SCKattered Thoughts

Imagine your alarm clock was flashing zeros at you this morning and when you did wake up the shower did not manage to produce any hot water and then, feeling perky with that extra hour of sleep and stimulating shower, you discover your car's interior lamps have been lighting the night all night long.  I think it is pretty safe to say you will spend part of the day replacing batteries and lighting the pilot of the hot water tank.  We rely on our appliances and cars to do what they were built for; when they stop working we do not hesitate to fix them. Read More »

Flash has been with us for many years adding some sweet animation and effects to the Internet. Some of the coolest websites are created using nothing but Flash (but also some of the worst sites). Back in the day, some of my favorite websites were little more than flash animations all over. With all the neat things that Flash can do, why doesn't the iPhone or iPad support it? With CSS3 and HTML5 on the way in, is Flash on it's death bed? Are CSS3 and Jquery the Ivan Drago to the Apollo Creed that's Flash? Read More »

The discovery phase is over. The strategy is in place. All the meetings have come and gone. Now what? How do you get started with a new design project? You have all the ammunition, except for maybe the main ingredient – motivation. Can you turn the creativity off and on at the drop of a hat? Or do you need some sort of motivation to get you in the mood? Read More »

For those of you unfamiliar with alt tags, alternative tags are added to the code that places an image on the web page. They are used to describe the image to someone who is blind and uses screen reader software to read the web page to them. They can also be used to add key words for search engine optimization. They don’t show on the page unless the image is not there for some reason, for example, an email before the recipient chooses to download the images. Adding alternative tags to images is a very basic and one of the easiest ways to improve accessibility to your site, but just what those alt tags should say is one of the more complicated things. I have been reading the accessibility guidelines that are spelled out on the webaim.org even that information is conflicted. Read More »

A few days ago, a good friend of mine was reading a book on Western Philosophy at the tanning salon where she works. A guy walked in and stated that she didn’t seem like the type of girl who would read things like that (new pick up line?). Being a well-read English major, she took offense to this and naturally tweeted about the situation. Read More »

Recently I was able to see how a blind person uses JAWS the most popular screen reader. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this technology, screen readers are software that read the content of a web page to the user. A person could use it to read the page from top to bottom and identify any links in the content as it goes. However, this is clunky and slow. Imagine how frustrating it would be to not be able to scan a page to look for the links you want, but to have to go through the content piece by piece, in order, from top to bottom Read More »

In a previous post, I showed one method for updating a SharePoint list with data from another SharePoint list. The example illustrated moving data from an existing text field to a custom field.  In the project this field was a custom type, containing a text box to hold a value and a dropdown list to hold a unit of measure. This blog entry will be about creating that custom field. Read More »

I found an old magazine the other day and had the best time looking at how styles have changed. Cars, fashions, foods and colors are just some of the things that date themselves, and reflect how society is changing. We seem to be nostalgic for the past and keep recycling styles; usually with enough of a change that we can never just pull clothes out of the attic and still look chic. Read More »

I work on a variety of different projects involving graphic design in my free time, and I'm very particular about the fonts I use. The way I see it, your font is your voice, and the emotions you project while speaking are just as important as the words you have to say. The font you choose can make a serious sentence sound sarcastic, or make a lighthearted anecdote come off as pompous. Read More »

In working with client SharePoint intranet sites, I occasionally have to add a new field to an existing list and populate it with data. Sometimes this new item needs to be filled with values from a soon to be deprecated field and sometimes with data from another list. Recently I had to update a list, changing one field from a to a new, custom type with a paired textbox and dropdown. Read More »

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