Tom Hapgood

The Buffalo Flows site launch

To coincide with the airing of The Buffalo Flows on AETN TV, we launched the film’s new site. I had some decisions to make in terms of browser support (Internet Explorer 6 Windows, of course, and iPhone Safari) and ultimately decided to push iPhone users to the old site and just alert IE6 users that the site is accessible (wrong word) to them but that it isn’t going to look nice. The problem in question for the IE6 users is mainly the use of the transparent PNG graphics that enabled me to lay the main site content over a Google maps iframe. Other technologies used are xhtml/css and ThickBox and jQuery.

New Master Chorale Web site

The final project of the Fall 2008 Web 1 course consisted of working with a “real-world” client. We were fortunate to work with the UA Master Chorale, specifically with Web copy writer and Search Engine Management expert Rebecca Haden and with the director and School of Music professor Graeme Langager. All 16 students planned, designed and coded a treatment of the site, with the “winning” project going to Joel McCourt. Thanks also to Shane Richey of the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences for moving the site files into place.

Anchor Links Bug in Internet Explorer 7

Recently, I had to make a big decision: to have a web page validate or to function correctly.

We had just launched the University of Arkansas Community Design Center project and began receiving messages that some in-page anchor links weren’t working correctly only in IE 7. If the user was viewing a project page and clicked on the “Project Awards and Publications” link (or the list of awards links below the big image) more than two times it stopped functioning. What’s supposed to happen is that when one of those links is clicked (all links going to the same place), the viewer should be brought to a specific point on the awards page. Well, on the third time clicking one of those links, IE would just send the user to the top of the awards page, or in essence, the wrong place. After much troubleshooting and research on the web, I eventually tried a deprecated (discontinued) anchor format and it worked! So, instead of sending the link on the project page to (basically) awards.php#projectname, which was an id attribute of the h4 tag on the awards page, we added an older style a name tag/attribute combination to the awards page, just below the h4 tag. Therefore, we’ve got a lot of id designations duplicated on the page, while each id should be used uniquely. But it works for all the browsers now.

Thanks to Cathy Haring with her Internet Explorer testing lab and Cynthia Barlow for the expert programming.

Weather widgets

I’m a weather afficionado. I actually sit and watch the weather channel. I watch the local weather during the local news broadcast on tv. I check various weather web sites to keep updated. I check the accuweather mobile web page on my phone. I look at the newspaper charts and maps. I look out the window continually to see what’s going on with the cloud patterns and precipitation chances and will sit and watch the rain or snow come down as if I’ve never seen it before.

One method that I’ve really come to enjoy and rely on is hitting the F12 key on my Mac and watching my weather widgets come open in Dashboard. As you can see from the thumbnails, I have about nine that I watch. These widgets come from mostly differing organizations and individuals, from what I can tell. Many of the widgets are well-designed and work otherwise very well. Most include nice design elements such as “shininess,” elegant transparency and a straightforward layout, using the normal css, html and javascript. Most of the time I have them set to the same location: Fayetteville, AR, where I live. Other times, when weather around here is “slow,” I’ll set them to various locations where I’ve lived or spent time, such as Framingham, Massachusetts, Tucson, Arizona, Karlsruhe, Germany, Naples, Italy and London, England.

The widgets usually include the following: static and animated maps imagery (radar, satellite, infrared and combinations), daily or hourly forecast graphics and temperatures, a large real-time temperature display and atmospheric icon, interface animation, webcams and weather photos.

One problem is that none of the widgets seems to work perfectly. It’s a fun time trying to sort out the truth from all the widgets when they don’t match up in many ways, such as on the radar map. For instance, the AccuWeather.com widget tends to always display a very outdated doppler image when compared to the weather.com, WeatherBug or the others (see my screen grab). It could even be considered dangerous when you see that we’re under a tornado watch box in most of the maps except for the AccuWeather one. I have reported this a few times but it doesn’t seem to be fixed yet.

Another annoyance, which one eventually gets used to, is deciphering which links/buttons on the widget will affect another state or section of the widget versus links/buttons that just jump out to the browser. As far as i can tell, the widget makers don’t consistently distinguish, with the sometimes exception of Weatherbug. Their “tabs” open sections in the lower pane, while their links in the lower pane tend to look like standard underlined hyper links.  Even their consistency has a limit, though, with the upper pane “More Observations” and “Alerts” buttons, which open the browser. Point being, when I’m in widget world I’d like to stay in widget world, or know exactly when I’m going to be thrust back into browser world. They could probably solve the problem by throwing an underline on the “More Observations” link and somehow on the ALERTS. The constantly moving wind speed and direction indicator on the WeatherBug widget is nice. They could probably lose the red mercury thermometer at the left as it amounts to clutter for me.

