pull in social network information from sites such as GMail, Twitter, Flickr or Facebook.
• This one’s my favorite; Daniel Burka said You simply have to say ‘No’ to more features. Look at the Firefox and Mozilla Suite. Firefox would never be so popular if they didn’t decide to keep it simple.

Advanced features only make sense if they increase the accuracy and reduce time spent on a task. Advanced options made up-front, without real demand from the user-base are often only something glossy and shiny. Inviting users to learn a feature which main purpose is to be a cool widget that differentiate the application from the others — will fail for one very simple reason.

The kind of users who would appreciate such a feature are often anxiously seeking for the next gadget once the master the current one. In most cases, those visitors are not here for the content, but for the context, most notably the coolness factor. Unless the coolness itself is your product, you are probably not targeting those users.

Add advanced feature when you are absolutely sure you need it and after you have real user’s feedback.

Advanced feature should be gently introduced once the user is familiar with the basic functionality. In desktop applications such advanced options are often hidden in the ‘settings’ or ‘preferences’ panel. In web application those could be placed somewhere in ‘my profile’ area. However you decide to do it technically, don’t create the interface noise by polluting the content.

With well known web services, like Amazon, the extensive loyal user base is a good excuse to place an advanced feature right up-front. With a new project which need yet to prove its’ credibility, one has to be careful not to reject valuable first comers by unnecessary complicated interface.

Related reading

• Alertbox: Feature Richness
• Good Experience Best-of

On to presentations… or better yet, speakers

Super-optimistic Chief Performance Yahoo! Steve Sounders, the author of YSlow for Firebug, confirmed what Nate Koechley first introduced at @media this Spring about speeding-up web pages.

You can’t fight the numbers and High Performance Web Sites surely whipped some shocking ones out. I already saw some of the graphs at YUI Blog earlier, but many attendees were left surprised.

Following the High Performance directions, any site can be 50% leaner within a few hours. Given the fact that the companies/organizations invest considerable amounts of money into hardware infrastructure and/or back-end development (for instance, a development of an advanced caching system), it is just silly to skip this first and the easiest step in optimizing site’s performance.

If you’re ready to start making faster web pages, but don’t know where to start, I encourage you to buy a book.

Robin Christopherson, a Web Consultant at AbilityNet, held pretty impressive demonstration about how visually challenged people use the internet. Listening to screen reader playing the endless strings of meaningful text was scary, but at the same time enlightening experience.

The curiosity of the session was — it takes approx. 20 minutes for screen reader to start reading the main content on Amazon.co.uk, because they simply didn’t provide skip to main content link.

Daniel Burka, a lead creative behind Digg and Pownce was a true refreshment. His presentation about community feedback was honest and authentic. He was surprisingly patient to rivers of attendees, without a blink of celebrity pretending. Thanks to his feet standing firmly on the ground, we’ve collected some pretty valuable tips & tricks during the informal discussions afterwards.

Erika Hall from Mule Design in her Copy is Interface gave a bunch of great examples of how careless choice of copy used on the site’s interface can make a site either miss-interpreted or completely blunt. She also pointed out that without knowing your users/audience, it’s difficult to come with the right choice.

The sweet desert of the second day was a survival/essential startup session by Feedburner co-founder Dick Costolo. He extended the presentation well over his minutes, but with a good reason and greatly approved by the crowd.

Launch Late to Iterate Often provided a great insight in common pitfalls in the first year or so of a projects life-span. Pointers like Ask for money when you have it, There’s no such thing as a Standard Deal and Flat Organization are just a few of 14 selected bullets I wrote down; and there was even more… What’s more important — he covered every thesis with a valid example.

All in all, many bits collected and a few randoms I will hopefully post in the next couple of days. In a mean-time, check out the available presentations at SlideShare.