Archive for February, 2010

File Under: HTML, UI/UX
Feb
26
2010

Using ‘Mad Libs’ to Make Web Forms More Fun

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In an ideal world, the web would have a built-in identity solutions — websites would automatically know who you are when you arrive. In the real world, however, almost every website has its own sign up and authentication process, endless forms enticing you to enter your name, your e-mail, pick a password… yawn, what now?

It’s repetitive, boring and makes many of your users click away in disgust. But what if you turned the sign up form into a narrative, something a bit like a Mad Lib?

That’s exactly what web developer Jeremy Keith has done for his podcasting site, Huffduffer. Instead of a list of blank boxes, Huffduffer’s sign up form looks like this:

All the usual behaviors of a web form are still there. You can tab between fields, your password is still masked and errors are highlighted if there are any. The difference is the in the presentation. It doesn’t look like some kind of online test.

In short, Huffduffer’s sign up for is refreshing, but does it work? Well, Luke Wroblewski, Chief Design Architect at Yahoo and author of the book Web Form Design, had the same question and, with some help from the team at Vast.com, ran some tests.

The designers at Vast redesigned their response forms along the lines of Huffduffer’s form and found that, as Wroblewski reports, “Mad Libs style forms increased conversion across the board by 25-40 percent.”

The forms are live on both Vast and the Kelley Blue Book website if you’d like to experience them yourself. Wroblewski has a few minor caveats about the increased number of users — be sure to check out his post for the complete details — but at least in some cases it would seem that a narrative flow trumps the boring old form.

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File Under: Events
Feb
26
2010

Win A Free Ticket to Google IO 2010

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Google’s premiere developer event is coming up in just a couple of months, and we’ve got two passes to give away.

UPDATE: This contest is over, and we have announced the winners.

Google I/O takes place on May 19 and 20 at Moscone Center in San Francisco. It’s the company’s largest developer event, with hundreds of sessions and demos of all the latest Google tech. Plus, there are the big keynotes like the launch of Wave, the first major public demo of Android and the HTML5 coming-out party where everyone in the room got a free Android phone.

If you live in or near San Francisco, or if you have the means to get here, you can win one of the two passes we’re giving away. Each one is worth $500! Here’s the deal:

  • Submit a link to something cool you’ve built using HTML5 — a web app, a canvas demo, an audio or video demo, a mobile app that uses geolocation. It has to be your own work, and it has to be somewhere on the public web.
  • Or, submit a link to a Google Chrome extension you’ve built. Tell us what it does and why it’s awesome.
  • Or, tell us how you would explain what a “web app” is to your grandmother. Let’s assume your grandmother is a nontechnical web user — you can’t use the word “application” or any acronyms, just plain English. (Yes, your submission has to be in English).

To participate, leave a comment on this post, send a tweet to @webmonkey, or send an e-mail to webmonkey@wired.com. Whatever you do, make sure your contact information is easily accessible. A valid e-mail address or URL is a must if you want to collect your prize.

Keep in mind, Google I/O is in San Francisco, and we’re only giving away a ticket to get you in — we’re not paying for flights or hotels, though we will pass along some free Webmonkey swag at the conference. And, OK, we’ll buy you a taco if you ask nice. Also, your ticket is nontransferable.

We’ll pick two winners in a few days, so enter early and don’t miss out.

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File Under: Browsers
Feb
25
2010

Opera Updates 10.5 Beta for Windows, Adds Mac Support

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Opera software has released the second beta for the company’s upcoming Opera 10.5 for Windows and the first beta for Mac users.

Mac users can grab the latest beta from the Opera website, the Windows beta 2 release remains, for now, an FTP download.

While the Opera web browser may not have the largest market share, it is the source off many browser innovations. Tabbed browsing got its start in Opera, and the browser was one of the first to broadly support emerging standards like HTML5 and CSS 3.

We took a detailed look at Opera 10.5 when the first beta was released for Windows and found that, aside from some interface design changes, the big news in this release is speed. This is largely due to the inclusion in this release of Opera’s new Carakan JavaScript engine, which boosts the browser’s performance on webapps considerably. Opera 10.5 is noticeably faster than its predecessors and even beat Firefox 3.6 and Google Chrome in our informal testing.

The second beta release is primarily a slew of bug fixes and doesn’t offer much in the way of new features. Still, if you’ve been enjoying the first beta, this release should make the experience a little more stable. And now Mac users can get into the party as well, though 10.5 beta 2 is unfortunately only available for Windows users. Mac users are only caught up as far as Opera 10.5 beta 1.