Many of the widgets have animated interface elements with click-inspired drawers that open and close, or collapsing/simplifying looks (default Apple weather widget), or an expanding weather map. The animation “award” probably goes to the NOAA round widget for having animation happen at just about every click. Click one of the four tabs and they circle around and disappear behind the round body of the widget, then animate out to reappear when the reset button is clicked. A nice touch, which shows they’ve done their interface/usability testing, is that when I click the Radar tab, it shows me the radar from a high altitude, then automatically zooms down closer to my actual location for a few seconds before slowly zooming back out to a regional view. Very slick.

The “Cams” or webcams features are pretty OK, but I don’t use the “Photos” much as they seem to be random photos of flowers and bugs.

The “Aviation Weather” widget I include just because I am also an aircraft freak and like to pretend that all of the data on that widget makes complete sense to me. The major problem with that widget is that it won’t remember my location and defaults constantly back to Switzerland. The developer Pascal Dreer seems to have made available an update that I’ll install, which might take care of that problem. I include the BBC’s widget because I like the economical design and pretending I “might be going” to London soon. (It has only settings for England.)

One of the reasons we moved out of southern Arizona was to live among seasons, green, water, weather and Arkansas has proven to be just the place for all of it. Here we have, as they say, four distinct seasons, which has made it a very fulfilling place for a weather-phile like me.

Where to get the widgets:
Aviation Weather Widget
NOAA Weather Widget
Weather Channel widget (and gadgets)
Weather Underground Widget
WeatherBug Widget
AccuWeather Weather Widget
BBC Weather Widget

UATV’s new Tech show off and running

Check out our own Josh Daugherty as an anchor on UATV’s "RJ45" tech show. Check it out.

Word Processing: an update

A few months ago I created a post about how, when I purchased my new MacBook Pro, I didn’t have a need for Microsoft Office. I had always had Office (Word, Powerpoint, Excel) running on a computer for standard document-creation tasks. As you can imagine, as a university faculty member and even a modern human being, I still needed the functionality of writing and sharing documents, creating presentations and calculating budgets. The alternatives to Microsoft Office, as I saw it waaaaay back in March of this year, included basically four non-Microsoft options: Writeboard, by 37 Signals, Google Docs, NeoOffice and Apple’s Pages. Two of those apps are Web-based/online and two are traditional desktop apps.

Buzzword, the lastest and Flash-based online application from Adobe, which could easily take over all the other forms, seems to combine the benefits of the online functionality with the benefits of the desktop app. It solves the interface and workflow problems and limitations of the Ajax-based online word processors like Google Docs and Writeboard, and provides the functionality of the desktop-based document-creation apps like Pages, Word and NeoOffice. In fact, it provides a much better functionality in many ways than the traditional-style desktop apps in the way it allows document sorting and viewing, the way it facilitates handling of those pesky nested lists, table creation and some other cool features. At the same time it offers extremely intuitive and powerful methods for sharing and collaborating of documents in real time, keeping track of versions and changes, an inline commenting feature, assigning roles and level of access to other people, etc.

As a creative person, this type of application really stands out as something that can enhance and foster creativity, as I’m not forced to struggle with the word processor and be inundated with functionality that gets in the way. Here’s a so-so little video demo:

Journalism site live

The creation of the new Department of Journalism Web site has been a year in the making and we’ve finally gone live. It’s standards-compliant, universally accessible (we believe), within University of Arkansas branding standards, and pulls in a lot of interesting and relevant feeds for the various degree sequences. The main tool of creation throughout the whole process, other than Photoshop, was Panic’s Coda software, which proved to be mostly up to the task. The coding involved php, mysql, xml, xhtml, css, WordPress (php/mysql), javascript and the aforementioned rss feedage. Soon it will live in the RedDot world, too. Still to come is the much-anticipated Internship Journal as well as a guest blogger. Thanks to Patsy Watkins, Kim Martin, Shane Richey and Chris Nixon.