The Awesome Screenshot Extension is truly an awesome screenshot extension!

Being a UI/UX/ Designer/Developer I find myself making a ton of screenshots everyday… mainly for grabbing a current UI and popping it into photoshop for creating super quick, realistic mocks without having to recreate the entire page from scratch… what I do is take the screen shot, mask out the part of the site that needs the new UI and mock up my versions… this is important because it gives the clients… in my case the product managers, a realistic look at what the site will look like with the new changes without them having to use their imaginations… makes it so much easier to come to a design solution everyone is on board with…

I remember way back in the day when OSX first came out there was this screen capture dashboard widget that allowed you to capture the entire page instead of what was just visible. I loved it… it was perfect because web pages rarely fit in the viewable portion of the screen… so without this tool I had to take a screenshot, scroll down, take another, and so on and then stitch them together in photoshop… Everything was gravy until I got a new machine because my old one died and to my horror I could not find this dashboard widget anymore… it is like it fell off the face of the earth… which sucked because I have been using the ol’ screen shot, scroll, repeat, stitch method since then…  well until now…

Enter Awesome Screenshot Extension!

This guy is truly that… it is an extension for chrome or safari and allows you to take a screenshot of the entire page! Boom, you are done. Plus it also allows you to take a screenshot and annotate it… so if you want to propose some changes to the companies corporate site, you can do your screen shot, mark up the page and then fire it off to your PM for some feedback… plus you can upload your screenshot to their servers for sharing… how cool is that?

Check it out!

Zooltool is a really cool way of saving and cataloging all of the design resources you come across everyday while browsing the web.

There is a lot of “design resource” sites out there from design blogs like smashingmagazine.com, webdesignledger.com and alistapart.com to cool tools like ajaxload.info and css-tricks.com/examples/ButtonMaker but zootool has to be one of my favorites.

Basically you can break the site into 3 parts.

1. This really cool script that you bookmark in your browser that injects javascript into the page and allows you to capture a webpage or individual image or video resources from that page and then save them to your Zooltool collections.

2. Your collection of images and resources that you can come back to and browse for inspiration

3. A cool public feed of other users inspirational images that you can see what you are missing in your everyday browsing of the web

(actually there is a fourth… their developer api so you can plug your feed into your site or whatever)

This site is awesome. The usability of the site is superb which makes it really easy to leverage this site in my everyday design life.

Looking for a great example of a gradual engagement sign-up flow? look no further…

The other day I saw an article on Techcrunch about Groupon selling a butt load of Gap Groupon’s… basically the deal was getting $50 worth of merch. for $25… it sounded kind of enticing so I decided to check them out… This was my first experience with Groupon and their gradual engagement sign up flow was so nice, I had to write about.

I am normally grumpy when I go through so called gradual engagement flows because normally they are, uh, how you say?… NOT, gradual engagement flows… They end up being more of a bate and switch trick where you are drawn in with the promise of a quick and easy sign up process but are bombarded with page after page of long crappy forms asking for way too much info with no positive feedback and no way of escaping… basically because they have no faith in capturing that user to get a full registration out of them later and are greedy with how much user data they want to collect… but not with Groupon.

Groupon’s flow is an actual gradual engagement flow…. You are only asked for the info they need to get you in fast and rolling -location and email… and then you have the choice to complete your registration or cancel and start shopping for Groupon’s…

What I really like about their flow from an interaction standpoint is they do an awesome job enticing users to complete their registration up front without souring the easy sign-up flow, which I find is the toughest part of creating a gradual engagement flow -creating a flow that is all about ease of use for on-boarding new users without sacrificing your business objectives-  How Groupon does this is after the location and email panes you are taken to the landing page and are presented with a modal that says you are subscribed, which is genius because now the user feels an emotional attachment to the site because they are now a member and relieved that the process was so easy… So when they see the rest of the form they feel obligated to continue filling it out because, hey, I am already signed up and a part of the site so might as well continue…I have no data to prove this, but I can only assume that they have a really high conversion rate on that form… hell, someone like me who hates giving out his info filled out this form without even thinking which is what spurred me to write this…

One of my favorite books is Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

I stumbled across this book a few years ago, and when I started reading it I couldn’t put it down. It was like stumbling across the Holy Grail of interaction/UI design. I must have read this book 10 or more times. Even though it is not written as a interaction/UI/UX design book, it has proven to be one of my most valuable resources. Why? Because it is the only book I have found that breaks down the actual psychology behind achieving optimal experience. In the book Csikszentmihalyi explains how we as humans strive to achieve a state of flow in whatever we do, be it working, playing a video game, filling out a form, whatever, and once we do achieve this state of optimal experience, we get this intrinsic feeling of happiness and contentment….pure joy…. The problem with achieving this state of flow is that it doesn’t always happen in every day life, so he breaks down exactly what factors go into achieving this optimal state of flow, in an attempt to teach his readers how to attain it more easily. As a UI designer, being aware of these factors for achieving optimal experience allows me to design my flows and interactions with optimal experience in mind.

If you do not have this book in your design library, you need to go out right now and buy it. The insights you will learn from this book are invaluable.

Ever wonder how designers create those cool vector looking abstract designs or get really cool grungy textures in photoshop?

example:

They don’t create custom patterns and they don’t create custom shapes. They use brushes. The above example is using a couple of free brushes found at qbrushes.com and a couple of transparent effects. You can find hundreds of free brushes that give you as little as primitive vector shapes all the way to fully developed images that you can use at variety of sizes. Brushes are cool because you can use a handful of them to create really cool original artwork or abstract patterns. You can also create your own brushes very easily. A lot of brushes are original black and white artwork that is scanned into Photoshop and then converted into a brush.

If you are interested in using Photoshop brushes, I would recommend checking out qbrushes.com to get a jump start. They have a pretty big directory of really cool brushes.

I ran accross Sweetcron the other day while kicking around the internet and it is really cool. It is a online life streaming software that allows you to aggregate your own personal web content in one place. So if you have a blog, use twitter or any other online service that generates a feed, you can feed it into your Sweetcron site to create an up to date time line of all of your online activities.

I took the opportunity today to try it out and install it on http://www.ohdatsnice.com. Instillation was super simple and themeing the content for a personalized took no time at all…I currently only have it hooked up to my blog, but their api makes it super simple to customize the interface and the content. It does take a little knowledge of PHP/HTML/CSS but if you are a web designer or dev guy, you will see that it is cake to set up and get going and to tell you the truth they make it really easy for the weekend warrior blogger to figure it out too.

Out of the box it pulls your entire feed content but in my example you see that I pulled out all the content and only left the title of the post and the posting date, with the blocks linking back to my articles…so you could use this software to suplement your current blogs etc…

All in all, I would recommend Sweetcron to anyone looking to keep all of their online activity in one place and I really think that this concept of lifestreaming is really going to take off…

Here is another example of a Sweetcron based site: http://www.yongfook.com

From the article Major flaw revealed in Internet Explorer; users urged to switch by Christopher Null…

“The major press outlets are abuzz this morning with news of a major new security flaw that affects all versions of Internet Explorer from IE5 to the latest beta of IE8. The attack has serious and far-reaching ramifications — and they’re not just theoretical attacks. In fact, the flaw is already in wide use as a tool to steal online game passwords, with some 10,000 websites infected with the code needed to take advantage of the hole in IE…”

Please stop killing baby kitty cats and switch to something other than IE

I know what you are thinking…hey this is the same Yelp Grub Finder app sans the Yelp…yea, sorry everyone…no more Yelp branding except for their required logos…as per Yelp…anyways, for those who are not familiar with my old Yelp Grub Finder, “Grub! on the go…” is an iPhone app that lets you search for food, beer whatever while you are on the go…it also provides review snippets and ratings from Yelp users to help you make your decisions…I also moved the home of my app to http://www.grubonthego.com

I will keep the old link location on bodesigns.com for those who have my app added to your home screens on your iPhones, but the look and name will change to “Grub! on the go…”

I got a call today from the head of BD at Yelp…

I thought it was a call to discuss purchasing my Yelp Grub Finder app being that it is featured on Apple as a staff favorite, and have had 50K + traffic in a few short weeks, but it was quite the opposite. To my surprise, they want me to change it…bummer… Even though I am using their name properly as per their terms of service, they think that it still looks too much like an app they have created…i don’t know about that, i think it looks a lot better than any app they would create … anyways, I will be changing the name and styling for the Yelp Grub Finder…All of the functionality is still going to be the same, the only difference will be the name and colors…Stay tuned for the change…

In this update I added in reviewers photos, names and links to their profiles on yelp…

Yelp grub finder