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Nick Burwell

Nick Burwell

113 posts •

Usability fail: hiding information

My wife loves Diapers.com.  I agree they do a good job of having a clean, simple website geared completely towards baby / registry / infant stuff.  They have her hooked.  But

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
1 min read

Usability fail: preventing user feedback

This one really made me laugh.  I had just filed my taxes on H&R Block online, and decided to fill out their survey at the end (oh how thoughtful of

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
2 min read

Website fail: parsing

Memo to Facebook: groups of characters starting with "www." may not be websites!Here was my real life example where I said "awww...a little [something, probably a kitty but I've now forgotten

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
1 min read

Escape HTML tags in Javascript

If you need to display text to a user, you most likely want to escape the string so that HTML is not rendered. This is good practice for security, but also prevents you

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
1 min read

Cool use for Google Sketchup

Fascinating video from Google's blog, showing how a blockbuster video game's design architect uses Google Sketchup.  I especially like at the end where they show how they combine the same building blocks

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
1 min read

Facebook UI change

Facebook just updated their comment UI again.. on the news feed, photos, etc they are showing the comment box but even when you put your cursor in the box and start typing, no

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
1 min read

Access Ext store by id

Today I needed to access the Ext store of a grid, inside a column renderer. That part was easy, as it is a parameter to a custom renderer: function my_renderer( val,

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
1 min read

Photo Collage: Wine Tasting

Recent trip to Santa Ynez wineries.

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
1 min read

Google's ajax search and how they keep their referer accurate

In recent months, Google rolled out a new search interface for modern browsers that does "instant" search as you type.  This all happens via ajax without reloading the page.  Why does

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
2 min read

Photo: Moon over the harbor

Hard to believe, but that is the moon over the harbor, not the sun.  I took this during a beautiful sunrise which was happening behind me.  I love the colors in

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
1 min read

Photo: Kansas in Santa Barbara

Lane Farms, Santa Barbara, CAThe clouds on this day were so captivating, I loved it.  Otherwise I wouldn't have even thought to take this picture as we walked into Lame Farms with

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
1 min read

Ruby method to find index of first matching element

I wanted to find the index of the first element in the array that matched a certain regex pattern.  There were a handful of methods that would give me back the array

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
1 min read

Web development from a Google UI guy

Marcin Wichary, user experience engineer at Google in an interview:"Something else that took me a while to internalize: you have to accept that with Web development, anything that’s worth anything will

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
1 min read

Photo: Dew on a Leaf

I like this photo for a few reasons:I took it using my phone (iPhone 4 to be exact), and yet it still has decent clarity and decent depth of field. I continue

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
1 min read

Herding Cats

This is awesome! The making of an IKEA commercial

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
1 min read

Web Browser UI differences: refresh / cancel buttons

A few weeks ago I wrote about the differences in the 4 major browsers' search / address bar.  As promised, this is part 2 and highlights the subtle and not so subtle differences

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
3 min read

MLB up close

A recent trip to Dodgers stadium.  We got decent seats at field level, but the best views by far were in the 9th inning when we stood in the walkway behind home

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
1 min read

It's the little things: Part 2

A few weeks ago I wrote about how Apple had made a subtle change to the reception bar graphics on the latest iPhone software update.  Today I discovered something in Snow Leopard's

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
1 min read

Mozilla Firefox exception when doing ajax call

If you have ever got the following exception in Firefoxuncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80040111 (NS_ERROR_NOT_AVAILABLE) [nsIXMLHttpRequest.status]" nsresult: "0x80040111 (NS_ERROR_NOT_AVAILABLE)" location: "JS frame :: http:

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
1 min read

Browser quirks: invalid CSS color syntax

I had a typo in CSS, which led me to discover that the following css works in Chrome but not Firefox:.my_text {  color: #white;}<span class="my_text">

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
1 min read

Photo: Too Close For Comfort

Air Show at Pt. Mugu Air Force BaseVentura County, CaliforniaUSAF Thunderbirds showing off. Yes, they really did fly that close, speeding in from opposite directions, sometimes flying upside down!

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
1 min read

Rails FormHelper with model relationships and has_many route

Using Rails 2.3.5 To do things RESTfully in Rails and you have a model relationship like:class Post < ActiveRecord::Base has_many :commentsend You can set up your routes like

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
1 min read

Sharing files as guest on Mac OS X 10.5/10.6

Tired of getting the "not connected" message when you click on a Mac computer on the "Shared" sidebar of finder?  I was.. and couldn't figure out how I had lost guest access

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
1 min read

It's the little things...

So Apple recently released an update to the iPhone 4.0 software (4.0.1), which came on the heels of the whole antenna fiasco with the iPhone 4, and I was pretty

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
2 min read

Photography: Nature Up Close

I recently took a trip to the Santa Barbara Botanical Gardens. The bees that swarmed the various flowers were fascinating to watch up close, as was the lizard doing push-ups on the rock.

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
1 min read
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