How the new Chrome Web Store increased signups to Handcraft by 1000%
Last week’s release of a renewed Chrome Web Store by Google increased signups to Handcraft by 1000%. What happened?
An open letter to Stripe
Update: Stripe responded below, and if you want Stripe in Europe you can leave your name and country here
Dear people at Stripe,
Stripe sounds lovely and I wanted to add a voice from Europe calling for you guys to hurry up and get over here. The payment processing industry is probably a mess in the US, but I can almost guarantee you it’s even more of a mess over here if you’re not in the UK. Sounds like a great business opportunity, right?
In getting ours set up we went through a 3-month long nightmare/adventure and finally settled on Ogone+Spreedly. I’m sure you know of both. Spreedly is like Stripe in its elegance and simplicity, but it’s not full-stack, which means we’re required to suffer through the terrible UX and customer support of Ogone. Seriously, if there’s a company I could say I actually hate, it might be Ogone.
I wrote some blog posts about our experiences that I’d like to share with you in an attempt to hopefully convince you to expedite your trip across the Atlantic:
http://blog.handcraft.com/2010/09/the-payment-provider-shortlist-part-1-fastspring/
http://blog.handcraft.com/2010/10/the-payment-provider-shortlist-part-2-chargify/
http://blog.handcraft.com/2010/11/the-payment-provider-shortlist-part-3-spreedly/
http://blog.handcraft.com/2011/01/looking-back-on-the-quest-for-payments/
Please come to Europe as soon as possible. We’re over here waiting to give you our 2.9% + 30c.
Yours faithfully,
People in Europe who want to make money off their web-based software
“A designer who does not write markup and css is not designing for the web, but drawing pictures.”
Andy Rutledge wrote a blog post saying that web design is product design:
Web design is product design. Drawing a picture of the product is not designing the product. Web design is experience design. Drawing a picture of on-screen content or mechanism behaviors is not designing the experience. The functioning html/css (and sometimes JavaScript) is the design.
The key quote here is “the functioning code is the design”. All too often people view “design” as just describing something visual. But the design of a building isn’t the picture of the building, it’s the blueprint. The design of an iMac consists of more than just an illustration of the iMac, it involves all the specifications and internals. That’s design. To wall in design within the visual is to misunderstand all the skills designers must have to do their jobs well.
In the case of web design, as Andy says, the code is the design. The beautiful thing about that is that you can work on just the design, writing HTML and CSS, and suddenly you have the end result. You don’t need to go into, say, mass manufacturing. You just publish your code (and maybe clean it up a bit). This is why we made Handcraft.
Don’t stop calling yourself a UX designer – it’s working!
It seems like there’s a neverending debate over whether people should be allowed to call themselves “user experience designer”. On one side of the fence you’ve got people assigning themselves the title because they feel that it represents best what they do, or have done for years. On the other there’s a crowd calling the former group names because they don’t feel they “deserve” to call themselves something they appear not to be.
But wait just a second. Has no one noticed what this argument is really about? About what the consequences are of everyone left and right wanting to call themselves a user experience designer?
That’s right. It’s becoming cool. Continue reading →
Adobe doesn’t get it
Adobe’s new Muse is a product aimed at helping print designers design websites without coding.
There are two things wrong here. The first is the idea that print designers should be designing websites. The second is that you can design a website without coding.
This is a troubling development from a company that is trusted by so many, and, in certain ways, is an industry thought leader when it comes to providing designers with tools that help them do their jobs. This is Adobe signaling they believe in tools that abstract away craftsmanship and instead rely on outdated paradigms, returning to the heyday of WYSIWYG IDEs that lull you into a state of thinking anyone can put together a successful website.
But it’s not true. Yes, print designers can learn to design websites. And print designers can be really fantastic designers. Print designers can also learn to write HTML, and do it well. Muse, however, implies neither of those things are necessary. No, it says, you just keep doing what you’re doing and this magical piece of software will handle the rest.
In the video on the Muse website, one of Muse’s product designers says ‘In five or ten years, I don’t think very many people will be coding to design websites.’ (via Elliot Jay Stocks)
How wrong you can be – it’s far more likely the opposite will happen.
More on the difference between wireframing and prototyping
Last year we wrote about how wireframing and prototyping aren’t the same thing. A few weeks ago, I gave a talk at UX Brighton about the difference as well. We decided it basically comes down to this: wireframing is about communicating structure early on, prototyping is about the user experience. Continue reading →
Handcraft gets Zen Coding
If you’re not familiar with Zen Coding, here’s a brief description taken from its homepage:
Zen Coding is an editor plugin for high-speed [HTML] coding and editing. The core of this plugin is a powerful abbreviation engine which allows you to expand expressions—similar to CSS selectors—into HTML code. For example:
div#page>div.logo+ul#navigation>li*5>a…can be expanded into:
<div id="page"> <div class="logo"></div> <ul id="navigation"> <li><a href=""></a></li> <li><a href=""></a></li> <li><a href=""></a></li> <li><a href=""></a></li> <li><a href=""></a></li> </ul> </div>
HTML prototyping: because the details matter
This week we headed to Brighton in England to give a talk at a UX Brighton event about “Practical Prototyping”. Our talk focused on a couple of topics we’ve talked about on this blog over the past year:
- Wireframing and prototyping are two different things, even though a lot of people use them interchangeably
- HTML is a great way to do prototyping because it allows you to focus on the details
- Handcraft is a great way to do HTML prototyping because it was designed specifically for it
We also decided to create the slides in HTML using Google’s HTML5 slides library. This allowed us to prototype the presentation with Handcraft. Can’t get enough of that dogfood! 
Check out our talk, HTML prototyping: because the details matter – to navigate through the slides, you can use the space bar, the directional keys, or just click on the next/previous slide.
If you came to our talk, we’d like to invite you to try out Handcraft and if you like it, we’ll give you 3 months of the paid version for free so you can dig in. Just send us an email or a tweet and we’ll hook you up.
HTML5 Boilerplate doesn’t use HTML5 tags?
- No Yo Dawg for Paul Irish?
“HTML5 Boilerplate is the professional badass’s base HTML/CSS/JS template for a fast, robust and future-proof site.” – html5boilerplate.com
Here at Handcraft we couldn’t agree more, so it’s one of the starter templates we offer for HTML prototypes. But today I stumbled upon something that struck me as odd. When I inspected the HTML source code of html5boilerplate.com I noticed it was built according to their own boilerplate template, but where it recommends using the new html5 <header> and <footer> tags they decided to go for the pre-html5 equivalents instead: <div id="header"> and <div id="footer">.
Check out the screen I shot of webkit inspector looking at the “walk through it with me, now” section on the homepage, and its source:
HTML5 Boilerplate not using HTML5 tags.
I’m sure Paul Irish and his team have their reasons, and little me would be the last person on earth to question them, but I am curious to know why they chose not to follow their own recommendation and go for the native html5 tags. What do you think?
Common Sense Code Completion is now context aware
Since we created our code completion addon for CodeMirror (see this post), it’s been adopted by several other projects, both open source and commercial. Thanks to the people at webpop we’ve been able to take CSCC further and bring context awareness to the table.
Check out the demo at http://handcraft.com/demos/cscc2
- Common Sense Code Completion, now context aware.
