design

Android's back button is a problem. A big problem.

Others have already identified this in a broad sense, but I wanted to give a few concrete examples of why I (as a guy who wants to simply port a couple apps from the iOS platform to Android) think the back button (especially) is a bad idea.

Disorientation

Mobile phones, and tablets especially, require a lot of UX work in the area of interface orientation. For my extremely-basic CNL app, I've spent hours tweaking little interface elements that change when the interface is rotated from portrait to landscape.

The tendency in iOS is to use a 'back' button with the label of the previous function/screen in a given app in a navigation bar at the top of the current screen. This allows a user to freely move about inside an app, and is pretty much consistent across all apps. Additionally, this 'universal back button' is always at the top left of the screen—just like a web browser.

Or... "Best Practices of In-App Web Browsers"

Being the usability nut that I am, I have decided that my goal of making a perfect in-app browser for various iPhone apps is an impossible task. But, judging from what I've been able to do so far, and from many different Web View examples I've seen from around the web, there are some basics that every in-app browser should get right.

I'll start by showing the in-app browser in two very well-known iPhone apps: Facebook and Twitter.

The transition from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 has taken a bit of time, and I (like many others) simply haven't had enough time in the past few months to do D7 testing while in the midst of tens of other D6 projects.

I've committed, though, to building out three Drupal sites in Drupal 7, now that we're at beta-3, and I will be posting a few reflections, mostly from a themer's perspective on some changes—the good, the bad, and the confusing.

A New Default Theme - Bartik

Just like Drupal 5/6's default theme, Garland (which is in use on this site right now :-/), Bartik will be seen on thousands of quickly-built sites around the web, and I think the theme is robust enough for this purpose. I'm actually building one site's theme directly on top of Bartik, just modifying CSS through a single stylesheet added by a custom module.

But it's nothing amazing, in my opinion. I think it would've been awesome to have some sort of dropdown menu support in core by this point—but it looks like that will wait until Drupal 8 at least. This is probably the number one most requested feature I get on a lot of the smaller sites I'm asked to build, and having the feature in core would be über-cool.

After having seen DrupliBacon and DrupliCake (there are other great adaptations of the Druplicon as well!), I decided I wanted to get some creative juices flowing this weekend. I present, DrupliGolf!

Drupligolf is the result of a round of golf, an addiction to Drupal, and a love for the best OSS mascot in existence. (The latter reason will definitely strike a chord with anybody who's shared a drink with the Druplicon in #drupal... and actually drank).

From strictly a hardware perspective, the Droid cannot beat the iPhone. (For those who don't yet know: the Droid is Motorola's 'savior phone,' which they hope will make them a prominent phone handset maker again). How can I be sure? Well, look at the below diagram:

Basically, it comes down to originality, memorability, and design.

A couple days ago, when building a quick site with limited functionality (basically a pretty front end to a database website), I ran into a hiccup with my custom module/theme for the site, which caused me to scratch my head for a few minutes.

In my custom module (called 'idcards'), I added a stylesheet for a couple forms on the site using the drupal_add_css() function: