Paintings & blog by Chris Gibbins

It still amazes me how many well known web sites have general usability problems that effect their ease of use. The latest I came across was ironically the London Design Museum website.

The index page looks quite nice, as you would expect from a site exhibiting and promoting good design, but it’s when you actually get beyond this that things start to go wrong. The main problem on both flash and html versions is the menu that appears when you rollover the shaded bar on the bottom of the new popup window interface. It seems to work sometimes and disappear on other occasions creating a frustrating environment for the user.

Another issue that may be more of a personal dislike is the switching between several browser windows whilst interacting with the site.

Recently came across Amy Hoy’s Blog about Ruby on Rails. Apart from the clear, fun writing style, she has such a talent for describing quite difficult concepts in an understandable way.

Check out her Cheat Sheets: What’s Ajax? Cheat Sheet, Form Helpers Cheat Sheet.

Whilst exploring several fascinating Ruby on Rails sites, wikis, and blogs, I have recently got into listening to podcasts. It is a nice change from reading all of the time, listening to the experts discuss all of the issues, whilst carrying on with some work myseslf. Take a look or should I say listen at Rails Podcasts.

Actually just stumbled on and excellent podcast interview by Joshua Porter on Web 2.0. Amongst many of the fascinating discussions about where the world of web sites is heading and where they came from, the survivors of the dotcom age and the lessons learnt, the subject of tagging came up. Apparently Amazon now includes the facility for adding personal tags. This service will also provide a really accurate indication of customer trends as well as providing benefits for the individuals.

I have heard a lot about ASP.net and how so many companies are now using it, and talked to many excited programmers raving on about how powerful it was. And now I am looking at Ruby on Rails. Another environment for building web applications that is supposed to save on production times.

Both these development platforms are pretty impressive, and I know that many have an instant dislike of Microsoft so would be in favour of RoR (Ruby on Rails) so I decided to look for some unbiased reviews. I found this review discussing comparison between ASP.net and Ruby on Rails.