Also worth mentioning is that native HTML5 video is working in both Windows and Mac version of Opera 10.5 beta. Opera joins Firefox as the second browser to go with the Ogg Theora codec for native web video.

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File Under: Web Apps
Feb
25
2010

Gmail Features Graduate From Labs to Big Leagues

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Google has pushed six of its Gmail experiments out of the Lab and into Gmail proper. Handy tools like the forgotten attachment detector, search auto-complete, vacation dates, custom label colors and in-mail previews of YouTube videos are all now standard Gmail features.

The features Google moved from Labs to Gmail proper feel a bit arbitrary — for example, why make YouTube previews standard, but ignore the Picasa, Flickr and Google Docs preview tools? But the Gmail blog says that the decisions were based “mainly on usage,” so presumably these are the six most popular features in Gmail Labs.

The good news is that the two search tools, search auto-complete and Go To Label make for a much-improved Gmail searching experience, particularly for those with a lot of labels to filter through. Go To Label adds a keyboard shortcut that lets you quickly jump to a label, just type “g l” (if you use Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts) and then type the first letters of the label you want to find. Search auto-complete will kick in and let you quickly jump to the label you’re after.

Sadly, some of Gmail Labs’ less popular — but still no doubt useful to some — features have been given the boot as part of this “upgrade.”

Among the features removed from Gmail Labs are the fixed-width font option, and Muzzle, a very useful add-on that hid your contacts’ chat status messages for a cleaner-looking sidebar. Also no longer available are e-mail addict, a time-limiting script that encouraged you to take a break from e-mail, as well as both random signature and location in signature, two features for automating your e-mail signatures.

If you happen to miss any of these tools, there’s a pretty good chance something similar exists for Greasemonkey. For example, if, like us, you happened to enjoy the Muzzle feature, there are some Greasemonkey scripts that bring Muzzle back to life (and one that hides Gmail Chat altogether).

With five projects booted out of Gmail Labs and six more moving on to be real Gmail features, it seems reasonable to think perhaps some new e-mail experiments might be arriving soon. So far, the Gmail teams hasn’t announced anything, but we’ll be sure to keep you posted.

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File Under: HTML5, Multimedia
Feb
23
2010

Can Google Save Free, Open Web Video With VP8?

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Google will soon control the patents around the VP8 video codec, one possible alternative to H.264 for web video. And the leaders of the free software movement are banging their drum, urging the company to ditch those patents and offer the new video technology for free.

Shareholders of the video company On2 have approved an acquisition offer made by Google, which was initiated last year. On2 has developed the VP8 video codec, and currently holds the patents on it.

If Google were to release the newly-acquired VP8 as a free, open source video codec, it could significantly alter the web’s HTML5 video landscape. After all, Google owns YouTube and puts out the Chrome browser, so adoption would get a huge kick-start.

Free software advocates unhappy with the license-heavy and patent-encumbered video codecs like H.264 and the video quality and performance of free alternatives like Theora have long been hoping that Google would take the VP8 codec and release it as a free, open source savior for web video.

In fact, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has published an open letter encouraging Google to do just that. However, even if Google does release VP8 for any and all to use, that’s no guarantee that the web’s open video problems will be solved.

Even with Google at its back, VP8 would face an uphill battle against H.264.

While the picture quality and compression of VP8 is generally believed to be superior to Ogg Theora, which is based on On2′s VP3, much of H.264′s appeal lies in hardware optimizations. For example, part of the reason H.264 works so well on your iPhone — offering smooth playback and little drain on the battery — is because the hardware is optimized for H.264.

So, even if Google does release VP8 into the wild, it would still be some time before it could possibly catch up with H.264 on the hardware level. A similar lack of widespread hardware optimization also plagues the Dirac codec, another potential alterative to H.264.

There are also some unanswered questions around the patent status of VP8. Since VP8 is currently closed source and proprietary code, it’s hard to say what patent claims it might be vulnerable to. The MPEG LA consortium (which oversees H.264) governs almost 2000 video encoding patents. The odds of anyone creating an entirely new way of encoding video that doesn’t somehow infringe on at least one of those patents is pretty slim.

In short, while we’d like to see Google do exactly what the FSF is suggesting, that doesn’t mean that such a move would magically solve the web’s open video conundrum.

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